[AP] Anthrax scientist commits suicide as FBI closes in

rhadamanthus · Apr 23, 2010

FBI's case keeps crumbling...

Colleague Disputes Case Against Anthrax Suspect
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: April 22, 2010

A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.

The public remarks from Dr. Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.

The F.B.I. declined to comment on Dr. Heine’s remarks on Thursday. In its written summation of the case in February, the bureau said Dr. Ivins’s lab technicians grew anthrax spores that the technicians incorrectly believed were added to Dr. Ivins’s main supply flask. But the summary said the spores were never added to the flask, suggesting that surplus spores might have been diverted by Dr. Ivins for the letters.

Some scientists and members of Congress protested in February when the Justice Department closed the case, saying it should have waited for the academy panel’s conclusions. The F.B.I. asked the panel last year to review the bureau’s scientific work on the case, though not its conclusion on the perpetrator’s identity.

Members of the panel, whose chairwoman is Alice P. Gast, a chemical engineer and president of Lehigh University, declined to comment on Dr. Heine’s testimony or his remarks to reporters. The panel is expected to complete its report this fall.

Since shortly after Dr. Ivins took a lethal dose of Tylenol in July 2008 and the Justice Department first named him as the anthrax mailer, some former colleagues have rejected the F.B.I.’s conclusion and said they thought he was innocent. They have acknowledged, as Dr. Heine did on Thursday, that they wanted to clear the name of their friend and defend their laboratory, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Dr. Heine said he had been treated as a suspect himself at one point and understood the pressure Dr. Ivins was under.

Asked why he was speaking out now, Dr. Heine noted that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory in late February. He now works for Ordway Research Institute in Albany.

Dr. Heine said he did not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Dr. Ivins’s flask — a link that led the F.B.I. to conclude that Dr. Ivins had grown the spores from a sample taken from the flask. But samples from the flask were widely shared, Dr. Heine said. Accusing Dr. Ivins of the attacks, he said, was like tracing a murder to the clerk at the sporting goods shop who sold the bullets.

“Whoever did this is still running around out there,” Dr. Heine said. “I truly believe that.”
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DaDakota · Apr 23, 2010

BigSherv said:

White people around the US will just ignore this and continue to believe Arabs are doing all of this stuff.
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No way, Timothy McVeigh and the Unibomber were white too, there are wack jobs in every race or religion.

DD

Surfguy · Apr 23, 2010

Nobody could believe Aldrich Ames was in the CIA directing Soviet counterintelligence operations and, at the same time, actually spying for them. Dr. Heines doesn't believe he could have been duped. That doesn't exactly make the case for proving the guy's innocence. It didn't help that the guy killed himself when they were about to close in.

Rocket River · Apr 23, 2010

DaDakota said:

No way, Timothy McVeigh and the Unibomber were white too, there are wack jobs in every race or religion.

DD
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and who talks about them?

I *REALLY* hope this is not a case of the FBI just trying to close a case.
If this guy didn't do it. . . then the real person is still out there.

Making us FEEL safe and making us safe are TWO SEPERATE THINGS!!

Rocket River

ScriboErgoSum · Apr 23, 2010

Surfguy said:

Nobody could believe Aldrich Ames was in the CIA directing Soviet counterintelligence operations and, at the same time, actually spying for them. Dr. Heines doesn't believe he could have been duped. That doesn't exactly make the case for proving the guy's innocence. It didn't help that the guy killed himself when they were about to close in.
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It also doesn't help the case for his guilt considering the FBI's behavior with Hatfill for the same case and Pearl in the Atlanta bombing. The Atlantic had a detailed article about how the FBI focused on the wrong guy (Hatfill) for over a year and did everything they could to ruin his life. He considered suicide and mainly didn't kill himself because he felt the public would have believed him guilty.

I think the FBI was under enormous pressure to solve this case. They probably got the correct guy, but I would not at all be surprised to find out they had cooked the evidence to manufacture guilt. It sounds like Ivins was a lot more emotionally fragile. He might have killed himself to dodge conviction and incarceration. He also might have done it because he couldn't handle the FBI's pressure.

rhadamanthus · Apr 23, 2010

ScriboErgoSum said:

I think the FBI was under enormous pressure to solve this case.
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Understatement.

They probably got the correct guy, but I would not at all be surprised to find out they had cooked the evidence to manufacture guilt.
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Not sure about the former claim (lack of direct evidence, motive, and large sections fo the timeline don't make sense); the latter is definitely believable.

It sounds like Ivins was a lot more emotionally fragile. He might have killed himself to dodge conviction and incarceration. He also might have done it because he couldn't handle the FBI's pressure.
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Pretty accurate, from what I've read. Conveniantly, the suicide gave the FBI rationale to "close the case" even though their arguments were falling apart simultaneously.

ScriboErgoSum · Apr 23, 2010

rhadamanthus said:

Not sure about the former claim (lack of direct evidence, motive, and large sections fo the timeline don't make sense); the latter is definitely believable.
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You're quite correct. I shouldn't have used the word "probably." The case certainly doesn't seem as ironclad as it did a few months ago, and if the facts were presented to me now, I would have to say there's reasonable doubt on Ivins' guilt. Originally the scientific evidence seemed overwhelming, and the circumstancial evidence seemed damning. However circumstancial evidence is certainly not conclusive. There was a mountain of circumstancial evidence against Hatfill too. I'm not an expert on manufacturing anthrax or biological weapons, so I kind of trusted the scientific analysis on the case that was being published at the time. Having Ivins' co-workers doubting that he could manufacture the anthrax is a huge red-flag. The timeline falling apart is really egregious too.

