Bioterrorism on a Grassy Knoll
Joe Persichini, the Assistant Director of the DC FBI Field Office said of Bruce Ivins yesterday, "It appears, based on the evidence, that he was acting alone."
Yet he and DC US Attorney Jeff Taylor seem painfully aware that their evidence doesn’t add up to a compelling case. In particular, Taylor and Persichini dodged and weaved whenever asked about any hard evidence that tied Bruce Ivins to the mailing–rather than just the production–of the anthrax.
For example, Taylor made an incredibly misleading statement to suggest that the envelopes used in the attack were only available in Frederick Maryland. He claimed that, "based on the analysis, we were able to conclude that the envelopes used in the mailings were very likely sold in a post office in the Frederick, MD post office in 2001." He continued to say that Ivins maintained a PO Box "at the post office from which these pre-franked envelopes were sold."
But the truth is that Frederick Maryland is just one of hundreds of post offices at which those envelopes would have been available:
Subsequent to the attacks, an effort was made to collect all such envelopes for possible forensic examination, including the identification of defects that occur during the envelope manufacturing process. As a result of this collection, envelopes with printing defects identical to printing defects identified on the envelopes utilized in the anthrax attacks during the fall of 2001 were collected fiom the Fairfax Main post office in Fairfax, Virginia and the Cumberland and Elkton post offices in Maryland. The Fairfax Main, Cumberland, Maryland, and Elkton, Maryland post offices are supplied by the Dulles Stamp Distribution Office (SDO), located in Dulles, Virginia. The Dulles SDO distributed "federal eagle" envelopes to post offices throughout Maryland and Virginia. Given that the printing defects identified on the envelopes used in the attacks are transient, thereby being present on only a small population of the federal eagle envelopes produced, and that envelopes with identical printing defects to those identified on the envelopes used in the attacks were recovered fiom post offices serviced by the Dulles SDO, it is reasonable to conclude that the federal eagle envelopes utilized in the attacks were purchased from a post office in Maryland or Virginia. [my emphasis]
In other words, Taylor suggests, inaccurately, that Ivins’ post office was the only one where those envelopes were available, rather than one of many post offices.
Then, when Persichini was asked about whether there was any hard evidence found in the searches of Ivins’ car and home, Persichini dodged by directing reporters back to the documents–documents which say nothing about such hard evidence.
QUESTION: A question for Mr. Persichini. You build — this is obviously, at this point, a circumstantial case. You build a strong circumstantial case. What direct evidence do you have? For instance, do you have any tape that was used on the envelope that was recovered from his home? Do you have any other — any other evidence that clearly would link him? For instance, in the affidavit, it mentions that people of this sort often keep souvenirs. Did you find anything like that at his home?
MR. PERSICHINI: Well first, I would refer back to the documents, because that’s the purpose of our press conference today, to provide you the documents and the information pertained in the documents. As it relates to admitting evidence into it, I’m going to refer back to Jeff. But again, we’re looking at the document itself and the purpose of our release and providing this information to the families. That’s first and foremost for us. So I won’t discuss the actuality of evidence, then.
Another reporter asks whether Ivins’ handwriting or hair matches up with the evidence found (note, the official transcript is inaccurate here; I’ve made corrections in brackets).
QUESTION: Jeff, did you find any handwriting samples or hair samples that would have matched Dr. Ivins to the envelopes where the hair samples were found in the mailbox?
MR. [PERSICHINI]: We did not find any handwriting analysis or hair samples in the mailbox. So there were no facts and circumstances of that part. [Persichini walks away from the podium.]
QUESTION: You didn’t take handwriting samples from Dr. Ivins? MR. TAYLOR: We examined handwriting samples but then there was no comparison made or a specific identification of the handwriting. It appears that when the analysts would look at it, that there was an attempt to disguise the handwriting. So it was unable to make a comparison.
With respect to handwriting samples, we did have indications from individuals with whom we spoke that there appeared to be some similarities in handwriting that were apparent. That said, we did not have a scientifically valid conclusion that we thought would lead us to be able to admit that in evidence.
Persichini, in particular, doesn’t seem to want to talk about the handwriting samples–and the lack of any real evidence matching Ivins’ handwriting to that used on the envelopes. Furthermore, he outright lies when he says there were no hair samples taken from the mailbox.
The collection box on Nassau Street was identified through forensic biological swabbing of every U.S. Postal Service drop box that collects mail to be processed at the Hamilton facility. Further forensic examination of the contaminated mailbox recovered a number of Caucasian human hairs fiom inside the box, which are suitable for comparison.
Granted, there’s no reason to think that the Caucasion hair in the Nassau Street box had anything to do with the anthrax case–but wouldn’t it be more honest to say that?
In short, while Taylor talked a lot about the possibility of making an entirely circumstantial case and claimed repeatedly that, had they tried this, they would have been able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Bruce Ivins was "acting alone," they tried to dodge admitting that while they have fairly strong evidence tying Ivins to the anthrax used in the case, their evidence goes to shit as soon as you try to prove that Ivins then took that anthrax and mailed it to reporters and senators.
No case. How sad!
As I wrote in the post downstairs:
And lo and behold we have the grassy knoll.
I just watched the press conference at C-SPAN — it’s up right now on the main page. Forgive me, but I don’t know how to save the link from the video — thanks to anyone who can do that.
Taylor’s face does turn red. And Persichini is quite the accomplished PR speaker, isn’t he.
*pedantry alert to Jeffrey Taylor re suspicious/suspect* You don’t mean his behaviour was suspicious; you mean it was suspect, or you viewed it as suspect. If I am suspicious of you, then I am suspicious and you are suspect. */pedantry alert*
This “case” is so full of shit that it is literally oozing brown; Ivins may or may not be guilty, but the case set out to date couldn’t prove anything. Many will ask “but would it stand up to cross-examination”? What a joke. Of course not; the case can’t even stand up for a whole 24 hours of scrutiny by some DFHs. If the government needed to convict Ivins, having him be dead was their one and only hope if this is the best they got. And anybody who thinks for one split second that this isn’t the best evidence set they could trot out, you are nuts. They out spies when they need to; they would burn whatever and whoever they needed to to shut this down once and for all. This IS what they got, and it ain’t real good.
This is all they’ve got, & we were told yesterday we can stuff it. MSM is willing to move along; watch it move along w/amazing rapidity unless there are hugeass hearings/investigation.
DOJ/FBI pushing this one out of the limelight hard enough to break a wrist.
What bmaz said.
Mrs. Dr. Peterr is a research scientist (not anthrax, not DC), and as we were listening to the TV reporters breathlessly and ominously announcing that Ivins had “worked late and unusual hours in the lab,” she burst out laughing. “Who the hell *doesn’t*? It’s the rule, not the exception.”
Yep. Weird hours — who in research doesn’t do that? By the way, the weirdest thing of all about that to me is precisely 2 h 15 min overtime 3 nights in a row. I would be hard pressed to match such a feat of exact timing of nightly departures myself.
