Anthrax mystery solved?

[southsider2k5]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gH1fcT1...xHs9EQD929H22G0

 

Anthrax scientist commits suicide as FBI closes in

 

By LARA JAKES JORDAN and DAVID DISHNEAU – 1 hour ago

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently has committed suicide in the wake of what a brother said was his intense pursuit by the FBI in connection with anthrax-tainted letters that killed five people.

 

The Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, a leading military anthrax researcher who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., the Los Angeles Times reported in Friday editions. Ivins had been told of the impending prosecution, the paper said.

 

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine. A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins' home in Frederick declined to comment.

 

Only last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, whose name for years had been associated with the post-9/11 attacks that traumatized the nation. Investigators had publicly named Hatfill a "person of interest" in 2002. The government paid Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit contending he was falsely accused and had been made a scapegoat for the crimes.

 

Investigators have been interviewing Ivins' family and co-workers since at least last year, and the pressure increased after Hatfill's name was cleared. Justice Department officials declined to comment.

 

"We are not at this time making any official statements or comments regarding this situation," said Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Washington field office, which is investigating the anthrax attacks, said Friday.

 

Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told The Associated Press that his other brother, Charles, had told him that Bruce committed suicide and Tylenol might have been involved.

 

Tom Ivins said Friday that federal officials working on the anthrax case questioned him about his brother a year and a half ago. "They said they were investigating him," he said from Ohio, where he lives, in a CNN interview.

 

But he never talked to his brother about it: "I stay away from him," Tom Ivins said.

 

A woman who answered the phone at the home of the third brother, Charles Ivins, in Etowah, N.C., refused to wake him and declined to comment on his brother's death. "This is a grieving time," she said.

 

Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year. He declined to comment on Ivins' death.

 

The Fort Detrick laboratory and its specialized scientists for years have been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax mailings, which killed five people, shut down a Senate office building and postal center for months, and compounded Americans' sense of vulnerability to terrorism.

 

An aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who received one of the anthrax-tainted letters, said Friday that Leahy had not yet been briefed on the developments. Leahy, as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, has the FBI under congressional oversight.

 

Unusual behavior by Ivins was noted at Fort Detrick in the six months following the anthrax mailings, when he conducted unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas at the infectious disease research unit where he worked, according to an internal report. But the focus long stayed on Hatfill.

 

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a physician who worked with Ivins in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility for 15 years, said he does not believe Ivins was behind the anthrax attacks.

 

Byrne of Frederick said he believes that Ivins was "hounded" by aggressive FBI agents who raided his home twice. He said Ivins was forcefully removed from his job by local police recently because of fears that he had become a danger to himself or others. The investigation led to Ivins being hospitalized for depression earlier this month, Byrne said.

 

He described Ivins as "eccentric," but not dangerous.

 

"If he was about to be charged, no one who knew him well was aware of that, and I don't believe it," said Byrne, who attended the same Catholic church as Ivins, who played the keyboards and led the church's musical program.

 

Norman Covert, a retired Fort Detrick spokesman who served with Ivins on an animal-care and protocol committee, said Ivins was "a very intent guy" at their meetings.

 

Ivins was the co-author of numerous anthrax studies, including one on a treatment for inhalation anthrax published in the July 7 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

 

The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006. The new investigators instructed agents to re-examine leads and reconsider potential suspects. In the meantime, investigators made progress in analyzing anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two Leahy and Sen. Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., according to the report.

 

Besides the five deaths, 17 people were sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida. The victims included postal workers and others who came into contact with the anthrax.

 

In the six months following the anthrax mailings, Ivins conducted unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas at USAMRIID — the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick — and found some, according to an internal report by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, which oversees the lab.

 

In December 2001, after conducting tests triggered by a technician's fears that she had been exposed, Ivins found evidence of anthrax and decontaminated the woman's desk, computer, keypad and monitor, but didn't notify his superiors, according to the report.

 

The report says Ivins performed more unauthorized sampling on April 15, 2002, and found anthrax spores in his office, in a passbox used for moving materials in and out of labs, and in a room where male workers changed from civilian clothing into laboratory garb.