If the FBI screwed up again, they will circle the wagons like nothing else to cover that up.

rhadamanthus · Feb 16, 2011

National Academy Concludes FBI Overstated the Strength of Genetic Analysis as a Link Connecting Ivins and the Anthrax Letters

For years, the FBI believed that it had identified the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks -- former Army researcher Steven Hatfill -- only to be forced to acknowledge that he wasn't involved and then pay him $5.8 million for the damage he suffered from those false accusations. In late July, 2008, the FBI announced that, this time, it had identified the Real Perpetrator: Army researcher Bruce Ivins, who had just committed suicide as a result of being subjected to an intense FBI investigation. Ivins' death meant that the FBI's allegations would never be tested in a court of law.

From the start, it was obvious that the FBI's case against Ivins was barely more persuasive than its case against Hatfill had been. The allegations were entirely circumstantial; there was no direct evidence tying Ivins to the mailings; and there were huge, glaring holes in both the FBI's evidentiary and scientific claims. So dubious was the FBI's case that even the nation's most establishment media organs, which instinctively trust federal law enforcement agencies, expressed serious doubts and called for an independent investigation (that included, among many others, the editorial pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal). Mainstream scientific sources were equally skeptical; Nature called for an independent investigation and declared in its editorial headline: "Case Not Closed," while Dr. Alan Pearson, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation -- representative of numerous experts in the field -- expressed many scientific doubts and also demanded a full independent investigation. I devoted much time to documenting just some of the serious flaws in the FBI's evidentiary claims, as well as the use of anonymous FBI leaks to unquestioning reporters to convince the public of their validity (see here, here, here, and here).

Doubts about the FBI's case were fully bipartisan. In August, 2008, The New York Times documented "vocal skepticism from key members of Congress." One of the two intended Senate recipients of the anthrax letters, Sen. Patrick Leahy, flatly stated at a Senate hearing in September, 2008, that he does not believe the FBI's case against Ivins, and emphatically does not believe that Ivins acted alone. Then-GOP Sen. Arlen Specter, at the same hearing, told the FBI they could never have obtained a conviction against Ivins in court based on their case -- riddled, as it is, with so much doubt -- and he also demanded an independent evaluation of the FBI's evidence. And in separate interviews with me, GOP Sen. Charles Grassley and Democratic Rep. Rush Holt (a physicist who represents the New Jersey district from which the anthrax letters were mailed) expressed substantial doubts about the case against Ivins and called for independent investigations.

Despite all of this, the FBI managed to evade calls for an independent investigation by announcing that it had asked the National Academy of Sciences to convene a panel to review only the FBI's scientific and genetic findings (but not to review its circumstantial case against Ivins or explore the possibility of other culprits). The FBI believed that its genetic analysis was the strongest aspect of their case against Ivins -- that it definitively linked Ivins' research flask to the spores in the mailed anthrax -- and that once the panel publicly endorsed the FBI's scientific claims, it would vindicate the FBI's case and end calls for a full-scale investigation into the accusations against Ivins.

But yesterday, the National Academy panel released its findings, and it produced a very unpleasant surprise for the FBI (though it was entirely unsurprising for those following this case). As The New York Times put it in an article headlined "Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work in Investigating Anthrax Letters": "A review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s scientific work . . . concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins"; while the panel noted that the genetic findings are "consistent" with the claim that Ivins mailed the letters and can "support" an association, the evidence is far from "definitive," as the FBI had long suggested. The report, commissioned by the FBI, specifically concluded that "the scientific link between the letter material and [Ivins'] flask number RMR-1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary." This morning's Washington Post article -- headlined: "Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins" -- noted that "the report reignited a debate that has simmered among some scientists and others who have questioned the strength of the FBI's evidence against Ivins."

In addition to reigniting doubts, the report has also reignited calls for an independent investigation into the entire FBI case. Yesterday, Rep. Holt re-introduced his legislation to create a 9/11-style Commission, complete with subpoena power, with a mandate to review the entire matter. Sen. Grassley told the Post: "There are no more excuses for avoiding an independent review." Ivins' lawyer added that the report confirms that the case against his client is "all supposition based on conjecture based on guesswork, without any proof whatsoever." All of that has been clear for some time, and yesterday's report merely underscored how weak is the FBI's case.

It is hard to overstate the political significance of the anthrax attacks. For reasons I've described at length, that event played at least as much of a role as the 9/11 attacks in elevating the Terrorism fear levels which, through today, sustain endless wars, massive defense and homeland security budgets, and relentless civil liberties erosions. The pithy version of the vital role played by anthrax was supplied by Atrios here and here; in essence, it was anthrax that convinced large numbers of Americans that Terrorism was something that could show up without warning at their doorstep -- though something as innocuous as their mailbox -- in the form of James-Bond-like attacks featuring invisible, lethal powder. Moreover, anthrax was exploited in the aftermath of 9/11 to ratchet up the fear levels toward Saddam Hussein, as ABC News' Brian Ross spent a full week screeching to the country -- falsely -- that bentonite had been found in the anthrax and that this agent was the telltale sign of Iraq's chemical weapons program, while George Bush throughout 2002 routinely featured "anthrax" as one of Saddam's scary weapons.

That there's so much lingering doubt about who was responsible for this indescribably consequential attack is astonishing, and it ought to be unacceptable. Other than a desire to avoid finding out who the culprit was (and/or to avoid having the FBI's case against Ivins subjected to scrutiny), there's no rational reason to oppose an independent, comprehensive investigation into this matter.
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