The FBI has done nothing but stall, stall, stall on releasing ANY inforamtion. They have repeatedly told tall stories to judges that they were weeks away from an indictment. They pretended they had “super secret” information. When they finally shared this “super secret” information with the judge he laughed them out of court.
The AFIP announcement still stands as the ONLY credible information about the spores.
Beecher (supposedly at the “center of the investigation”) was not involved in the analysis, has not seen the analysis, and wrote a parargaph in a paper that editors now agree should NOT have passed peer review.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/government/84/8449gov1.html
This is the FBI’s first public statement on the investigation since it began analyzing the material in the Leahy letter and the first time the bureau has described the anthrax powder. Beecher, however, provides no citation for the statement or any information in the article to back it up, and FBI spokeswomen have declined requests to interview him.
“The statement should have had a reference,” says L. Nicholas Ornston, editor-in-chief of the microbiology journal. “An unsupported sentence being cited as fact is uncomfortable to me. Any statement in a scientific article should be supported by a reference or by documentation,” he says.
It's an "on-going investigation." You may not believe it and prefer to believe in some conspiracy, but the facts say it is an "on-going investigation." And there may even be some good reasons why there was no arrest in the past year or so. I discussed some of the reasons in the "Comment" I wrote for my web site on Sunday:
I believe that the FBI knows who sent the anthrax letters, but proving it in a court of law is an entirely different matter.
However, I've been kicking myself because I didn't mention [on a radio interview I did] the situation with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
From a statement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
“The President must now restore credibility to the office of the Attorney General. Given the serious loss of public trust and the disarray at the Department of Justice, the American people must have absolute confidence in the integrity of the next Attorney General as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as defender of our constitution independent of political influence."
From an editorial in the Charlotte Observer:
His performance as attorney general left him without a shred of credibility with Congress and steered the Justice Department into partisan disarray.
From an editorial in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times:
Gonzales will leave office, he said in an announcement yesterday, on Sept. 17. He leaves a department in deep disarray.
Even if the FBI had concluded its Amerithrax investigation, they could not make an arrest if the Department of Justice was not ready or if the Department of Justice felt it was unable to successfully prosecute the case. As I've stated before, this is not a case the Department of Justice or the FBI can afford to lose. And, since it's clearly a very complicated case, the prosecuting attorneys would really have to be ready. That poses the question: Can they be ready when the Department of Justice is in "deep disarray"?
Furthermore, according to USA Today:
When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales leaves office Sept. 17, he will bestow to his successor a department plagued by investigations, high vacancies and low morale, former agency lawyers say.
From CBS:
His presence as attorney general was hindering public confidence in the work of the Department of Justice, impeding its ability to deal with Congress, shattering morale through its halls, and generally embarrassing the administration which he supposedly serves.
Suppose the FBI had arrested the anthrax mailer a month ago, before Gonzales resigned. Suppose they arrested someone who had never before been mentioned in connection with the Amerithrax investigation -- Dr. Joe Blow. And suppose Dr. Blow claimed to be innocent? And suppose friends of Dr. Blow were all over the media expressing shock over the arrest of such a respected citizen. And suppose the Bill of Indictment was loaded with difficult to understand scientific evidence.
What would the reaction have been by the public and by the media? Would it have been viewed as an attempt to get the pressure off Attorney General Gonzales?
And what about the unresolved Hatfill lawsuit? If Dr. Joe Blow had been arrested, would all the people in the scientific world and in the media who have been pointing their fingers at Dr. Hatfill for years suddenly nod their heads and acknowledge that they were totally wrong and that Dr. Blow is clearly the anthrax culprit? Or would they be lining up to declare that the indictment was an attempt by the Bush Administration to continue the cover up of Dr. Hatfill's guilt by using scientific mumbo-jumbo to accuse some innocent man?
When the Department of Justice is headed by a man who a large portion of the media and the general public considers to be incompetent and a partisan political hack, and who even the Director of the FBI has publicly disputed, is it the right time to make an arrest in the Amerithrax investigation?
Of course, I could simply be rationalizing why there has not yet been an arrest in the Amerithrax case. It's possible that they simply don't have enough evidence. Or they might have the evidence, but the spectre of the O.J. Simpson case hovers over them as they wonder if the jury will accept the evidence.
I guess that's the difficulty with information that relates to an on-going criminal investigation, isn't it?
You can provide facts, but you cannot back up those facts with supporting information that is evidence in an on-going criminal investigation.
You might see it as proof of a "non-massive" conspiracy to cover up an illegal U.S. government bioweapons program, but I see it as just a matter of releasing important information to scientists while not providing details which could be used as evidence in an on-going criminal investigation.