Tales Of The War On Terror

So Congress isn't buying the neat little bow that the FBI tried to put on the anthrax case.

WASHINGTON — A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that “important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case.”

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

“My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army’s biodefense laboratory who worked on anthrax vaccines. “There are some very serious questions that have yet to be answered and need to be made public.”

I'm looking forward to that hearing.

In addition to letting potential domestic terror suspects go free, you'll be pleased to know that the Bush Administration, an equal opportunity bungler, has done the same with foreign terror suspects:

A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.

But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.

The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.

In a case of a buried lede, the Times story later gets around to mentioning that the Bush Administration's jumping of the gun, authorizing arrests in Pakistan of people connected to the plot for nakedly political reasons prior to the 2006 midterm elections, cut short the investigation and put Scotland Yard in a situation where they didn't have enough evidence to convict. London had to roll up the plotters before they were ready to present full evidence.

George Bush - politicizing terror, making sure nobody is held responsible since 2001!

Time for a change.

FBI: Federal Botching of the Ivins case

Anyone who was paying attention knew it was going this way:

Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.

FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.

First of all, this gaping hole in the case, the lack of any physical evidence putting Ivins at the crime scene, has been obvious from the moment the FBI closed the case. In fact, they're STILL looking for additional evidence, which should tell you something about how secure they are in their determination that Ivins acted alone. They're basing the entire case on the remote belief that Ivins checked out of his lab with just enough time to spare to drive 4 hours to Princeton for pretty much no reason and mail the letters. Except the postmark on the letters reflects the day after it would according to the FBI's own timeline. (The FBI doesn't even talk about the other letters mailed; presumably they have no evidence tying Ivins to those locations, either). And now this - the hair samples don't match. That's really only one of the many questions remaining in the case. The FBI has checked Ivins's car, his house, his locker, and his safety deposit box and found no traces of anthrax spores. The evidence of the particular strain of anthrax could have been in the hands of up to 100 people, and anyway the DNA testing does not point to any individual. There is just nothing in what the FBI has presented that is in any way conclusive - in fact, more pieces point AWAY from Ivins than toward him. Meryl Nass has the definitive rundown of the Swiss cheese-sized holes in the case.

Congress is holding preliminary hearings, which is a start.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it will call FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to appear at an oversight hearing Sept. 17, when he is likely to be asked about the strength of the government's case against Ivins. A spokeswoman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a vocal FBI critic, said he would demand more information about how authorities narrowed their search.

The House Judiciary panel, meanwhile, is negotiating to hold a separate oversight hearing in September with bureau officials, in a session that could mark the first public occasion in which Mueller faces questions about the FBI's handling of the anthrax case.

But it's not enough. The scope of any investigation must be broadened and it would be best if it occurred in the hands of an independent body with subpoena power charged with digging down to the truth. It must be said - if the FBI is not outright lying, they're certainly trying to cover up their years of mistakes and increasingly intimidating and bullying behavior as they sought a suspect on which to pin the attacks. This is what has become of accountability in Washington, and so a stand must be taken right here. It is unacceptable to let this pass. People died, others were sickened, and the tragedy was turned around and used to sow fear in the public and set us on a course toward unnecessary war. The attacks had a specific political and media target. It's not good enough for the puzzle to end without a full accounting.

This is especially unnerving because the FBI, the same entity that has consistently screwed up this case for half a dozen years, is about to get a whole bunch of new powers.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey confirmed plans Wednesday to loosen post-Watergate restrictions on the FBI's national security and criminal investigations, saying the changes were necessary to improve the bureau's ability to detect terrorists.

Mukasey said he expected criticism of the new rules because "they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection inside the United States." However, he said the criticism would be misplaced because the bureau has long had authority to do so [...]

In addition, agents assigned to national security investigations will be given more latitude to conduct surveillance based on a tip. Also, agents will be permitted to search more databases than allowed previously in criminal cases. As it stands now, agents who get a tip about a possible organized crime figure cannot use certain databases that they are allowed to access in national security cases, such as those containing information about state-issued drivers' licenses [...]