 

Ivins told Army investigators he conducted unauthorized tests because he was worried that the powdered anthrax in letters that had been sent to USAMRIID for analysis might not have been adequately contained.

 

In January 2002, the FBI doubled the reward for helping solve the case to $2.5 million, and by June officials said the agency was scrutinizing 20 to 30 scientists who might have had the knowledge and opportunity to send the anthrax letters.

 

After the government's settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said.

 

Ivins was one of the nation's leading biodefense researchers.

 

In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the USAMRIID received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

 

In 1997, U.S. military personnel began receiving the vaccine to protect against a possible biological attack. Within months, a number of vaccine lots failed a potency test required by federal regulators, causing a shortage of vaccine and eventually halting the immunization program. The USAMRIID team's work led to the reapproval of the vaccine for human use.

 

The Times said Ivins was the son of a Princeton-educated pharmacist who was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in microbiology, from the University of Cincinnati.

 

He and his wife, Diane, owned a small white home just outside the main gate to Fort Detrick, about two blocks from an apartment where Hatfill once lived.

 

Dishneau reported from Hagerstown, Md.

[Balta1701]

Link.

A second test of the anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle points to the presence of a troubling chemical additive, sources tell ABCNEWS.

 

MORE INVESTIGATIVE NEWS: • Atta Met Iraqi Official in Prague

 

Four well-placed and separate sources told ABCNEWS that initial tests detected bentonite, though the White House initially said the chemical was not found.

 

The first battery of tests, conducted at Ft. Detrick, Md., and elsewhere, discovered the anthrax spores were treated with the substance, which keeps the tiny particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together — making it more likely that they could be inhaled.

 

The inhaled form on anthrax is far more deadly than the skin form.

 

As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons, but officials caution that the presence of the chemical alone does not constitute firm evidence of Iraqi involvement.

[southsider2k5]

Link.

 

So could it be that W was right about Iraq trying to attack the US? How ironic would that be?

[Balta1701]

So could it be that W was right about Iraq trying to attack the US? How ironic would that be?

Actually...that article is from 2001...and is one of the classic examples of how the media helped sell the war. ABC ran it, it was totally wrong, every single bit of it, they played it for days and days as a key story...was one of the first pieces aside from Rumsfeld saying that there were plenty of good targets in Iraq that involved the country turning away from fighting Al Qaeda and moving on to Bush's Iraq war.

 

ABC of course can't figure out why we think they did anything wrong or why we think they need to burn their sources for that article. Damn liberal media.

[Balta1701]

I'm half surprised that I managed to find a bumpable anthrax thread using the Google.

The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago.

 

Shortly after Ivins committed suicide in 2008, federal investigators announced that they'd identified him as the mass murderer who sent the letters to members of Congress and the news media. The case was circumstantial, with federal officials arguing that the scientist had the means, motive and opportunity to make the deadly powder at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.

 

Now, however, Justice Department lawyers have acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab — the so-called hot suite — didn't contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001.

 

The government said it continued to believe that Ivins was "more likely than not" the killer. But the filing in a Florida court didn't explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that his secure lab "did not have the specialized equipment . . . that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters."

 

The government's statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI's eight-year, $100 million investigation never provided direct evidence that he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder.

 

Earlier this year, a report by the National Academy of Sciences questioned the genetic analysis that had linked a flask of anthrax stored in Ivins' office to the anthrax in the letters.

 

The court papers were uncovered by a reporter for the PBS program "Frontline," which is working on a documentary on the case with McClatchy and ProPublica, an investigative newsroom.

Link. I should also note that I'm glad McClatchey is still on this, along with Frontline and the NSF, even if it doesn't get covered. At present I'd say that it should be impossible to call the only biological attack in U.S. history a closed case for any reason other than politics.

[southsider2k5]

It is things like this that make me laugh my ass off any time people honestly talk about the parts of the federal government pulling off 9-11.