- Hello, Jeff - I never believed Bruce Ivins was the sole
perp. I think he was an innocent man who was railroaded by an FBI and
Justice Department desperate to close the Anthrax case.
-
- I think most people know who was behind it, who ordered
the attack, and why - but I also think that the conspirators will NEVER
be brought to justice. Just that simple.
-
- The investigation ruined a lot of innocent lives, caused
one person of interest to drink and die of a 'heart attack.' The
'person of interest' innuendo also caused Dr. Ivins to be suicided and
the disgrace of Dr. Hatfill. Dr. Hatfill's life has never been the same.
-
- Numerous scientists were viewed as suspects and their
lives put under a microscope for all to see.
-
- Just more of the same.
-
- Patty
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-
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- The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved
- The FBI disproved its main theory about how the spores
were weaponized.
- By EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN
- 1-24-10
-
- The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as
far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins,
a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute
of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. The cause of death
was an overdose of the painkiller Tylenol. No autopsy was performed, and
there was no suicide note.
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- Less than a week after his apparent suicide, the FBI
declared Ivins to have been the sole perpetrator of the 2001 Anthrax attacks,
and the person who mailed deadly anthrax spores to NBC, the New York Post,
and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These attacks killed five people,
closed down a Senate office building, caused a national panic, and nearly
paralyzed the postal system.
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- The FBI's six-year investigation was the largest inquest
in its history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the examination
of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters, computers and mailboxes.
Yet it failed to find a shred of evidence that identified the anthrax killer-or
even a witness to the mailings. With the help of a task force of scientists,
it found a flask of anthrax that closely matched-through its genetic markers-the
anthrax used in the attack.
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- This flask had been in the custody of Ivins, who had
published no fewer than 44 scientific papers over three decades as a microbiologist
and who was working on developing vaccines against anthrax. As custodian,
he provided samples of it to other scientists at Fort Detrick, the Battelle
Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and other facilities involved in
anthrax research.
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- According to the FBI's reckoning, over 100 scientists
had been given access to it. Any of these scientists (or their co-workers)
could have stolen a minute quantity of this anthrax and, by mixing it into
a media of water and nutrients, used it to grow enough spores to launch
the anthrax attacks.
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- Consequently, Ivins, who was assisting the FBI with its
investigation, as well as all the scientists who had access to the anthrax,
became suspects in the investigation. They were intensely questioned, given
polygraph examinations, and played off against one another in variations
of the prisoner's dilemma game. Their labs, computers, phones, homes and
personal effects were scrutinized for possible clues.
-
- As the so-called Amerithrax investigation proceeded,
the FBI ran into frustrating dead ends, such as its relentless five-year
pursuit of Steven Hatfill, which ended with an apology in 2007 and Mr.
Hatfill receiving a $5.8 million settlement from the U.S. government as
compensation. Another scientist, Perry Mikesell, became so stressed by
the FBI's games that he began to drink heavily and died of a heart attack
in October 2002.
-
- Eventually, the FBI zeroed in on Ivins. Not only did
he have access to the anthrax, but FBI agents suspected he had subtly misled
them into their Hatfill fiasco. A search of his email turned up pornography
and bizarre emails which, though unrelated to anthrax, suggested that he
was a deeply disturbed individual.
-
- The FBI turned the pressure up on him, isolating him
at work and forcing him to spend what little money he had on lawyers to
defend himself. He became increasingly stressed. His therapist reported
that Ivins seemed obsessed with the notion of revenge and even homicide.
Then came his suicide (which, as Eric Nadler and Bob Coen show in their
documentary "The Anthrax War," was one of four suicides among
American and British biowarfare researchers in past years). Since Ivins's
odd behavior closely fit the FBI's profile of the mad scientist it had
been hunting, his suicide provided an opportunity to close the case. So
it held a congressional briefing in which it all but pronounced Ivins the
anthrax killer.
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- But there was still a vexing problem-silicon.
-
- Silicon was used in the 1960s to weaponize anthrax. Through
an elaborate process, anthrax spores were coated with the substance to
prevent them from clinging together so as to create a lethal aerosol. But
since weaponization was banned by international treaties, research anthrax
no longer contains silicon, and the flask at Fort Detrick contained none.