Michael German, a former veteran FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said if Mukasey moves ahead with the new rules as he describes them, he'll be weakening restrictions originally put in place after the Watergate scandal to rein in the FBI's domestic Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. At the time, the FBI spied on American political leaders and organizations deemed to be subversive throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s.

If this anthrax case is a test case for how the FBI handles a sensitive domestic terrorism investigation, their powers shouldn't be increased, they should be removed, and the J. Edgar Hoover Building shuttered. Only a full investigation will lead to the proper and necessary rollback. This agency as it's currently constructed cannot be trusted to even keep a minimal standard of competency, let alone be trusted with any role in handling national security cases.

No Physical Evidence

One suspects that the traditional media is pretty much done with the anthrax case, having wrung all it can from the lurid tales of Bruce Ivins' obsessions with sororities and emails depicting a dark side and mental instability. But two aspects of the case stick out like sore thumbs - 1) nobody can place Ivins at the scene of the crime, and 2) the scientific evidence is woefully lacking.

The FBI is hanging its case on the fact that Ivins took an administrative leave on September 17, 2001, at which time they believe he drove to Princeton and mailed the first batch of letters. But it's very unclear whether that narrow window was enough for the 3 1/2 hour ride.

Ivins normally got to work early--around 7:30 AM. Assuming his brief stay was half an hour (are they suggesting he went in and picked up the anthrax? and if so, did anyone ask why he'd do so during daytime hours?), he would have had eight hours to drive to Princeton and back. That's certainly doable--Google says the drive takes 3 hours and 25 minutes. Who knows whether Ivins sped much in his 1993 Honda Civic (in 2001, he also had a 1996 Dodge van; he did not yet have his 2002 Saturn). But even if he went faster than Google says he should have (he would have been driving on I-95, after all, which pretty much requires speeding), he almost certainly would have hit rush hour traffic at least once in his drive, if not twice.

In other words, Ivins could have made the drive, but just barely.

And why Princeton, of course; the Kappa Kappa Gamma connection is extremely weak, and no witnesses placing him at the scene have come forward (in fact, the FBI never even bothered to ask). In addition, if Ivins did mail the letters in that window, the postmarks would have been for the wrong day.

If the Post's reporting about Ivins' September 17 activities is accurate -- that he "return[ed to Fort Detrick] for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m." -- then that would constitute an alibi, not, as the Post breathlessly described it, "a key clue into how he could have pulled off an elaborate crime," since any letter he mailed that way would have a September 17 -- not a September 18 -- postmark. Just compare the FBI's own definition of "window of opportunity" to its September 17 timeline for Ivins to see how glaring that contradiction is.

And the scientific evidence is even more sketchy. In fact, the FBI provided almost no scientific testing evidence despite dumping hundreds of pages of documents about the case. They banked on the press foregrounding the lurid details and not the hard facts.

Meanwhile, virtually nobody with a science background in microbiology has stepped forward in support of the FBI's conclusion that Ivins was likely the one and only person involved in the 2001 attacks, said Gigi Gronvall, a senior associate with the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

"[Federal officials] came out and said they'd made the case, but they didn't actually present that science. So it really can't be evaluated," Gronvall said in an interview. "They talked about the genetic signature but they didn't elaborate on what that was. We want to know how they were able to determine that that one flask contained the parent train of what was sent out."

Dr. Meryl Nass' entire blog is worth reading to dissect the numerous holes in this case, but in particular you can check this post about the lack of conclusive evidence. It's damning. Go read it.

This investigation is maddening and I guess we're all going to have to keep screaming about it until key questions are answered.

... I think this aspect of the investigation merits a read, too. Almost everyone who has been suspected as the anthrax killer has ended up eroding under the pressure, because the FBI has hounded these people to the breaking point. They've ruined lives to cover their own asses and now they're pinning the whole thing on a dead man. It's a history of shameful conduct.

Case Closed... And Then Open A Little

I think the FBI's "open and shut" case on Bruce Ivins is landing with a thud. Their claims keep getting contradicted by material evidence. They said that the envelopes purchased to mail the letters could only have been bought at the post office where Ivins had a PO Box, but that turns out to be inaccurate. They said that there is evidence in the documents released about searches of Ivins' car and home, but there isn't. There's no evidence matching Ivins' handwriting to the writing on the letters. The strain of anthrax used in the killings, considered rare and only available to 10 people, turns out to be more prevalent and available in up to 15 government labs. And most damning, the government is still looking for evidence in the anthrax case.