Depends on what kind of research work you’re doing. If the protocol of your experiment says “add 5mls of item X to the solution, one hour later add 5mls of item Y, one hour after that add 5mls of item Z, and then let sit for twelve hours,” you could easily be in the lab in the evening for 2.25 hours running that experiment, so it is ready for you to analyze the next day.
Then suppose your first take on it doesn’t work. OK, stay late the second night and run it again, this time with 7.5mls instead of 5mls. Next morning, back in the lab, you see that take two washed out as well. OK, it’s a late night in the lab for a third night running. This time let’s try 10mls. Hey! What do you know: it worked. On to the next step in the research . . .
Three nights, the same 2.25 hours spent in the lab. It happens all the time, to researchers everywhere. The experiment rules the work schedule. Every time.
Ain’t that the truth. And with bacterial work, you can’t exactly whip the little guys along to be ready right after lunch, either, I would imagine. And your overtime gets distributed entirely unpredicatably through the year, I also imagine — no significance to it being in August, say, instead of February.
Is there some specific record of what he claimed to be doing these evenings?
Detrick would be REAL sticky about keeping lab books, I would guess.
In theory, the answer is both yes and no. Any decent scientist — hell, any decent grad student — would be noting what was done and when with regard to their experiments, but not creating a log of everything the researcher was doing.
That is, he/she would note something like this in their experiment log:
6PM – started experment #abc, added 5mls item X to solution.
7PM – added 5mls item Y to solution.
8PM – added 5 mls item Z to solution.
8AM – retrieved solution, ran analysis ABC, results as follows . . .
You will not see notes like “6:15PM – Went to the bathroom while waiting to add item Y.”
This, of course, is simply good science, which one can assume is the standard at a lab like this.
This isn’t to say there aren’t other mechanisms for seeing what Ivins was doing when (key card access records, cameras, computer login records, etc.), but at a minimum, one would expect to find some kind of experimental notes documenting what he was doing.
This is all “in general” — I haven’t seen or heard of any such notes in the reporting on this. Doesn’t mean they do or don’t exist, simply that no one has bothered asking yet, or (if they did ask) that no one felt the answer was worth reporting.
*sigh*
OK, if I’d just read all the way to the end of the stories . . .
From the very end of today’s WaPo story:
Still, this doesn’t quite close this aspect of the case, at least for me.
There is plenty of legitimate work that takes place in a lab that would not leave evidence, such as reading journal articles and papers, planning out future research approaches, even discarding old samples and unneeded/obsolete/spoiled supplies from the lab. (Think “spring cleaning” — every researcher does it, every so often, if for no other reason than to make room for the current research stuff.) Sometimes, for some people, this is easier to do when no one else is around and the phone doesn’t ring.
Again, I’m not saying he’s guilty or innocent — just that there are a lot of unanswered questions and what strike me as unwarranted assumptions. The evidence, as disclosed, does not seem to support the conclusion that the DOJ/FBI is drawing from it.
It’s just a WAG, but I’d say that a certain Senior Administration Official wants this case closed by January 20, 2009, and there are folks at the FBI who are trying to do just that.
More than once, from the stories I’ve been told, a researcher heading into a divorce has been known to actually live in the lab for days or weeks. They probably know the lab better than their own bedroom, and nobody bothers them there. Why go to a motel? I would not have been surprized to be told that Ivins stayed overnight in the lab for no scientific reason.
Perhaps I am simply less organized than most then. And I’m not sure where the timer is — it is just in the area with the hood and the bunny suit, or does it include the time he is in the building (i.e., the office, the bathroom, and the kitchenette with the coffee pot, that sort of thing). Also, since it is only time elapsed, not time in and out — did he punctually arrive at the same time every day and leave at exactly the same time or was just the elapsed time the same?
Not to belabor the point, but I am surprised that there wasn’t at least a minute or two differential. I just recently finished an experiment where it took me 2 hours to process 24 samples, and I managed to wrap things up pretty close to 2 hours for each batch of 24. I didn’t time it to the minute, but I would be exceedingly surprised if I was done in exactly the same amount of time down to the minute for each batch.
It’s possible that the time is recorded in 15 minute increments. Again, it would help to know if that’s the case. This information is known to the investigators. Why didn’t they bother sharing it?
He has some kind of key card, if I recall correctly, so they’d have exact times of entry, unless we’re talking about time he logged in a time entry system.
WO, it doesn’t appear to be recorded in 15 minute increments as the following week his overtime was recorded as 42, 20, and 18 minutes (skipping the hours), similarly in October the minutes were 59, 33, and 42.
In any event, I think the time question is less interesting than Neil’s about how many mailboxes were used to send the letters, or bmaz’ about the autopsy, or Glenn Greenwald’s about the source of the bentonite/Iraq connection.
I am also curious whether Ivins was a member of the clique at Ft. Detrick that had it in for Arabs. If so, can they tie him to the letter sent about Dr. Asaad? If not, then who did send that letter?
There was a concerted effort to tie the anthrax to Middle Eastern terrorism/Iraq, both on the part of the person who sent the Asaad letter and on the part of the administration in terms of Iraq. Those are the connections that interest me most about all of this.
Dr. Philip Zack
Dr. Zack wound up at Nexstar in Boulder, CO, which was subsequently purchased by Gilead. Rumsfeld, George Schultz and many others got rich on Gilead stock in the aftermath of the attacks, which instructed victims to “take penicilin.”
Check this out
and this
I have seen the Zack references before. My questions remain… was Ivins one of the anti-Arab scientists. If so, did the FBI tie him to the Asaad letter? If not, how does the FBI account for the Asaad letter?
Thanks, I hadn’t seen those numbers. I’m only half paying attention to all this. When they announced there would be no autopsy, I decided the fix was in.
I’ve been away for a bit. Just my two cents:
A ‘full’ autopsy may not be in the offing in this particular case, (a full autopsy would include taking out the individual organs, weighing and measuring them, etc), BUT a TOXICOLOGY REPORT is a part of ANY autopsy performed for an unexpected death. So Mr. Ivins technically has already undergone a “partial autopsy” in the form of a toxicology screen (blood and urine), which I assume would have been standard of care for any patient arriving in an emergency room ‘unconscious.’ (News reports state that Mr. Ivins was taken unconscious but not dead yet to Frederick Memorial Hospital).
Once again, emergency room protocol for any unconscious patient includes the drawing of multiple vials of blood, including extra tubes of blood “just in case”. A toxicology screen of his blood and urine would be standard of care.
What were the complete test results of those blood draws, in addition to Tylenol levels? Are those vials of blood still in the possession of Frederick Memorial Hospital or has the government taken possession of them? and why?
If someone thinks Mr. Ivins was exposed to LSD or any other drugs not listed in news reports, then let’s test his emergency room blood for those trace illicit drugs.
BTW Tylenol with codeine, AKA Tyelonol #3 IS a strange choice for a man to choose to commit suicide. Men more often choose guns, and Mr. Ivins apparently owned a few. Women tend to choose drug overdose.
I’ve not been able to confirm this, but one source says he OD while a patient at the hospital. Most reports I’ve heard, have him found at home where a gun would make more sense.
