In the wake of the suicide of anthrax suspect Bruce E. Ivins, some critics argue that the government’s response to the anthrax mailings of 2001 was counterproductive: Previously, Ivins was one of only a few dozen military researchers with access to high-grade strains of anthrax.
After Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks, the Bush administration greatly increased bioterror funding as well as the number of workers and labs with access to deadly biopathogens — hundreds of people now work with these once tightly restricted substances.
The move arguably increases the chances that another twisted individual will carry out a plot from within, and makes it much more difficult to narrow the list of suspects.
“We are putting America at more risk, not less risk,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of a House panel looking into safety lapses at bioresearch labs.
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Where the story on the three other people who were sourced by ABC confirming the link of the anthrax attack to Iraq?
The same place the “yellow cake” source hung out: in this administrations head, what there is of it.
Say, for example, you stood Bruce Ivins in a row with 10 other competent, highly trained business people and scientific people, who would you profile as a possible “twisted individual who would carry out a nefarious plot from within”?
Of course, subjective profiling is not permitted.
Irvins was just greedy. He was hoping to get rich with the supposed deal for the anthrax vaccine. It was a “stupid pet trick” and Irvins was another tragic note in history of lessons learned.
His ’suicide’ is WAT too convenient. Who wlse was involved in these attacks on ‘liberals’ and the press? And why?
“After four years of painstaking scientific research, the F.B.I. by 2005 had traced the anthrax in the poisoned letters of 2001 to a single flask of the bacteria at the Army biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., according to government scientists and bureau officials.
But at least 10 scientists had regular access to the laboratory and its anthrax stock — and possibly quite a few more, counting visitors from other institutions, and workers at laboratories in Ohio and New Mexico that had received anthrax samples from the flask at the Army laboratory.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/washington/05anthrax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1217941323-O0OMN2Euo6wZe5EPZ3a9jg
I think you’re right, Ben. It’s all a little too convenient. The FBI is under tremendous pressure to solve this case and I wouldn’t put it past them to “fluff up” some evidence. And now, Ivens isn’t in any position to defend himself, is he?
Looks like the FBI leaned on a very weak man until he broke.
I read he od’d on tylenol, saw nothing about tylenol 2 or tylenol 3. How many bottles would he have to take of regular tylenol?
Interesting:
“Book says White House ordered forgery
By MIKE ALLEN
A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.
Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.
The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”
The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”
If he really was just interested in self promotion, why would he make the mailings to the party not in power, or to what repubs. consider a liberal media?
Why wouldn’t he have sent it to Republican Congressmen or to the W.H.?
Or Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? Could have created a real frenzy, if he’d sent it to FOX.
And why is the Gov stockpiling Anthrax? and I agree his suicide seems to convenient.
Maybe the anthrax was more widely distributed to make it more difficult to find the person who was going to send it.
Is bush just tying up loose ends before he leaves office.
It’ll probably come out in a few decades that the guy was a CIA mole.
Which would be less painful and quicker, a snort of anthrax, or a coupld bottles of tylenol?
Even the bushlickers arent buying the “suicide” story.
The guy was scapegoated, discredited, and then murdered.
Are we surprised? We shouldnt be. In the age of bushco, laws are so, well, so, like, for the LITTLE people.
Be sure to thank congress for confirming that.
Maybe they should hold the trial in absentia. His lawyer says he would have beat it.
“His lawyer says he would have beat it.”
Which of course, is exactly why he was “suicided”.
Maybe since the case is “closed” the lawyer should release the information to the public.
Activities of this guy, “Ivins,” needs to be studied, analyzed, dissected, traced until the investigators know about him than he knew about himself.
Did he leave any traces of anthrax anywhere he went? What conversations did he have with his fellow workers? What was the culture of his work group? Was this a group effort? Was guilt somehow pinned on Ivins by others? Just what is going on there?
The “wvidence” officially released so far doesn’t even amount to probably cause, let alone indicate clear-cut guilt. I saw Tom Daschle on the tube, and he, unsurprisingly, is not satisfied that they’ve found the person who tried to kill him.
It’s been said that trace identified the DNA of the anthrax back to him, but it’s since been quietly acknowledge that he was not the only one with access to it.