The government is still searching for evidence that Bruce Ivins was solely responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks despite declaring the case solved.

Search warrants and other documents filed Thursday in federal court in Washington show the FBI wants to look through computers Ivins used at his local library before he killed himself last week.

Gee, I thought the case was closed.

As details continue to leak out, including an assertion that Ivins took an administrative leave for several hours on the day the letters may have been sent - a detail left completely out of the DoJ's document dump - it's no wonder that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are starting to ask questions.

Last night, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) sent a three-page letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller III, asking them to respond to 18 questions about virtually every aspect of the probe.

In the House, Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat who represents the New Jersey district where the anthrax-laced letters were mailed, says he's talking to other House members about a combined inquiry involving the judiciary, intelligence, science and technology, and government oversight committees.

That's exactly what we need. Meryl Nass has a lot more.

Evidence, Remixed

So that's it then. The FBI has laid out what they've got, and they say Bruce Ivins was the anthrax killer, hand down. No question about it. It was him. Definitely. Case closed. You can read the documents yourself!

Except there's the whole massive amounts of holes in the evidence thing. Other than that, rock solid.

1. Ivins had just been immunized against anthrax. He was required to have yearly immunizations, and some anthrax scientists have chosen to be vaccinated every six months for safety, since the vaccine's efficacy is weak--and Ivins had proven its weakness in several animal models. In his career he had probably received about 33 separate anthrax vaccinations.

2. Earlier, we heard the envelopes came from the specific post office he frequented. Today the affidavit states it is "reasonable to conclude" they were purchased in Maryland or Virginia.

3. Choosing a strain that would direct suspicion at Ivins. The perpetrator(s) were tremendously careful to leave no clues vis a vis the envelopes. For example, block lettering was used, which is the hardest to identify with handwriting analysis. Second, stamped envelopes were chosen to avoid using saliva. Third, there were no fingerprints on anything.

Why would the person(s) who took such care select an anthrax strain that would focus suspicion on himself? In 2001, strain analysis was possible. It had been discussed many times as a forensic tool for biowarfare, including in a paper I wrote in 1992, which Ivins had read, and in which I thanked him for his contributions.

4. Ivins was the "sole custodian" of the strain. But the strain was grown in 1997, and many people had access to it over that four year period. Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be "custodians" of it too.

And most important, being at the actual scene of the crime:

13. The anthrax attacker MUST be able to be placed at the scene of the mailboxes, at the times the letters were mailed. Surely the FBI sought information on these dates and places from everyone with anthrax access in the US and probably abroad, shortly after the letter attacks. Either Ivins had an alibi or he didn't. Put up or shut up: this is the most critical evidence in this case. If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone.

Furthermore, there were other letters. Some contained other powders. Some were said to contain some anthrax in contemporaneous news reports. Some were warnings. These were mailed from other places, on other dates. The FBI has sat on this collateral evidence. If these envelopes, ink or block print were the same, the attacker would have to be placed at the scene when those letters were mailed. What happened to this evidence? Pony up.

You can give me all the lurid tales to paint this guy as a wacko as you want. Until you place him at the scene, without the sleight of hand of saying "the mailbox was near a storage closet that housed materials from a sorority that he was obsessed with 30 years ago," the case is noticeably weak. You can pull out all the acquaintances of Ivins (which conflict with those who actually knew him well), but all they do is prove Ivins was a creep (which is believable), not necessarily a bioterrorist.

The evidence we do have is middling.

While what I've seen of their case so far makes a pretty compelling argument that Ivins was involved in creating the anthrax, they've got nothing that explains how it walked out of Ft. Detrick, got into envelopes, and got sent to a bunch of media figures and senators. Importantly, their "motive" for the selection of Leahy and Daschle is piss poor.

And, as I've said twice already, if they take their "motive" seriously: a desire to make sure anthrax vaccines were continued, a desire to pass the PATRIOT Act, and a reason to dislike Daschle and Leahy, Scooter Libby (who also lived in an area where he could have gotten those envelopes) and Dick Cheney had much stronger motives for sending the anthrax.