Are the hours logged with a punch clock, or just hand written on a log sheet? If only hand written, It would be easy just to repeat the previous days’ times as “close enough.”
Or, maybe he had a TV program that he didn’t want to miss back home?
Bob in HI
The time is recorded by a sensor reading a chip or a magnetic strip, usually on a badge. Common to most gov’t offices these days. The sensor links to a computer. The time is likely exact, hours, minutes, seconds.
Each person gets a unique identifier. Not uncommon to loan yours to others who forgot theirs….tho that is against policy and punishable. And bad security, too.
Replying to pajarito @ 172:
Yes, exactly, if the logging of Ivins’ time in the high-containment lab was automatic and was based on an ID tag (as opposed to biometrics like fingerprint or retinal scan), then at best all the log actually records is that Ivins’ ID tag or a duplicate thereof went into and came out of the lab at those times. Could have been carried by somebody else. Or else entries in the log could, perhaps, have been made remotely by hacking with no tag actually going in or out. It’s the electronic voting problem all over again, isn’t it?
These entry/exit times could (and should have) been verified by comparing the logs with the security cam recordings — was that ever done?
I had a job in a large corporation where we were supposed to log in and out each morning and evening by writing our times on a log sheet, but our boss said it was good enough to fill out all the log info for the week on friday morning.
Was the whole press conference like this??
What a bummer that they didn’t find any handwriting analysis in the mailbox — I guess sometimes it’s tough to find those facts and circumstances.
Is this intentional “baffle-’em-with-bullshit” or has this guy’s brain atrophied from too many years of cop-speak?
EPU’d on previous thread:
Ru-roh. Has anyone else noticed the problem inherent in the fact that Ivins went off the Special Immunization Program in spring, 2001 and didn’t go back on it until September 7? Yet,the after-hours data on access to the “hot suite” show lots of time in August, when he would have been most at risk from being off the program. Wouldn’t they have taken away his access when he went off the program? More details in a post I just put up; click my name.
Yeah, I was wondering about that–but I don’t know how long the evidence is good for. But they’ve got a spike starting in August, before he was back on the vaccine, at a time when we know he was working on the vaccine’s efficacy. What’s up there?
from the email you quote:
“…I don’t know what will happen to the research programs and hot suite work until we get a new lot….”
While its making alibis for Ivins which – apparently – he didn’t make for himself, if he was concerned that the supply of vaccine was exhausted he’d be rushing to complete work that had languished for months since he was now re-authorized, but subject to the finite efficacy of the last dosing.
The AVA was the material he was getting from BioPort to test. His concern there was that BioPort material was continually failing tests that would make it unfit for use; he was starting to become concerned that the group would have no approved material to work with on their main project. That is separate from the vaccines he was taking personally to make it safe for him to enter the hot suite. I just don’t see how he would have authorization to enter the hot suite if he was off the vaccines for several months. The reporting is a bit sketchy on what the vaccination program was, but it appears that they got at least three shots a year, if not more. Of course, it also is not clear from his email what he meant by going off the program. If spring 2001 was when he first skipped a shot that was due, then by August there is no way he should have been in the hot suite.
I agree with your conclusion that “…I just don’t see how he would have authorization to enter the hot suite if he was off the vaccines for several months. …”
However, another possible explanation:
“…The situation placed pressure on select staff members at USAMRIID, including Dr. Ivins, who were part of the Anthrax Potency Integrated Product Team (IPT). The purpose of the IPT was to assist in the resolution of technical issues that was plaguing Bioport’s production of approved lots of the vaccines.
In the weeks immediately prior to the attacks [my emphasis], Dr. Ivins became aware that an investigative journalist who worked for NBC News had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on USAMRIID seeking detailed information from Dr. Ivins’s laboratory notebooks as they related to the AVA vaccine and the use of adjuvants. On August 28,2001, Dr. Ivins appeared angry about the request providing the following response in an e-mail: “Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass. We’ve got better things to do than shine his shoes and pee on command. He’s gotten everything from me he will get.”…”
Responding to a FOIA is not trivial, though it does not explain why he’d be in the hot suite.
that the handwriting samples used the English Alphabet, which Dr. Ivins has also been known to use ?
so they had the tail wagging the dog;
IF this suspect were the perpetrator THEN he likely bought the envelope in this venue, SINCE we want to claim he IS the suspect we can THEREFORE claim he LIKELY bought the envelope at precisely the place he needs to have bought it to be the suspect in the first place
or something equally convoluted
The reporters who questioned Taylor and Joe Persichini were simply inane. They had no case any self-respecting AUSA or USA would take to a grand jury and that’s saying they had no credible physical evidence whatsoever.
I’ve hit several areas where they have no credible evidence and so have others.
The cluck clucking media is now reduced to going to family members of the anthrax victims and asking them their impressions of the evidence. That’s a far cry from the legal team that would have defended Dr. Ivins.
Taylor is fulfilling the role of the desultory Bush aparichick that he is. Taylor did the same thing when he was on Orin Hatch’s (no litigation experience in a federal courtroom Hatch but used to talk as if he had been Mr. federal litigator when chairman of SJC).
From the wiki wik:
Those envelops could have been bought in scores if not hundreds of places. The hair they have is no more help than the pubic hair of the FBI and it might has well/could have been for all we know.
Other than harassing Ivins’ family and showing how stupid that US Attorneys in the Bush administration and the FBI in the Bush administration has become, and reminding us of what a totally inept moron Mike Chertoff is as Director of DHS since there is no anthrax plan and they have stockpiled 60 million essentially worthless vaccines when applied to defending the American people against pulmonary anthrax at the cost and waste of billions of dollars, and showing that the Bush administration can marshall MD’s who have no concept of what it takes to defend against an acute anthrax attack, I’m not sure what all the fanfare has been about.
I guess you could mark it as the concecration of the United States as a Bannana Republic and an insult to attorneys everywhere that the DOJ and FBI have deteriorated into pure shit.
The guys at the press conference may not have been lying about this; they may just be dummies who didn’t grasp the limited, but sensible, inference made in the case document: it narrowed down the laboratories in range of the post offices that sold the envelopes. It made no claim which post office.
emptywheel:
Someone else might have addressed this, but you said Ivins’ comment about anthrax and sarin suggested contact with intelligence.
However, that’s something I vaguely recall hearing on tv, and commenter “Anonymous” at Nass’s site confirms this:
Jeebus. Nice catch.
Now I’m having flashbacks to that footage of those AQ guys playing leapfrog.
Probably a futile pursuit, but the Woodrow Wilson School has to be a nest of neocons.
And Woodrow Wilson liked faked casus belli (that’s the plural!).
Woodrow Wilson’s head, Anne-Marie Slaughter, I believe, is a right wing Democrat and possibly a closet neocon, but the School as a whole has a diversity of views. Johns Hopkins SAIS is regarded as farther right. Dartmouth is no liberal’s favorite, certainly not its news rag, Brown and Cornell are farther left, but hey, let’s throw in Harvard, Columbia, Penn and Yale and poison the ivy.
But Woodrow Wilson is at Princeton.
So is Bernard Lewis.
That’s what made me think of it.