-
- ***
-
- Yet the anthrax grown from it had silicon, according
to the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. This silicon explained
why, when the letters to Sens. Leahy and Daschle were opened, the anthrax
vaporized into an aerosol. If so, then somehow silicon was added to the
anthrax. But Ivins, no matter how weird he may have been, had neither the
set of skills nor the means to attach silicon to anthrax spores.
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- At a minimum, such a process would require highly specialized
equipment that did not exist in Ivins's lab-or, for that matter, anywhere
at the Fort Detrick facility. As Richard Spertzel, a former biodefense
scientist who worked with Ivins, explained in a private briefing on Jan.
7, 2009, the lab didn't even deal with anthrax in powdered form, adding,
"I don't think there's anyone there who would have the foggiest idea
how to do it." So while Ivins's death provided a convenient fall guy,
the silicon content still needed to be explained.
-
- The FBI's answer was that the anthrax contained only
traces of silicon, and those, it theorized, could have been accidently
absorbed by the spores from the water and nutrient in which they were grown.
No such nutrients were ever found in Ivins's lab, nor, for that matter,
did anyone ever see Ivins attempt to produce any unauthorized anthrax (a
process which would have involved him using scores of flasks.) But since
no one knew what nutrients had been used to grow the attack anthrax, it
was at least possible that they had traces of silicon in them that accidently
contaminated the anthrax.
-
- Natural contamination was an elegant theory that ran
into problems after Congressman Jerry Nadler pressed FBI Director Robert
Mueller in September 2008 to provide the House Judiciary Committee with
a missing piece of data: the precise percentage of silicon contained in
the anthrax used in the attacks.
-
- The answer came seven months later on April 17, 2009.
According to the FBI lab, 1.4% of the powder in the Leahy letter was silicon.
"This is a shockingly high proportion," explained Stuart Jacobson,
an expert in small particle chemistry. "It is a number one would expect
from the deliberate weaponization of anthrax, but not from any conceivable
accidental contamination."
-
- Nevertheless, in an attempt to back up its theory, the
FBI contracted scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California
to conduct experiments in which anthrax is accidently absorbed from a media
heavily laced with silicon. When the results were revealed to the National
Academy Of Science in September 2009, they effectively blew the FBI's theory
out of the water.
-
- The Livermore scientists had tried 56 times to replicate
the high silicon content without any success. Even though they added increasingly
high amounts of silicon to the media, they never even came close to the
1.4% in the attack anthrax. Most results were an order of magnitude lower,
with some as low as .001%.
-
- What these tests inadvertently demonstrated is that the
anthrax spores could not have been accidently contaminated by the nutrients
in the media. "If there is that much silicon, it had to have been
added," Jeffrey Adamovicz, who supervised Ivins's work at Fort Detrick,
wrote to me last month. He added that the silicon in the attack anthrax
could have been added via a large fermentor-which Battelle and other labs
use" but "we did not use a fermentor to grow anthrax at USAMRIID
. . . [and] We did not have the capability to add silicon compounds to
anthrax spores."
-
- ***
-
- If Ivins had neither the equipment or skills to weaponize
anthrax with silicon, then some other party with access to the anthrax
must have done it. Even before these startling results, Sen. Leahy had
told Director Mueller, "I do not believe in any way, shape, or manner
that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress."
-
- When I asked a FBI spokesman this month about the Livermore
findings, he said the FBI was not commenting on any specifics of the case,
other than those discussed in the 2008 briefing (which was about a year
before Livermore disclosed its results). He stated: "The Justice Department
and the FBI continue working to conclude the investigation into the 2001
anthrax attacks. We anticipate closing the case in the near future."
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- So, even though the public may be under the impression
that the anthrax case had been closed in 2008, the FBI investigation is
still open-and, unless it can refute the Livermore findings on the silicon,
it is back to square one.
-
- Mr. Epstein is currently completing a book on the 9/11
Commission.
-
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- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870454100457
5011421223515284.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular
-
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- Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural
Economics Univ of West Indies Please visit my "Emerging Diseases"
message board at: http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php Also
my new website: http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/ Zhan le Devlesa tai
sastimasa Go with God and in Good Health
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