But don't worry, the FBI says. We've got Ivins 200 miles away and no real motive and no real evidence tying him to the emptying the flask, but since we used some really cool science to place Ivins with the flask, that should be good enough for you.

The science is thin; the circumstantial evidence (he hated the ACLU! An NBC reporter was on his case at one point! He wrote a variation of "death to America" in an email in September 2001!) is voluminous and not particularly compelling. I'm seeing the FBI link the anthrax to a particular flask, but Ivins had no residue on him, in his car, in his house, in his lab, or really anywhere he had access to. And Greenwald makes an important point:

It is critical to keep in mind that all they released is their own claims and summary about the evidence they have. The evidence itself continues to remain concealed, in their exclusive possession, examined by nobody.

What happened today with this selective document release is akin to a criminal trial where only the Prosecutor is allowed to see the relevant evidence, only the Prosecutor is allowed to select which evidence is presented, and only the Prosecutor speaks. Such a distorted, one-sided process doesn't even happen at Guantanamo, which should, by itself, indicate how much skepticism is warranted here until the FBI makes the actual evidence available so that its claims can be subjected to critical scrutiny.

Plus, even if you agree with the FBI's conclusions, you have to consider them criminally liable for allowing Ivins to continue to work inside a government lab years after they pinpointed the flask that contained the deadly anthrax and linked it to him. That's insane.

Even the victims and their families and friends, who you would think would be most willing to have closure on this, aren't all convinced.

Dena Briscoe, president of the American Postal Workers Union local for Washington and Southern Maryland, slipped into the news conference at the Justice Department to ask when postal employees would be informed about the investigation. "There are still too many unanswered questions. I still can't say that one person did all of this," Briscoe told a reporter just before an official asked her to leave the room [...]

Leroy Richmond, 64, who nearly died after contracting anthrax at Brentwood, was asked later about the briefing. "I'm okay with it," he said, holding aloft a ream of documents. He referred questions to his attorney, Gregory Lattimer, who said the Stafford resident is still considering a lawsuit.

"A plausible case could be made in terms of Mr. Ivins's guilt, but on the other hand, a case could be made that none of this constitutes a smoking gun," Lattimer said.

This demands a full investigation and a full release of all the data that the FBI is using to convict Ivins in the media. In addition, we need to know who leaked to Brian Ross of ABC News the disclosure that the anthrax contained bentonite, linking it to Iraq. TV Newser has a long interview with Ross where he insists that his sources, all government scientists involved in the initial analysis, were not intentionally lying to him but simply mistaken. The sources themselves need to answer those questions.

The Continuing Saga of the Anthrax Case

Glenn Greenwald beat me to today's update on the anthrax case, showing pretty conclusively that the FBI's case, which is being dribbled out slowly, just doesn't add up to much. One thing I learned from Greenwald is that yesterday's revelation about Ivins' obsession with a sorority being the reason he mailed the letters near their house at Princeton, which already sounded ridiculous (they don't have sororities at the several dozen other campuses closer to his Frederick, MD home?), was also completely factually wrong.

The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college's Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property. Sorority members do not live there, and the Kappa chapter at Princeton does not provide a house for the women.

I know that most sexual deviants often hide out and use mailboxes near where sororities house their rush materials - it's as axiomatic as breathing oxygen and emitting carbon dioxide - but color me skeptical.

In fact, color the New York Times skeptical as well, particularly of the FBI's investigation methods.

They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

The picture being painted of Ivins as some kind of creepy, sexually depraved deviant may be true - the obsession with Kappa Kappa Gamma (which according to the NYT ended in 1981), holding a private mailbox to receive porn - but it has literally nothing to do with sending poisoned letters to media and political figures and making them crudely look like they were coming from Islamic terrorists. The fact that Ivins voted in several Democratic primaries makes it curious that he would have sent these letters out exclusively to Democratic leaders, particularly those who were holding up negotiations on the Patriot Act (Leahy, Daschle).

There's apparently going to be a wealth of scientific information coming out tomorrow, but for now, the biggest leak concerns Ivins' use of freeze-drying equipment that could be used to convert wet anthrax spores into powder.