I have a problem, though: judging by Miller’s squeamishness about getting real anthrax, I’m hesitant to believe one of them would have the bravery to handle a letter.
I’m missing your point; Princeton is an Ivy, hence, my snark, which was about casting a little too wide a net regarding who might have conspired in promoting these anthrax attacks.
Is it that you prefer the Nittany Lions to Princeton Tigers? Or is yours a broader attack on the military-intelligence-academic/think tank complex (”industrial” is now almost old hat) that enables this administration and its neocons? The latter, more general criticism, I think, has more weight than that the dons at Ivy campuses or international relations schools are all conspiring to commit bio-warfare.
FWIW: I was just recently prescribed the antibiotic Avelox (same family of drugs as Cipro), and after just a few doses I had such terrifying side effects that I stopped taking it.
When I read through Ivins’ emails, it really struck a chord: psychotic out of body experiences, mysterious gaps in awareness of time and place, incapacitating dizziness and confusion, tingling and strange pains in the arms, paranoia, depression, etc. On researching the drug, I discovered that it is contraindicated for people who are taking antidepressants. Evidently he was on Celexa, and probably other drugs for depression, while he was being dosed with anthrax vaccine. Could this be what knocked him for a loop in the spring?
That would be ugly for the government, wouldn’t it. Drugs taken by staff to prevent them from being sickened at work generated adverse side affects that made them susceptible to other problems. That would likely be systemic, not limited to Ivins or his co-workers. Congress, it seems, should be looking at more than whether the FBI this time identified the right perp.
Replying to nightlight @ 167:
Yes, last night I asked the same thing, could there have been interaction between the anthrax vaccine and the psychoactives that Ivins was later prescribed by MH professionals?
LSD leaves a metallic taste in the user’s mouth:
Among the federal documents are excerpts from Ivins’ e-mails to a friend detailing his battles with mental illness. They include parts of an August 2000 email about “one of [his] worst nights in months” and his “paranoid, delusional thoughts.”
“I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind,” the e-mail read, according to a federal affidavit. “It’s hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I’m being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front at work and at home, so I don’t spread the pestilence.”
“Occasionally I get this tingling that goes down both arms,” read an e-mail sent by Ivins on April 3, 2000. “At the same time I get dizzy and get this unidentifiable ‘metallic’ taste in my mouth. (I’m not trying to be funny, [redacted] … It actually scares me a bit.) Other times it’s like I’m not only sitting at my desk doing work, I’m also a few feet away watching me do it. There’s nothing like living in both the first person singular AND the third person singular!”
“Remember when I told you about the ‘metallic’ taste in my mouth that I got periodically? It’s when I get these ‘paranoid’ episodes … Ominously, a lot of the feelings of isolation — and desolation — that I went through before college are returning. I don’t want to relive those years again.”
SEE FULL POSTING AND LINKS AT #36 on prior TIMELINE thread
Paranoid episodes, each concurrent with Metallic Taste = LSD
Or the drugs he was prescribed.
Ivins was taking celexa
There seems to be a whole host of side effects with celexa which can include metallic taste and tingling limbs and paranoia- among many others. Some anti-depressants seem to be related to higher rates of suicide.
I must contain my anger. The reliance of our police forces and courts on medical professionals who in turn rely on psychotropics of very questionable effectiveness is one day, I am convinced, going to be considered a scandal of our age.
Take two tasers, three ounces of Scotch, no ice, and call me in the morning.
amen!
Others have said it, but I agree. The perspective on this case from Dr. Nass is compelling.
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/
1. More than 100 people had access to the anthrax strain involved.
2. The envelopes could have been purchased by anyone anywhere in Virginia or Maryland.
3. This is one of the most complex, expensive and longest-lasting cases in FBI history. It still can’t place Ivins or an identified accomplice at the scene in Princeton where the letters were posted.
4. Ivins worked extra hours at his lab shortly after 9/11. How many federal employees anywhere in government could truthfully say the opposite?
5. The FBI attempted to pay Ivins’ son $2.5 million if he said his dad did it. Apart from the hoped for sound bite, which Ivins’ son never gave them, where’s the first-hand knowledge that that might be true?
6. As EW’s thread title suggests, the FBI has settled on, “the crazy guy did it alone” meme. The ability to evade for seven years the most resource rich man hunt in decades, if not ever, suggests not craziness, but high-order ability to plan, execute and exercise self-restraint.
7. The sorority angle is just that, an angle; it’s not been shown relevant to the case, except to impugn Ivins’ credibility. Ditto the strange episode with Ms. Duley. Even if true, which is questionable, its collateral in that it doesn’t show Ivins made the materials or sent the letters. And the FBI insists “there was no conspiracy”. Suggesting the latter, of course, would imply more widespread problems and incite legitimate fears. It would also invite inquiry where none is wanted. Which brings us to the last item.
8. Cui bono? Other than “the crazy guy obsessed” with a sorority (always a good meme for testosterone-toxic Washington), who else had a financial or political reason to have sent the letters? Who “won” after these attacks, which saw the passage of the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, the birth of a $50 billion “bioterrorism” industry, and the revival of a moribund anthrax vaccine program, one of whose chief beneficiaries was Bioport. Its CEO bought the company in 1998 for $3 million down, with a US Army guarantee in hand. The day after Ivins was admitted to hospital and the day after he died, the CEO sold shares worth $200 million. How and on what basis were these other candidates removed from consideration?
The last two item draw attention to the elephant in the living room. Missing from the investigation so far is a discussion about the government-run and government-backed bio-weapons and bio-terrorism industries, their origins, sources of wealth and political backing and their obvious management flaws, which led to the misuse of woefully dangerous materials.
As EW hails from the land of automotive, that brings to mind a basic quality process analogy about this investigation. Has the FBI been attempting to fix the paint bubbles on a single hood, or ought it to be looking at the paint line that leaves bubbles on lots of hoods? Congress, at least, and the next administration, should focus on the latter.
Cui Bono?
Motive?
The list is longer than my arm, and Ivins is nowhere to be found on it.
Spell SAIC backwards…
CIA’s
SAIC was commissioned by G. W. Bush in 2002 to construct a replica of a mobile WMD laboratory of the sort used by Saddam. This mock up, supposedly destined to be used to train teams searching for WMDs in Iraq, was designed by Stephen Hatfill, the WMD expert now being harangued into isolation and thus silence by Bush’s FBI. Last spring, the Bush administration handed SAIC some of the biggest defense contract plums to be had -a billion-dollar chunk of the NexGen business and an unbelievably porky 10-year contract worth over $600 million.”
http://www.mail-archive.com/ct…..07176.html
http://www.warprofiteers.com/article.php?id=7892
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…..orporation
http://www.whatreallyhappened&…..spect.html
This post says immunizations would have been bi-yearly at most, so if he was taken off in the spring, the vaccine woudl still have residual efficacy.
Thanks. I’ve also left a question at Dr. Nass’s blog asking if she can help us to understand when he would have been denied access because of going off the program.
On a previous post, a commenter quoted what appears to be information about the lab SOP vis a vis immunization, that says workers had to be vaccinated or use appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE). So he had an alternative.