What they have–and seemingly all they have, presisely, is the statement of Jean Duley, a social worker, who made some strong allegations of the man’s general mental state, a week before his suicide, and after she had talked to the FBI.
There are serious problems with this theory. This commentator, I think, puts it quite well:
Based largely on the audio recording of her testimony filed just 2 days before his “-suicide”-, the MSM is trying this man in the press, post-mortem, with absolutely zero regard for the fact that these are simply allegations put out there by one person who admittedly had already been meeting with the FBI, and without any corroborating evidence.
And also, with no regard for Dr. Ivins family and friends that have to listen to this onslaught day and night, all based on the unsupported testimony of ONE SINGLE PERSONwho isn’t even qualified to diagnose any mental illness, much less one as serious as what she claims.
But according to the ONE”witness”- (and this is important as well. She didn’t “witness”- anything; she is giving HEARSAY testimony as fact! That doesn’t stand up in a court of law, but I guess it’s just fine for the MSMto demonise this man and his family with) that every single MSMnews agency is running with, this guy was running around the streets looking to stab people; he hates women now apparently (might as well make it personal for that demographic); he tried to kill bunches of people in 2000; he was about to go on a rampage and shoot-up his office mates; he was a “revenge killer”- though if her story is true, the only people he killed were from the anthrax attacks and that had nothing to do with revenge in any way, so that just makes ZERO sense on EVERY level; and he was just a bad person all around, generally speaking.
This “boogie-man”- image wall-papered over a church choir director and volunteer for the Red-Cross would be laughable if, for some reason, the MSMwasn’t running withit as if it were the gospel truth. It would be laughable, if they weren’t callouslydestroying the memory of what, by ALL others accounts, was a good and decent man. Not to mention the fact that if he had been a sociopathth from day one, don’t you think SOMEONE would have suspected him from the beginning? Don’t you think that MAYBE he couldn’t have been given such a high security clearance? MAYBE?
The story she is selling is completely stupid. And remember, it was HER calling the cops with that ridiculous “he’s gonna kill EVERYBODY”- story that got him detained and sent to the hospital in the first place on July 10th of this year. I wonder if any of the MSM”-journalists”- were smart enough to look and see if she had already been in contact with the FBI before that date.
(just a note: you think, withall this ’sociopath killer”- evidence she is talking about, that the judge would have allowed him to voluntarily admit himself, or that the hospital would have let him go out on the streets? You would think that SOMEONE at even ONE of these MSM “news”- sources would have questioned that tidbit of info, huh?)
According to her statement, his “threats”- to her on the phone message was him calling her up angry because, as she puts it, “she was helping the FBI FRAME HIM”-!!!
Don’t see that in many of the MSM stories, do you?
You also don’t read about him running the streets looking to stab people, because then, it just starts to look like she was making it up. I mean, come on? Running the streets looking to stab people? I thought he was a “revenge killer”-?
But regardless of how the MSMgoes with this story, one thing is clear; they are in the clear. Because someone, somewhere, convinced her she needed to go “on record”- with all of this stuff. made up or not. And that is the saving grace for the corporate MSM as well as the FBI. Now, it’s ALL on her. If this backfires and they never produce the “white paper”- evidence they are promising “sometime next week”-, then they get what they want with ZERO legal accountability; they can blame it all on her.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=8440
P.S. Looks like this is far from over:
Perhaps most importantly, he is the Chairman of the House’s Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, which very well may hold hearings to examine the FBI’s investigation and conclusions.
This morning, I spoke with Rep. Holt for roughly 20 minutes. During the discussion, Rep. Holt:
* indicated his support for the creation of an investigative body, with full subpoena power, along the lines of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate all unresolved aspects of the anthrax attacks;
* enumerated the many reasons why a rational person would lack confidence in the the FBI’s investigative abilities;
* complained that the FBI has continuously “stonewalled” both him and all other members of Congress, for years, as they tried to exercise oversight over the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax case;
* declared that nobody should conclude, without much further proof, that the actual anthrax killer has been identified. (Emphasis Added)
Particularly on matters of intelligence and science, Holt is one of the most informed and intelligent members of Congress. When those attributes are combined with the fact that his district was directly affected in several ways by the anthrax attacks, his views on this case are well worth listening to.