Ivins's possession of the drying device, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations.

The device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army's sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked as a scientist, employees at the base said. Instead, sources said, Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying. He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.

I'll go over to Greenwald for this one.

But that appears to be completely false. Here is the abstract of a 1995 research report, for which Ivins was the lead scientist, reporting on discoveries made as part of their research into anthrax vaccines (h/t substantial). This is the method they described using:

The efficacy of several human anthrax vaccine candidates comprised of different adjuvants together with Bacillus anthracis protective antigen (PA) was evaluated in guinea pigs challenged by an aerosol of virulent B. anthracis spores. The most efficacious vaccines tested were formulated with PA plus monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) in a squalenel lecithin/Tween 80 emulsion (SLT) and PA plus the saponin QS-21. The PA+MPL in SLT vaccine, which was lyophilized and then reconstituted before use, demonstrated strong protective immunogenicity, even after storage for 2 years at 4°C. The MPL component was required for maximum efficacy of the vaccine. Eliminating lyophilization of the vaccine did not diminish its protective efficacy. No significant alteration in efficacy was observed when PA was dialyzed against different buffers before preparation of vaccine. PA+MPL in SLT proved superior in efficacy to the licensed United States human anthrax vaccine in the guinea pig model.

Clearly, Ivins' legitimate work researching anthrax vaccines entailed the use of a lyopholizer. As the commenter notes, "If you google 'lyophilize' and 'anthrax', most of the pages returned are about anthrax vaccines, which is what Dr. Ivins was working on at Ft. Detrick."

You're going to hear about some fantastic new technique - some radical DNA technology that the FBI hopes to use as a tool to convince a CSI-loving public about the dead accuracy of their claims. But as Dr. Meryl Nass notes, the most sophisticated technology can link the powder to a lab, but not an individual. This is an effort to close a case that should not be closed. Rep. Rush Holt, who represents the district from where the anthrax was mailed, wants an investigation.

Having watched how [the FBI] collected evidence, I don't have a lot of confidence, and I think the burden is on them to satisfy me, and other members of Congress, that they've done this right. . . . The case seems to me at this point to be circumstantial, and again, without briefings from the FBI, it would be presumptuous of me to say. And it would be presumptuous of people in Central New Jersey to breathe a sigh of relief and say: "They got the murderer. He is no longer at-large." The people deserve better re-assurances than what they've been given.

Finally, there's this op-ed from Richard Spertzel, the head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99 and a member of the Iraq Survey Group. He is completely unconvinced by the claims leaking out of the FBI, but his claims should be met with absolute skepticism.

Let's start with the anthrax in the letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute [...]

In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program. In meetings held on the cleanup of the anthrax spores in Washington, the product was described by an official at the Department of Homeland Security as "according to the Russian recipes" -- apparently referring to the use of the weak electric charge [...]

Furthermore, the anthrax in this case, the "Ames strain," is one of the most common strains in the world. Early in the investigations, the FBI said it was similar to strains found in Haiti and Sri Lanka. The strain at the institute was isolated originally from an animal in west Texas and can be found from Texas to Montana following the old cattle trails. Samples of the strain were also supplied to at least eight laboratories including three foreign laboratories. Four French government laboratories reported on studies with the Ames strain, citing the Pasteur Institute in Paris as the source of the strain they used. Organism DNA is not a very reliable way to make a case against a scientist.

I don't know what Spertzel is getting at with the "Russian recipes," but he's actually contradicting himself with this editorial. In 2002 he claimed that he could make this stuff. He's been pushing the state-sponsored terrorism angle for years, as well. In this situation, your friends may be your enemies and it's hard to piece together where the truth lies. Whatever the case, there needs to be a coordinated, sustained effort to get a full-scale investigation rather than having Ivins tried in the media.

This timeline from Marcy Wheeler is also helpful.

...an update here (h/t Steinn Sigurdsson) - if you look at Ivins' patent for the anthrax vaccine in 2002, he very clearly used a lyopholizer in the course of the research.