On previous threads, commenters were referring to Ivins’ lab as B-3, as if that were a room number. However, it is undoubtedly a reference to Biosafety Level 3, a level of biocontainment recommended for some types of work with some infectious agents. This classification comes from a set of guidelines issued by the CDC, “Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories,” usually referred to as BMBL. Most labs using these kinds of agents follow BMBL. The edition of BMBL in effect at the time of the anthrax attacks was the 4th edition, and you can can see what it recommended for work with anthrax here.
The FBI and USA had this evidence in front of a grand jury, right? Did the Grand Jury decide to indict or not indict, or were they still deliberating? I don’t remember reading on the front page of every newspaper:
When Ivans died, someone decided they had an opportunity. Was that a bottom up or top down internal decision? Did Mueller want to dump the case, declare guilt by innuendo and be done with it or did Mukasey, or was it the White House political officer now in charge of USA Attorney prosecuting decisions?
Taylor was making a case yesterday in front of a national television audience that he was embarrassed to make. He was embarrassed professionally. As to who drove the decision, we just done know.
They did not indict and in different comments to the media the FBI team said directly that they didn’t have enough evidence to indict. They did what DOJ is best doing.
DOJ you will find can be very very aggressive until they have significant oposition. They are much more careful when they think about taking on a large corporation.
They have their pressure points and can be called on their bullshit but it is not made easy.
They are in their element in amassing the government’s considerable but incompetent resources to pick on the little guy. Their preferred opponent, like most bullys is a dead oponent that they can pick on after his death.
A dead opponent offers the type of resistance or challenge they prefer and that is commensurate with their abilities.
DOJ lawyers are best equipped to litigate against dead people and to deal with the motions of dead people, and the challenges to their interpretations of the Federal Rules of Evidence by dead people.
It is as if in law school, Jeff Taylor was taught that he was being trained to litiate against dead lawyers and dead defendants because that best represents his ability.
Jeff Taylor by the way has next to no trial experience in a federal courtroom like his mentor Orin Hatch. He has no idea of what a real case needs to fly in a real courtroom.
Although any idiot can inhdict any ham sandwhich in a federal grand jury, and it is a completely selective dog and pony show presented by and large to people who have little legal training unless a lawyer happens to be on the grand jury, I don’t know with the lack of evidence that was presented yesterday (unless they have considerably more) if they could have secured an indictment.
It’s exactly as Bmaz has said. Dr. Ivins might be guilty or might be one of the people who is guilty, but you’d never be able to extrapolate it from what was presented. Hundreds of competent trial lawyers could have a field day with this case. I believe they have more information, but have no idea what the quality of it is.
There is really no bar that they have to meet. The media is largely worthless and they will move on. Except for people like Gerald not 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner who has been rendered cowed and compliant by 911, (who probably thinks the evidence is fine they haven’t offered a peep as to critical analysis. I’m sure Dan Abrams had some problems with this, probably similar to Bmaz’ assessment, but I didn’t see his show last night and he probably will continue to have problems with it.
The more I hear about this case, the more I think it is highly plausible that Ivins was a cutout for/framed by a foreign group of terrorists who played the FBI like a grand piano. Or he was a cutout/framed by some one or some other group.
To be specific, the grand jury was and is at this moment still in session on this case.
Good commentary, Nell.
“As to who drove the decision, we just done know.”
I think that’s the key question, isn’t it?
Bob in HI
That is good commentary, Bob, but it’s Ne-i-l’s, not mine. I think I should take up your example and sign my posts, because the sans-serif font and small type make it more than usually hard to distinguish our names.
NeLL
See, it’s not just me…
i agree, nell, though i suspect that they started focusing on ivins as soon as they realized the hatfill suit was going to flush them down the crapper. the likely turned up the heat on ivins, but he was so fragile he cracked in a way they didn’t anticipate.
and yeah, the decision had to be made to keep the public placated with a story that made them look good, distracted everyone from the hatfill millions, and put the whole thing to rest.
from the top, doncha know.
Wonders never cease. Some parts of the gov’t can’t keep track of nuclear weapons, but others can trace envelopes with transient printing defects to a post office in Maryland. Wow. I’m impressed.
They didn’t trace it to “a post office”. They traced it to hundreds of post offices within range of a single laboratory.
Can’t a guy have a little snark?
BTW, my point stands: there is an awful lot of supervision implied in being able to track a batch of envelopes, and a lot of knowledge of the distribution of errors throughout the presumably large production runs. What was this “transient error”, exactly? Was it a common ‘transient’ or a unique one? I mean, imagine that every so often the eagle gets printed 1/64th of an inch to the left because a new batch of blanks is put into the press. That kind of thing would happen periodically. (I get misaligned pages every time the paper in my printer gets low.) Did they put the blanks in backwards, so that the eagle came out upside down? OK; philately would have you believe that such errors are very rare indeed.
Who tracks such things? Who cares that much about envelopes from minute to minute?
To add to your suspicions: if my memory doesn’t deceive me, the tv media made public the assertions of these idiosyncracies in the envelopes in autumn 2001.
Your point about the envelopes is close to something that occurred to me at breakfast. It was in relation to working late but not plotting a crime. This led me to consider the activity of whomever was examining the envelopes. Someone had to sit and stare at them, looking for anything that popped out; then a detail was noticed, not unlike the abberrations you mentioned. Then go out, get a collection of envelopes and compare for the defect. Then what? How do you then get to someone who says,”Yeah we got a run of those, of this magnitude, but decided they were ok to use, and we sent’em out. They went to these post offices.” The more I mused on this the less likely it seemed that such a scenario actually took place. So what other scenario accounts for how the “mailing source” was determined?
The need to manufacture one for a designated fall guy?
Right. Odd, isn’t it?
Well, its good police work, if it happened. What I have trouble imagining is the HOW of it happening, and not filling in the blank.
The worry, isn’t it?, is that it appears to be incomplete police work, because it depends on an argument of exclusivity (”envelopes with those flaws went ONLY to MD & VA”) but so far we’ve seen only an assumption of exclusivity.
Well, part of the worry. The exclusivity could be true, but as in grade school, show your work. We are not being shown how the problem was solved. What we’ve been presented is a “briefing”, not for the public, but “for the victims’ families”. The presenters were not there to show how the case was resolved, certainly not to be crossexamined by-THE PRESS, for gosh sakes, but merely to give an “update” on what was learned before the case was closed, now that the latest person of interst is no longer prosecutable.
Good observation. I suspect that’s one of the administration’s lessons learned from the Twin Towers. Those most closely affected by an event hold the key to controlling wider citizen response. Placate them, and the wider response may dissipate before it becomes a political problem.
Sadly, this administration sees virtually everything as a function of “opinion management”. Acknowledging, evaluating and ameliorating real world problems is irrelevant in the new para-dig-me.
“Someone had to sit and stare at them, looking for anything that popped out; then a detail was noticed, not unlike the abberrations you mentioned. Then go out, get a collection of envelopes and compare for the defect.”
