Posted on 09/24/2008 2:42:34 PM PDT by Justice Department
Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist the FBI says is the sole culprit behind the 2001 anthrax-by-mail attacks that killed five people, apparently was barred from all government labs in March after spilling anthrax on himself and going home to wash his clothes before telling his bosses....
(Excerpt) Read more at voices.washingtonpost.com ...
Ivins died in an apparent suicide July 29 as the FBI tried to finish its investigation into the "Amerithrax" case. Four months earlier, he spilled on his pants several milliliters of a vaccine strain of anthrax used on animals. He was preparing samples in a biological safety cabinet in a government lab at Fort Detrick, Md., according to a report (PDF) obtained by The Frederick News-Post through the Freedom of Information Act....
Interesting-once the whole thing is read !
It’s a WarshPost article ~ probably meaningless in any normal sense of the word but it seems to serve their need to continue keeping up the pretense that the Far Left in this country does not need to be investigated regarding the anthrax attack.
“The News-Post reported that Ivins cleaned up the anthrax, walked across the street to his home, washed his pants with hot water and bleach and dried them. He then told a supervisor about what happened: “While cleaning the biosafety cabinet in B504 a few drops of diluted Sterne spores got on my pants.”
Why didn’t he just change his pants?
FBI found no spores in his house.
Bruce Ivins teaching a child how to juggle in 1983. [Source: Sam Yu / Frederick News-Post]
Ivins the juggler spills anthrax on his pants.
AHHHHHH I hate it when guys mess up perfectly good lines!!
Your suppossed to wait until you have a girl with your then you say these pants are itchy...they may have Anthrax on them..Mind if I take them off?? LOL
Well, at least he tried to clean-up his own messes.
The FBI never examined anthrax samples from the 2001 contamination of a biodefense lab that was covered up by their lead suspect in the anthrax mailings — a decision that one of the FBI’s leading anthrax experts calls “weird.”
Researcher Bruce Ivins in 2002 confessed to cleaning up the office contamination without telling anyone during an Army investigation at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. Ivins became a suspect in 2005 in the mailings that killed five and sickened 17.
FBI investigators have not yet analyzed the genetic fingerprints of 25 anthrax samples supplied from the lab contamination investigation, says Vahid Majidi of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
“They’re still in my lab,” says Paul Keim, a microbiologist at Northern Arizona University. Keim called the FBI’s decision not to examine the contamination samples “weird” given the intensity of investigators’ focus on biodefense researchers, which included polygraphs of Army institute researchers.
Keim, until June, retained duplicates of the FBI’s repository of 1,070 anthrax samples collected from researchers worldwide after the mailbox attacks. Genetic fingerprints of those repository samples eliminated suspects other than Ivins by 2007, says FBI lab director Chris Hassell.
The investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings has drawn harsh reviews from critics in recent Senate and House hearings, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who questioned whether one person could have carried out the attacks. The Justice Department publicly named Ivins, 62, as their lead suspect in the attacks in August, days after his suicide.
Ivins’ attorney, Paul Kemp, says his client was innocent and suggested many researchers had access to the anthrax identified by genetic fingerprints.
Before landing on the FBI’s radar, Ivins emerged as the central figure in the separate investigation of anthrax contamination at Fort Detrick, where he confessed to cleaning up spilled anthrax in his office without telling superiors. “I had no desire to cry wolf,” Ivins told an Army investigator at the time. The Army’s investigation found samples of the type of anthrax used in the letter attacks on Ivins’ desk and elsewhere in his office, according to a report May 9, 2002.
“Why didn’t (the FBI) analyze it? One presumes this was pretty relevant evidence,” says biodefense analyst Michael Stebbins of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., who was not part of the investigation. “It raises questions about systematic errors in the FBI investigation.”
Majidi, an FBI scientist involved in the investigation, says the bureau viewed the 2002 contamination investigation as an Army matter. As a result, he says, the FBI never submitted samples from Ivins’ office for the detailed genetic analysis that later tied a flask in his laboratory to the anthrax used in the attacks.
“I don’t know” why the FBI never analyzed the 2002 anthrax in Ivins’ office, says Debbie Weierman of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. “Suspicion on him was immense, if you look at this in hindsight.”
For Keim, the revelation in August that the FBI had shifted its focus to Ivins cast the omission in a new light. In 2002, he says, “I got the samples and thought, ‘What a sloppy place.’ But I’m starting to think Bruce was taking anthrax out of his lab and then covering his tracks.”
“For Keim, the revelation in August that the FBI had shifted its focus to Ivins cast the omission in a new light. In 2002, he says, “I got the samples and thought, ‘What a sloppy place.’ But I’m starting to think Bruce was taking anthrax out of his lab and then covering his tracks.””
It would have been a lot easier to put a sample under your fingernail~
Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a report on a FOIA request relating to a national story. It was first reported in the Frederick News-Post. Can’t people ever view a true crime matter from a factual rather than political point of view?
As a matter of fact, I believe I read a copy of the original Army investigation-which made no mention of Ivins that I can recall. (This copy had been obtained under a FOIA request by an outside group.)
One of the things noted in the original report was the ABSENCE of Ames strain in the (gathered) samples.
That's why they are not of value as a source.
“The Enterprise Report has exclusively obtained highly detailed U.S. government documents proving the whereabouts of now deceased Army microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins on the days the anthrax letters were mailed. The documents detail the precise “windows of opportunity” that Ivins had to mail the letters, if he was the person who did so in 2001.
These never before seen security records detail Ivin’s time at the US Army’s USARMIID laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland on the days in question relative to the mailings of the anthrax letters. Ivins, a US Army scientist killed himself in July 2008, after becoming the primary focus of the government’s investigation. After his death The U.S. Department of Justice, FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service named him as the person solely responsible for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks......
The anthrax letters were mailed from a Princeton New Jersey mailbox and postmarked September 18th and October 9th, 2001. They were sent to a variety of news media outlets and two US Senators.
The documents reveal Ivin’s “windows of opportunity” in which he would have been able to travel from Fort Detrick, Maryland to a U.S postal service mailbox in Princeton New Jersey, where the anthrax letters were dropped, according to federal authorities......”
It's actually quite difficult to figure out how a letter mailed over at Princeton could arrive in Boca Raton Florida BEFORE it arrived in DC or New York City.
Things just don't work that way.
It's much easier to note that there were whole big bunches of 9/11 terrorists in Boca Raton Florida and that they had ample opportunity to mail the letters there. All that needs to happen to make the letters arrive when they did is to accept the fact that USPS regularly manages to misroute hand addressed single piece rate First Class letter mail entered in street collection boxes on Friday evening.
Oh, darned, now I've let the secret out of the bag.
The letter mail collection box at Princeton was clearly contaminated by nothing more than a contaminated flat-mail mail tray placed in the bottom of the collection box AS IS DONE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER DAY IN THIS COUNTRY.
Those trays are regular little hypodermic systems and they can collect and pass around bacteria and other contaminants with ease.
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