The concentrated sample was desalted again using the same buffer, frozen and finally lyophilized using a Speed-Vac. The dried samples were dissolved in 25 μl of the TRIS buffer described above and diluted 1:1 with a 2×SDS solubilization buffer consisting of 50 mM Na 2 CO 3 , 4% (w/v) SDS, 12% (v/v) glycerol, 2% (v/v) 2-mercaptoethanol and 0.01% (w/v) Bromphenol Blue prior to heating at 95° C. for 5 min.

The Sorority Made Him Do It

Was he trying to get the attention of someone who looked like Jodie Foster?

The top suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks was obsessed with a sorority that sat less than 100 yards away from a New Jersey mailbox where the toxin-laced letters were sent, authorities said Monday. Multiple U.S. officials told The Associated Press that former Army scientist Bruce Ivins was long obsessed with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma, going back as far as his own college days at the University of Cincinnati.

The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

The bizarre link to the sorority may indirectly explain one of the biggest mysteries in the case: why the anthrax was mailed from Princeton, N.J., 195 miles from the Army biological weapons lab the anthrax is believed to have been smuggled out of.

This is some major bullshit right here. Why would Ivins' obsession with some random sorority have anything to do with mailing letters made to look like they came from Muslim extremists to Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings? This "he was a woman-hater" narrative has nothing to do with the crime committed. And as usual for this case, contradictory information shows up later in the article - nobody can place Ivins at the mailbox or even in New Jersey at the time of the mailings.

Meanwhile the feds are dying to close this probe and wash their hands of it. And yet all the leaks coming out are from unnamed government scientist sources (just like the unnamed sources that led ABC News astray with the bentonite story in late 2001).

This case stinks on ice, and it always has. Somebody tried to frame Dr. Ayaad Assaad before anybody was even killed:

On Oct. 2, Ayaad Assaad, a U.S. government scientist and former biowarfare researcher, received a call from an FBI agent asking him to come in for a talk. It was well before anthrax panic gripped the nation -- in fact, it was the same day that photo editor Robert Stevens, 63, was admitted to a Florida hospital. It wasn't until the next day that Stevens was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, and another two days later, on Oct. 5, when he would become the first of five eventual fatalities caused by the apparent bioterrorist attack.

The day after hearing from the FBI, Assaad met with special agents J. Gregory Lelyegian and Mark Buie in the FBI's Washington field office, along with Assaad's attorney, Rosemary McDermott. They showed Assaad a detailed, unsigned, computer-typed letter with a startling accusation: that the 53-year-old Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who filed an age discrimination suit against the U.S. Army for dismissing him from a biowarfare lab, might be a bioterrorist.

"Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist," the letter stated, according to Assaad and McDermott. The letter was received by the FBI in Quantico, Va., but Assaad did not learn from the FBI where it had been mailed from. "I have worked with Dr. Assaad," the letter continued, "and I heard him say that he has a vendetta against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he told his sons to carry on."

According to Assaad, "The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor where I work now, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live.

What the hell is going on here?

Anthrax Case Twists And Turns

There is a very coordinated push to leak details about the late Bruce Ivins to certify that he is the "lone nut" anthrax killer which don't entirely hold up upon scrutiny. There's definitely a desire on the part of the government to make this an open and shut case seven years after the fact, but it doesn't completely hold together. The LA Times is claiming that Ivins stood to make money off of an anthrax panic, because he invented some bioterror vaccines, but inside the article it's made clear that we're talking about $10,000 rather than $1 million. We're hearing that a social worker who worked as a therapist with Ivins was scared to death of him and claimed that he tried to poison people in the past, but the social worker, Jean Duley, has her own checkered past, with a long rap sheet, and apparently knew about the grand jury investigation, as it's in her restraining order against Ivins:

client has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats & actions toward theripist. Dr. David Irwin his psychiatrist called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions will testify with other details FBI involved, currently under investigation & will be charged with 5 capital murders. I have been subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury August 1, 2008 in Washington, D.C.

How would she know that before testifying? Why does she have intimate knowledge of the case? Why is she the recipient of FBI information?

The FBI is leaking to the LA Times that DNA evidence proves Ivins' guilt, after a fresh look at the genetic evidence, and that after these tests it was clear that only Ivins could have been the killer. But the New York Times Scott Shane calls the evidence circumstantial and that the grand jury was planning to continue to meet for weeks.