I’ll bet a cookie that this was done electronically. That is, they had an electronic version of the envelop “gold standard”, and then scanned the anthrax envelops. A bit-by-bit comparison of the images can then be run electronically (computers are good at boring, mind-numbing tasks), and voila!
Bob in HI
Granted. I didn’t mean it literally about staring, etc, but was more concerned about what happened next. If some form of electronic sorting of data pointed to the cited POs, such much the better for detective work. But why not say that?
Re: the envelopes….
I saw a program recently detailing the secret tracking mechanisms in everyday things we use like copiers and digital cameras. It is possible there is some micro-dot identification on these somewhere that says what post office they are from.
just saying… I have no evidence of this of course.
A good point that I think bears repeating. The DOJ changed its story and admitted that the envelopes could have been purchased at any PO in two states, MD and VA. Half of the East Coast and mid-America, from NYC to Detroit to Cincinnati, Louisville, Charlotte and Columbia, lies within a day’s drive of one of those PO’s. So to say that proximity to one of them helps make the case against Ivins seems pretty weak.
Circumstantial evidence is still evidence, even if it’s of limited value. Their deduction is sound: there’s a good chance the mailer wouldn’t have thought about envelopes and that therefore he comes from the vicinity of possible post offices. The problem is not with this limited evidence, it’s that it was misrepresented at the press conference.
I have to say, if all we know is that the envelopes showed a ‘transient’ error, we cannot judge whether their deductions are sound or not. Envelopes with these errors could be spread like measles through the country and the FBI or someone just happened to find a batch that went to MD & VA. And we are supposed to believe that there is a mechanism in place to track flawed envelopes when so much else in the gov’t is held together with chewing gum?
Maybe the envelopes were flawed because they were forged envelopes. Were they creamy?
*grin* (I’m getting punchy from contemplating this junk. Too tired to joke.)
Granted, even Moriarty made mistakes; and he should never have visited the Reichenbach Falls. But someone smart enough to make and disseminate the anthrax and not get caught for over seven years would be aware of several things. Most obviously, that authorities would go over any evidence they had with all the forensic tools at their disposal: the anthrax spores, envelopes, handwriting, dna of the spores, the sender, etc. The sender, for example, obviously wore gloves and used self-adhesive envelopes and stamps so as not to leave trace evidence in the adhesive.
So it seems probable the mailer(s) considered what the envelopes might reveal to investigators, be it their constituent materials to the manner, time and place of their manufacture and where they were sold, and chose them accordingly. It would be a lucky break if they didn’t.
But the culprit(s) were so inept in other ways, such as the actual content of the letters. Even if the culprit was someone as fiendish as Judy Miller, she, too, has been known to bumble.
By “inept”, do you mean remained free and unindicted and working at a top security clearance-only facility for seven years despite the most resource-intensive and expensive investigation the FBI has ever launched (barring the search for whichever White House aide(s) outed Valerie Plame)?
This doesn’t seem probable to me at all. He knew how to handle anthrax; that was his job. He didn’t necessarily think about envelopes with as much foresight and precision.
You left out the “seven years free and unindicted” bit. So we’ll have to agree to disagree over how broadly planful the anthrax mailer(s) were and why they remain free, be it a combination of guile or luck, investigatory stupidity or negligence.
Yes. I did laugh at your comment.
Pressure wasn’t just coming from the upper levels of DOJ and the administration. Leahy turned the screws on Mukasey. While Mukasey can say something is an ongoing investigation as a dodge, in this case it may have been true. I’m not sure if the pressure from Leahy on a specific case was entirely appropriate. We might not have thought so if it had been a Repuplican bearing down on the A.G.
As someone who made a similar point a few days ago, I feel compelled to offer two points on Leahy’s behalf, that legitimize such public pressure: he was an intended target, and he (and everyone in Congress) was being stonewalled by the FBI and DoJ about the status of the investigation.
The other aspect of the “pressure” is that it was only semi-public: it would have remained completely invisible to anyone not in the hearing room or watching on C-SPAN if not for Emptywheel. The words exchanged between Leahy and Mukasey went unreported in the media accounts of the hearing, which at most mentioned that Leahy inquired about the status of the investigation.
Oh, now it’s my fault, eh?
I was smiling when I said that…
Seriously, though, that post is one reason that EW and FDL readers are more attuned to this story than some.
Thank you, Marcy:
Yes, ‘this’ is ALL your ‘fault’.
Please continue being ‘blameworthy’, Dr. Accountability.
Thanks, as well, to the rest of you who comment so knowledgeablly here every day.
‘This’ is all a most remarkable ‘education’. I am sincerely in debt to all of your collective wisdoms and insights.
Leahy is a victim of the crime within the contemplation of criminal investigation protocols; he has a right to ask questions and demand answers irrespective of his political position and/or status as a Senator.
It seems that there is a similiarity of the Ivins episode with the ‘media dance’ that follows bush’s giving an order to impliment a decision. I’m thinking of the burst following the Plame outing, the burst on the need to remove SH, the burst to rewrite social security, the burst on the good of ‘ownership society’, the present burst on the need to drill off-shore. This burst on the anthrax case and its odd ineptitude seems another example of bush having ‘ordered’ the conclusion of the case.
I listened to a conversation between Ian Masters and Scott McClellan yesterday where Scottie talks about how bush is now going about cleaning up his (and cheney’s as they relate to him) messes before the end of his term so there will less chance for his facing accountability. It occurs to me that the anthrax case is one of those messes. Maybe that’s what we’re witnessing.
http://www.ianmasters.org/archives.html
Which letter(s) were mailed from Princeton, and when in relation to the other letters?
All the letters were mailed from Princeton. The media letters were postmarked Sept. 18, and the Senate letters October 9.
Despite this remarkable sentence near the end of the August 5 lyophilizer story in the Washington Post:
No one, to my knowledge, has ever reported that any of the anthrax letters were mailed from anywhere but the box on Nassau Street in Princeton. Given that the sentence was deep in the story, and not supported in the story by any evidence, I’m assuming that it’s an error.
I phoned and emailed one of the three bylined reporters. Because this ‘fact’ has already entered the Wikipedia entry on the anthrax letters, it’s especially urgent that it be promptly and prominently corrected or supported by the Post.
If anyone can point to previous reporting of a different mailing location, please note it here. Some stories have, through less careful phrasing, given the impression that some or all the letters were mailed from Trenton; the basis for the error is that the return address on the letters had a Trenton-area zip code.
That, to me, is amazing. All from Princeton, really?
That’s how it’s always been reported, unless someone can point me to media or FBI statements otherwise.
This site, linked to by emptywheel, identifies only one mailbox, for the second mailing, which doesn’t eliminate the possibility of other mailboxes for the first.
From the linked page:
No wonder Leahy had serious questions for Mukasey, and wasn’t being self-preoccupied in putting them.
That’s a bit of overkill (of a scarce spore supply) for one senator. Unless the purpose is not the death, but the media coverage.
Or perhaps the goal was to wipe out the whole office staff and maybe more offices in the Senate Office Building. THAT would have attracted several magnitudes more fear, and more inclination to give more power to the President.