Oops. Forgot the link:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2008/08/05/holt/index.html
“It’s been said that trace identified the DNA of the anthrax back to him, but it’s since been quietly acknowledge that he was not the only one with access to it.” — Rage
beber predits: this will turn out to be bullshit.
Rage – looking further at the allegations against Dr. Ivins I note that it seems that his ‘troubled’ behavior began only after the FBI hounded him so much. I haven’t seen anything said that he demonstrated such traits back when the FBI was hounding Hatfield.
Welll, he was obsessed with a sorority (or was it sorority girls) And the had a chapter in Princeton, which was a few blocks from a mailbox from which anthrax was mailed, And he could have drive for 7 or 8 hrs. to it to throw investigators off (hope it was on a weekend and he didn’t have to report for work the next day).
Case Closed.
If the administration will lie about THIS:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26030573/?GT1=43001
then manufacturing a “suicide” should be no problem at all.
You’ll have to excuse my paranoia of the cia, watched The Bank Job couple days ago. No telling what our agencies are capable of.
There needs to be hearings and convictions after bush leaves office and has no legal out.
And don’t forget this little tidbit from the CIA:
One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.
In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants — half-jokingly dubbing his group “The Crusaders” — to learn about Obama’s background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.
He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.
Then the retired spook tried to get Israeli intelligence officials interested in his Obama dossier. They weren’t, to his chagrin. He also shopped it to some foreign reporters. Again, no luck.
He wound up posting some of it on a blog — and where it went from there in the vast world of cyberspace is anybody’s guess.
But a few months after the man began his work, the allegation that Obama was educated in a madrassa appeared in an anonymous article in Insight Magazine, an online publication of the Unification Church, in January 2007. It also claimed that Clinton operatives had dug up the information. The article was cited by several conservative commentators, including on Fox News, before it was debunked.
The piece had the markings of what’s called a “false-flag” operation: Make a covert operation appear to be the work of another party. And, like many misinformation campaigns, it “takes what you might believe without any factual basis and seen circulating around …a lot of speculation spun into a story,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA official.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/36410.html
You know?, they’re trying to get people to believe that this “Psychologist” of his was just that, a psychologist. She was in fact, a substance abuse counselor with nothing but an associates degree. Tom Clancy couldn’t write a better novel.
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
Outside of Atlanta, there lies 250,000 tupperware type caskets lying in a field. Wonder what they are for. Seems like they could be sealed up pretty nicely.
Hmmmm?
Pretty dangerous times we live in.
I wonder if his drinking began after the FBI harrassment.
prolly just an over-reaction.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/05/anthrax/
Above link to Greenwald piece provided to add a bit more grist to the mill.
“we went from “a New Jersey mailbox used to send the anthrax was less than 100 yards away from a sorority for which Ivins harbored an intense life-long obsession” to “the mailbox was near a storage closet used by a sorority that Ivins used to frequent 27 years ago and by a specific chapter that Ivins appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with.” ”
I wonder if the mailbox was close to a Pizza Hut? Maybe he was obsessed with ANCHOVIES!!!!!!!
Definitely needs to be probed further. The way they were throwing around the dna breakthrough, I’d bet half the people that read it immediately associated it with being Ivins dna.
He was kinky visiting the proximity in which the sorority stored their robes!
So how much is this future defamation oc character/wrongful death suit going to cost the taxpayer?
McCain said on the Letterman show back in 2001 that he had evidence which linked the anthrax to Iraq. Perhaps he could explain that evidence and his sources. Then again, he said Osama Bin Laden would be dead the following month (all part of McCain’s plan to catch Osama, which he’s been sitting on for seven years apparently).
MP – can’t you tell? Just look at that picture above: Ivins is Osama bin ladin without the beard!
Good one, Ben.
Nah BTH, Ivins is a church going Christian and we all know the terrorists are Muslims. Obama is Islam’s greatest leader so he clearly mailed out the anthrax in 2001 knowing that he could use it for his 2008 campaign.
This country is on life support.
Doesn’t Ivins have the same last name as Molly Ivins? Hmmm.