While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation also have no evidence proving that Dr. Ivins visited New Jersey on the dates in September and October 2001 when investigators believe the letters were sent from a Princeton mailbox, the source said.

The source acknowledged that there might be some elements of the evidence of which he was unaware. And while he characterized what he did know about as “damning,” he said that instead of irrefutable proof, investigators had an array of indirect evidence that they argue strongly implicates Dr. Ivins in the attacks, which killed 5 people and sickened 17 others.

And Ivins had security clearance as recently as last month and was only barred from the Ft. Detrick site after counselors warned of his "deteriorating mental condition."

This could be a guilty man knowing the walls are closing in, or a marked man who was harassed into suicide because many in government wanted to close the case. The point is that there are a lot of questions, and until the evidence is revealed there's no reason to accept the official story. It is called "unlikely" that Ivins even knew how to produce weaponized, dry anthrax and didn't have access to it. (The site Anthrax Vaccine is going to be indispensable going forward; Dr. Meryl Nass, the author, and Glenn Greenwald appeared on Democracy Now this morning.)

Meanwhile, regarding the false ABC report linking the anthrax attacks to Iraq (which was not the first, by the way, there was a lot of misinformation or disinformation out there at the time), Glenn Greenwald writes:

Relating to ABC, a reader exchanged emails with Brian Ross this weekend, and Ross wrote this (the email was sent from Ross' ABC address; yesterday, I emailed both him and ABC's Jeffrey Schneider to request confirmation of its authenticity, and they didn't reply):

As we reported more than six years ago our information came from current and former government scientists. The report was discointed [sic] and denied by the White House which we reported. I believe now the scientists got it wrong although they insisted they were correct long after.

Actually, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that Ross has ever acknowledged that his sources for the bentonite story were "current and former government scientists." Given that he previously described his sources as being "well-placed," that means, presumably, that they were scientists with extremely close proximity to Fort Detrick (where the anthrax tests were being conducted) if not Fort Detrick scientists themselves. That would mean, if the FBI's accusation against Ivins is true, that the same Government lab where the attacks originated was the source for falsely telling Ross that tests revealed evidence linking the attacks to Iraq. In light of that, how can Ross possibly continue to conceal which Government scientists disseminated this false story?

It is also worth noting that Ross, who was a key witness in the Steven Hatfill litigation (since he had published numerous incriminating leaks from the DOJ) badgered at least one of his government sources, FBI spokesman Edwin Cogswell, to provide Ross with a release authorizing Ross to disclose the source's identity (allowing Ross to avoid being held in contempt by the court). Has Ross sought a similar release from his bentonite sources? Clearly, at least in some instances, Ross is able to convince his sources to allow him to disclose their identity when he is properly motivated to do so. For the reasons Professors Rosen and Gillmor point out, no release should be necessary, since these sources fed him deliberate falsehoods, but one wonders if Ross has even tried to persuade them to give permission for Ross to disclose who they are.

There are far more questions than answers at this point. ABC and any other journalist who got tips about this case need to burn their sources if they believe that the sources have lied. Tom Daschle, who received one of the anthrax-laced letters, wants full disclosure on the botched investigation as well.

There's clearly going to be a sustained effort to close this case, finger Ivins as the killer, and turn away from any of the lingering questions. That would be a huge mistake.

We Have The Worst Conspiracy Theorists

So imagine that you have two incidents. Both are considered terrorism, both are connected by the policymakers to an Iraq war they desire, and both are used as a casus belli to gin up support for that war.

One is a dynamic attack with documentary evidence of planes crashing into large buildings, 3,000 people dead, a terror group which takes responsibility for it, evidence of the hijackers boarding the planes and taking control of them, audio of the cockpits during the hijacking, etc., etc.

The other is this strange series of biochemical agents delivered through the mail, most of them are sent to media and leading Democrats in Congress, nobody takes responsibility, the mystery of who sent them is not solved for years, the notes enclosed in the envelopes crudely say things like "We have this anthrax, take penacillin now, Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great," and nobody can completely figure out the motive or who would have the means to pull this off, although the speculation is typically focused on government research labs.

You mean to tell me the cottage industry of conspiracy theories is over the FIRST one?