Bob in HI
And a great opportunity to install the latest in undetectable communications intercepts (wiretappy things) while the building was evacuated. Not only for in-house communications but also online. And Lord knows Congress has been disgracefully lax in Internet security so as it is. All the better to blackmail and extort members and staff.
(And yes I do have an elaborate tinfoil hat, decorated most tastefully with various shades of nail polishes.)
Judy’s letter was postmarked FL.
All the letters actually containing anthrax, that is.
Among the many hoax letters, which were going all over once the scare started, several were mailed from St. Petersburg, FL — some to the targets of the actual anthrax letters, like Brokaw at NBC, and one to Judith Miller.
But hoax letters can’t really be relevant to the question of whether a single person was responsible for the real anthrax letters — which is the context in which the Wash. Post article was mentioning letters mailed from Florida as well as Princeton.
One would think that a review of surveillance videos from all post offices that could have sold the envelopes would have been undertaken; I hope there was such a review. The purchaser would have been likely to have been wearing gloves or to have received the envelopes bagged or packaged—so as to avoid leaving fingerprints on them—or to have purchased enough bundled envelopes (perhaps bound with a rubber band) to make feasible the handling of the bundle while leaving fingerprints on only the first and last envelopes, which could have been shredded.
Hmmm….now let me think…immediately makes me wonder…who has a record of forging things like documents or handwriting….hmmmm….who might have given Ivins a mission or order to create a certain type of anthrax without an explanation of how it would be used (possibility)….oh yeah, and who would not want that handwriting to be analyzed….oh yeah, and who might turn on Ivins, making him really, really pissed off and distressed…. and who would be glad that he’s not a living witness, so that the case can be closed.
Grassy knoll indeed.
Neil, I like Leahy a lot, but was he being stonewalled? Or was the case just not there? Leahy seemed to me like he was looking for a specific result.
AP idiots strike again:
These two “reporters” should be fired and never allowed to play act in that job any more.
A more likely scenario is that they will be given Russert- like status or pulled into Woodward’s circle of influence, in this and future neocon cabals.
somewhat OT- “Horton will discuss the Hamdan conviction at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba at 12:15PM Eastern.”
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/20…..war-radio/
also Suskind on bush lies on Fresh Air in a few minutes.
http://www.npr.org/templates/r…..p?prgId=13
Drat. I’m sorry to have missed Horton. Must look to see what he’s written on Hamdan.
I’m sure the ‘very interesting’ conversation will be posted on Antiwar.com tomorrow.
What is missing for me is the trail of contamination. If these envelopes leaked enough to kill mail handlers there would probably be some contamination back to the lab, like in Ivan’s car. Possibly on his clothing, and back to his house. He could have contaminated the entire lab, or his home.
These issues are not unavoidable, but they needed to be addressed within days of 9/11.
I’m somewhat skeptical that all these elements could be pulled together within days.
If these envelopes leaked enough to kill mail handlers
Agreed that there should have been a sign of contamination somewhere regardless, as there was at the box where they were mailed, but at the mail processing facility the letters are subjected to intense shaking and pounding.
If the mailer understood what happens at postal centers, s/he would have known s/he was almost certainly going to kill some postal workers.
Miller got her fake anthrax Oct. 12, between the brown and clumpy batch and the lethal second round.
This surmise has a lot of flaws, but could this mailing have been a justification for her to take Cipro (I’m presuming she did)?
OT to anthrax but on topic to the cowed and compliant federal judiciary from Howard Bashman’s appellate site. One more reason to educate the bitter Hilliranistas who are so mad about the 200 millionairess that they want to vote for McFederalist Society judiciary :
Senate Stall to Let Next President Tip Court Balance (Update1)
Current Fed Judiciary Vacancies left to Next President
Future Fed Judiciary Vacancies
White House memo exposes Rove knew of problems with anthrax vaccine
new on Raw Story
As with everything else, including much of medicine, the manufacture of anthrax vaccines has been politicized. There are a number of companies, labs, and universities in vaccine trial programs that are ongoing. I wanted the vaccine after the letters, and at first a search told me I would have to travel 600 miles every time I got a successive shot. About that time, a program opened up for me to get it locally, and I took it. Only a literal handful of doctors did, because they were “skeeereeed” and didn’t use their usual ability to read and metabolize medical information for the benefit of their patients when the patient was them.
The government drove the major manufacture of military vaccines out of business, and now the Bioshed program by your Bannana Republic of the “Jeff Taylor Karl Rove dominated homeland government” is a clusterfuck of sorts.
But if you haven’t gotten the point–you are to be barely seen and absolutely not heard from like a well managed proletariat . Maybe all you dirty dissident rabble rousing hippies need to reread “1984.” BTW your kids won’t be reading it, and for those of you who have kids who haven’t graduated middle school or high school yet I have an interesting experiment. Right click your kid’s desktop>notebook and ask them tomake a list of the books they’ve read since the sixth grade. It’s not going to take but a minute. There aren’t going to be many, and 1984 won’t be on it. If there are more than 20 of the classics that you read, I’d be damn amazed. I ask that question of the kids in the high school down the street from me all the time. Most of them who are college bound read next to no books. I know the Digital Imaging teachers and the English teachers and they confirm what I’ve just said. It’s a whole different paradigm from the reading lists you might have gotten.
But back to vaccines. Most companies have dropped out of their manufacture although some studies still take place with small groups of volunteers. Most physicians given the opportunity to receive anthrax vaccines and boosters have avoided them like a big pile of dog shit on the side walk mostly due to ignorance of those physicians.
Emergent based in Rockville, Md. manufactures Anthrax vaccine in Lansing, Michigan after successfully defeating Vaxgen on the government contract.
You can read about the vaccine clusterfuck here:
Anthrax Vaccine Loses to Lobbying
Don Francis, the former president of Vaxgen, isn’t chopped liver. He’s a physician who is a world class epidemiologist. He ran the CDC for years. He helped discover HIV and did major work on Ebola. His M.D. is from Northwestern and his Ph.D. and Infectious Disease fellowship were done at Harvard. He was a major force in establishing that HIV was caused by an infectious agent and the groundwork for establishing the understanding and research for HIV back in 1981 when he headed the HIV lab in 1981. He later moved to Genetech to work on developing a vaccine for HIV.
Wiki Don Francis, M.D.
Where was it, and who did they give it to?
I have to pull the records to remember the exact dates and I will if I can quickly before I leave. Not in my “quick retrieve file cabinets” so that means it’s buried in a closet. I didn’t bother to make them digital.
The closest I could find was at Chapel Hill North Carolina. Whatever studies might be going on now shouldn’t be hard to find on the web.
The study was carried out by a private research group using internists in downtown Atlanta who are based at an Emory private hospital to monitor the lab tests, EKGs, PA and Lateral etc.
If I remember correctly because this was I believe in 2003-4 we were given a few shots over a period of about a year and a half. I have more details on what we were given but those are buried deeply in a big big closet.
