SubscribeAfter the government's settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said. [...] Ivins was being treated for depression and indicated to a therapist that he was considering suicide. [....] his access to sensitive areas was curtailed [....] Ivins was facing a forced retirement in September.So the suicide didn't exactly come out of the blue.
Bush treated this terrorist act like a criminal investigation, instead of a war.
As all Americans know, recent weeks have brought a second wave of terrorist attacks upon our country...Four Americans have died as a result of these acts of terrorism...The Postal Service and the FBI have offered a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to the arrest and the conviction of the anthrax terrorists...We do not yet know who sent the anthrax -- whether it was the same terrorists who committed the attacks on September the 11th, or whether it was the -- other international or domestic terrorists. We do know that anyone who would try to infect other people with anthrax is guilty of an act of terror...I'm proud of our citizens' calm and reasoned response to this ongoing terrorist attack.It pisses me off that Bush claims that we haven't been attacked since the 9/11 attacks when he said himself that we have. We're supposedly in a Global War on Terror, we were attacked by Weapons of Mass Destruction (the little vial Colin Powell shook at the UN represented anthrax), and he gets a pass.
No love lost between those Ivins brothers, eh?
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 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.
it's clear there's nothing the press likes LESS than following through on an unsolved mystery
it's clear there's nothing the press likes LESS than following through on an unsolved mystery
Ezzell said the experiments did not involve anthrax in its dried form, the type found in the letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) that was so finely ground it could immediately become airborne. Ivins worked with small teams of scientists; their findings had global significance in the field of anthrax studies and were later used by opponents of a mandatory vaccination program instituted by the Pentagon that has been highly controversial.
The evidence amassed by F.B.I. investigators against Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week after learning that he was likely to be charged in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, was largely circumstantial, and a grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment, a person who has been briefed on the investigation said on Sunday.
Of course, the FBI already has a Richard Jewell in the anthrax case: Steven Hatfill, the wrongfully accused Fort Detrick scientist who successfully sued the crap out of the government for linking him to the killings. Now it appears the FBI is eager to dump the case in the lap of a man who is dead.Dead men don't register lawsuits.
1) So we were attacked by a conservative right-wing extremist, is basically the conclusion.
2) See above.
3) Maybe something to this. But maybe not. What's the hard evidence corroborating this claim? Is there anything more solid than a statement on a piece of paper, in other words?
4) As mentioned up-thread, this seems to be the crux of the DOJ's case. But still, it leaves me slapping myself in the forehead and asking, can that possibly be the usual way of doing business with a civilian scientist conducting extremely sensitive and high-risk biological weapons research at a secured military facility? If that's true, we've got a serious problem.
"The feds were suspicious enough in April 2004 to send an FBI agent back to the military lab in Fort Detrick to seize the flask of anthrax, known as "RMR-1029." The flask was sealed with evidence tape and carried out by FBI contractors.(*Bonus points if you can spot any potential gaps in the chain of accountability or any possible avenues for further investigation in the seizure of the materials as described.)
Nine months later, on March 31, 2005, the FBI confronted Ivins with their belief that he had not given them the sample they asked for.
"Dr. Ivins was adamant in his response that there had been no omission from his [REDACTED] submission, and he insisted that he had provided RMR-1029 to the FBI in his second submission samples in April 2002," according to the affidavit.
Even after that conversation, it took more than two years until they sought a search warrant for Ivins' home. "
"It was a flask that was "created and solely maintained" by Dr. Bruce Ivins, the key suspect who killed himself last week. Others at the lab also had access to the flask, officials said. "
Officials also said Ivins did a great deal of mailing under pseudonyms and from various cities other than his hometown of Frederick. Much of that letter traffic involved anti-abortion or Right to Life activities, they said. Ivins' lawyer, Paul Kemp, told NPR that attributing a new motive to Ivins was hogwash. He says the FBI is just floating a new theory and can't prove that Ivins was so passionate about his anti-abortion beliefs.Well, gee. It sure wouldn't be easy to manufacture evidence to support all kinds of bizarre claims about Ivins' far-out political views in a scenario like the one this statement posits. How odd that unlike so many other passionate anti-abortion activists who don't also happen to be registered Democrats, Ivins felt the need to go about conducting seemingly all of his political activism in ways that really can't be corroborated apart from the DOJ investigation, in ways that left behind only circumstantial evidence.
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posted by CunningLinguist at 10:29 PM on July 31, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]