And before labeling me as making a false equivalence between 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, in their own way they were just as scary. I remember weeks of palpable fear, especially with their timing right after the WTC attack. Everyone in the country gets mail; not everyone gets on an airplane or works in a national landmark. The random death of the old lady in Connecticut, taking it outside the realm of postal workers and media/political figures, was particularly frightening. And there's no doubt that the recipients of the letters looked extremely calculated, designed to provoke a response of fear in the corridors of power, an upset of the social order.

Now we have thrown into this mix the strange suicide of Bruce Ivins, who reportedly was about to be charged with the anthrax mailings (he was informed of the investigation and subsequent talks with his lawyer acknowledged that charging was imminent).

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI.

This is after the government had to pay almost 6 million dollars to Stephen Hatfill, another government scientist originally tabbed as a "person of interest" in the case. That had to happen before they could charge Ivins, apparently. Ivins worked at AMRIID, the Army's institute for infectious diseases. His brother spoke to his mentality.

The eldest of his two brothers, Thomas Ivins, said he was not surprised by the events that have unfolded.

"He buckled under the pressure from the federal government," Thomas Ivins said, adding that FBI agents came to Ohio last year to question him about his brother.

"I was questioned by the feds, and I sung like a canary" about Bruce Ivins' personality and tendencies, Thomas Ivins said.

"He had in his mind that he was omnipotent."

There is a trail of strange and almost wingnutty letters to his local paper. But Ivins was one of those stereotypical quiet scientists, not the profile of a bioterrorist, and subsequent reporting shows that he was found unconscious in his home months ago, was admitted to a psychiatric facility recently after threatening co-workers, and seemed to have a mental breakdown from the strain of the investigation.

Despite the allegations -- and even after Ivins's apparent plunge into mental illness -- longtime friends and colleagues say it is inconceivable that Ivins could have been a bioterrorist. Many contend that he was driven to depression and suicide because of months of hounding by federal investigators.

"He just looked worried, depressed, anxious, way turned into himself," recalled W. Russell Byrne, an infectious-disease specialist who last saw Ivins on a recent Sunday at St. John the Evangelist, the Roman Catholic church in Frederick to which they both belonged. "It would be overstating it to say he looked like a guy who was being led to his execution, but it's not far off."

The "official story" continues today with an implication that he stood to make money off of his inventions of bioterror vaccines, but the story gets the timelines all wrong (the vaccines were sought even before 9/11 and well before the anthrax attacks) and even inside the story there's an admission that Ivins' take would have been in the tens of thousands.

There's a possibility that Ivins wanted more resources to go to bioterror and so he sent these mailings without expecting anyone would die, but that doesn't answer all the questions raised. In a seminal post, Glenn Greenwald asks about ABC News' breathless assertion at the time that Iraq was surely involved in the dispensing of anthrax based on this new information.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein. And look where -- according to Brian Ross' report on October 28, 2001 -- these tests were conducted:

And despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.

That's where Ivins worked.

Like I said, we have terrible conspiracy theorists. Because it's not much of a leap, when you consider that the very lab from which the attacks are now alleged to have originated is the same one that leaked false intel to ABC News linking the attacks to Iraq; when the attacks were designed to scare media and political elites into believing that Muslims could reach them through the postal system; when one of the signature pieces of evidence shown by Colin Powell at the UN for war with Iraq was a small vial of anthrax; when you read this incredible admission from elite pundit Richard Cohen:

Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore -- at least it's never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the New York Post and Tom Brokaw's office at NBC. . . . There was ample reason to be afraid.

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

For this and other reasons, the anthrax letters appeared linked to the awful events of Sept. 11. It all seemed one and the same. Already, my impulse had been to strike back, an overwhelming urge that had, in fact, taken me by surprise on Sept. 11 itself when the first of the Twin Towers had collapsed. . . .

...when you recognize that politicians like John McCain set to linking anthrax to Iraq almost immediately; when you learn that, despite Ivins repeatedly being linked to leaked anthrax spores and residue, the government sought to blame it on Stephen Hatfill, a separate fall guy...

I mean there's a rich amount of material here for any "Truther" to make use of. And in this case, the questions are very real and very vital. There must be a full investigation.