White house response to fake letter charge.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080805/ap_on_go_pr_wh/white_house_iraq_4
Anyone else dubious when they use the weasel words ‘to the best of my knowledge” in their denial?
NRA using spies, what’s this country coming to?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080805/ap_on_re_us/nra_mole_1
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/05/anthrax/
Above link to Greenwald piece provided to add a bit more grist to the mill.
Indeed, Vaughn. The money quote:
Within less than 24 hours, we went from “a New Jersey mailbox used to send the anthrax was less than 100 yards away from a sorority for which Ivins harbored an intense life-long obsession” to “the mailbox was near a storage closet used by a sorority that Ivins used to frequent 27 years ago and by a specific chapter that Ivins appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with.”
Greenwald is increasingly becoming “required reading” these days.
Ivins is sounding more and more like another anthrax/fbi victim:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080806/ap_on_go_ot/anthrax_investigation_61
I’m leaning toward KsGrrl and Rage on this one.
When I first heard it, it reminded me of something from “V for Vendetta.” It’s all so conVENient, isn’t it?
No real evidence, just Pravda telling you that Big Brother has it all taken care of.
BTW, where’s the retraction from ABC that the anthrax attacks were not from Saddam Hussein as they reported from their “high placed sources”?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/terrorism.usa
ABC News’ behaviour surrounding one of its biggest “scoops” is already an object lesson of what’s wrong with American journalism. The news organisation has proved unwilling – so far, at any rate – to come clean about how it was manipulated in the 2001 (and later) investigation into the anthrax attacks in the US following September 11.
. . .
The network’s hyperventilating broadcasts of leaked, false allegations purportedly tying the anthrax to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime (see Glenn Greenwald’s meticulous examination of the coverage) was bad enough. What the organisation is doing now is journalistically unforgivable.
. . .
It now appears that the attacks were of domestic origin and the anthrax came from within US government facilities. This leads us to ask you: Who were the “four well-placed and separate sources” who falsely told ABC News that tests conducted at Fort Detrick had found the presence of bentonite in the anthrax sent to senator Tom Daschle, causing ABC News to connect the attacks to Iraq in multiple reports over a five-day period in October, 2001?
Even before the latest twists in the anthrax case, ABC News was deeply tarnished by its terrible journalism in 2001 and its protection of liars who may well be criminals. Every day that passes takes ABC further into the kind of scandal territory that, at some point, it cannot overcome . . .
Things we know:
The anthrax came from the US Army
Bentonite is commonly used in the United States
Things we speculate about with no evidence:
Hatfield did it
Ivins did it
Case closed
More breaking news:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080806/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/anthrax_investigation_108
“unable to give investigators “an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of” the attacks”
They have obviously never been around a research lab. We always worked all sorts of crazy hours.
Guess they’re closing the case.
I watched the news conference. Not impressed.
The essence of the government’s case–in fact the only thing tying Ivins to the anthrax–was the supposed incontrovertible identification of the specific flask in which the anthrax was contained, and their unimpeachable determinition that only Ivins had access to it.
But what identified the flask with such specificity? And the DNA link to Ft Detrick sounds more ominous than dispositive when one considers that the actual anthrax used in the attack also happened to be kept at that location.
Their theory of the motive: Ivins was afraid the anthrax-vaccine program would be shut down, so attacking people with anthrax would keep that from happening. Uh-huh. Once again, though, there appears to be no evidence to support this theory.
The documents are now released (at least those they’re willing to release). It should be interesting to see if they’re any more impressive than what was presented to the press today.
http://www.usdoj.gov/amerithrax/
Guess the company he was trying to help would never had access, nor motive, too?
Heard other scientist say that only the strain could be identified, not to such exacting standards it would be a ‘match’.
Would like to see what the probability factor is.
Heard other scientist say that only the strain could be identified, not to such exacting standards it would be a ‘match’.
Interesting. Is there, I wonder, such a thing as an “anthrax paternity test”? How unique is each bacterium?
Yet more disturbing questions on the Ivins investigation, from a fellow anthrax expert who knew Ivins personally:
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2008/08/beyond-reasonable-doubt.html