I didn’t have any side effects that I have ever noticed, and was provided with a ton of literature on them since we were given detailed questionaires on side effects every few months, but I got an intense itching red/”errythymic” skin reaction (it itched like hell–like a severe case of poison ivy) at the site of injection because of the particular bandage they used. It took me a couple days to realize the reaction was from the particular patch they used, and not the vaccine and I stopped putting the patch on after the shot and never saw it again.
I was under the impression you looked into in the immediate wake of events, in autumn 2001. That’s why I asked.
I saw offers for a vaccine. I didn’t know much about the vaccines then, but I soon learned of their limitations. I got into the study anyway.
I never believed Hatfill did it. I don’t think they have any significant physical evidence yet that Ivins was the mailer or one of them.
I think they must have a lot of contempt for the intelligence of Americans to have put that out crap out there as if they had much of a case. I haven’t talked to a lawyer yet who doesn’t ridicule Jeff Taylor’s selective presentation regardless of their political persuasion.
I can’t read everything, but nothing I’ve read despite that Ivins may have been eccentric, or that he may have been delusional shows me evidence he is the anthrax killer. I think Americans and those families are owed some firm evidence before they can claim they have solved this case.
I do wonder though, if FBI and DOD believed for so long that Ivins was delusional and had severe ETOH problems, why they kept him working in an anthrax lab at Fort Detrick. I mean, had he been researching with materials that weren’t so dangerous it might have been another story.
I still havent gotten to see White’s (@6) link, so this may be redundant. PetePierce @ 86 quote the ex-president of Vaxgen as saying, “Its a horrible story… they took a high-tech company, capable of making vaccines, and killed it. And additionally said, “With trial and error we could have fixed it.”
What I think I’ve seen in the e-mail traffic reported from Ivins is a note of sarcasm or contempt (sorry, cann’t produce a quote)about the state of affairs regarding the nations ability to respond to bio-warfare. (This to me provides a better explanatory context for his remarks about AQ having Sarin and anthrax.) He seems bitter about having to spend time and cultured resources on cleaning up the failures of the Bioport vaccine. Call it professional jealousy or sour grapes about losing out on royalty money, but I think I see more of an intellectual concern for getting the mission done right. This includes his disdain for having to divert from his work to respond to the NBC FOIA demand. If this line of reasoning holds up under scrutiny, it could go a long way in explaining those extra hours in the lab. Perhaps it may suggest an alternate view of why he was reluctant to give the FBI samples of his diminshing supply of spores.
Rove says in the memo that Ross Perot offered him “a packet of materials from the Lyndon LaRouche crowd about Richard Armitage, but I turned him down.”
Huh.
He also said in an email to Hadley that when Cooper asked about Plame, he didn’t take the bait. He took the packet.
what’s that line about, the “larouche group materials on richard armitage”?
IMO the emphasis on that is all wrong. We KNOW that OVP/DOD were thick into this form day one (and, as I’ve pointed out elsehwere, Wolfowitz affiliates were the first to publicize an Iraq-anthrax allegation).
The emphasis shouldn’t be Rove, it should be Wolfie.
Bmaz, it didn’t seem to me that Leahy was asking just in the capacity of victim or he might have chosen a different setting. To me, his tone suggested he had information and he was disappointed DOJ wasn’t acting on it. And it does seem possible that the pressure from him upped the pressure on Ivins. Is there any chance Leahy’s office heard from Duley?
A compulsive perfectionist acting alone, it seems to me, would have difficulty forcing himself to send out anthrax not of the highest available quality lethality-wise.
Also, Leahy went to the top which suggests he was looking for pressure to be exerted from the top down.
Why are none of the many reporters now assigned to this story asking bmaz’s questions about the body and the autopsy? If they’re asking and getting refusals to answer, they should be reporting that.
It’s such a basic question in a murky suicide that I can’t believe it’s not being addressed more directly. I wonder if the lawyer Kemp knows the answers.
So far the sole hint of a reference to an autopsy is in a Frederick Post story where some spokesperson refused to discuss “results from the autopsy”, implying that there was one.
Shouldn’t someone be working in a reference to “The Purloined Letter” at some point?
I thought we’d moved on to “The Cask of Amontillado.” I believe that “Into the Maelstrom” comes next.
This story reminds me of the Borges story about a man who sets out to make a map of the world in 1:1 scale, while any given post of emptywheel’s makes me think of “Funes the Memorious”.
Two very palpable hits, brandanx.
Oy, her memory, that amazing memory. D’you know that I watched over again the second panel from the Senate Armed Services hearings yesterday, and I was just stunned to see that in memory I had transposed the seating places of the witnesses? As they were taking their places, I was saying to the screen, “No, no, you’re in the wrong places. Mr Mora, you’re over there, and Col Beaver, you’re here.” But they weren’t, o’ course. Such a demonstration of what happens to the memories of us ordinary mortals.
And then there’s EW.
I’m waiting for “The Fall of the House of [B]Usher.”
lol.
Because Bmaz is bright and has excellent training as a lawyer and they are stupid and compliant.
Note the cast of characters in this story…even includes Whittington and Joe Albaugh:
http://www.bushwatch.com/gravedigger.htm
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/….._0807.html
White House memo exposes Rove knew of problems with anthrax vaccine
and this:
After the attacks of September 11th, President George Walker Bush placed BioPort’s North Lansing laboratory under protection, invoking the national interest. Interestingly enough, the Italian magazine Il Manifesto reported, in its October issue, that this happened at the same time that the FBI also placed the El Hibri’s at the top of their list of suspects for sending anthraxspores through the mail system. “
Did our President stall and impede another investigation?
There is one possible reason why our President does not want anyone looking into the matter since BioPort and George Herbert Walker Bush are connected via Carlyle Group.
Nothing impresses me more than to see present and former military persons stand up for those that are currently in uniform and being treated wrong or shabbily by the current occupant of the White House after they have served this nation and remain vigilant because they know that there are some real “sleaze persons” in the DoD, our government and certain defense contractors:
WILFULLY RISKING THE HEALTH OF THE US MILITARY[3]
by: MAJ GLENN MacDONALD, USAR (Ret)
Al Capone would have been proud.
?
“Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. was part of the crew who sold Saddam Hussein the deadly means to wage war with anthrax germs. The United States wanted the “Butcher of Baghdad” to use anthrax on Iran.
Now the admiral, who shocked political observers by endorsing Bill “I loathe the military” Clinton in 1992 and was rewarded the following year with the post of ambassador to Great Britain, gets a “sweetheart deal” from the Pentagon to produce a questionable “vaccine” that is supposed to “protect” the nation’s military from the deadly organisms.
Not only does Crowe and his mysterious pal, Faud El-Hibri, get an exclusive multi-million dollar contract to produce anthrax vaccine, but the Government agrees to pay triple the original cost in the contract, from $3.50 a dose, to over ten dollars! This, after the company Crowe and El-Hibri partly own – Bioport of Lansing, Mich. – was temporarily shut down by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after it failed an inspection in November.”
FOLLOW THE MONEY
http://www.rense.com/general82/rats.htm
Read my link at #78. Bioport is Emergent solutions before it changed its name. Joe Albaugh…
This is timeline- and Leahy-related:
The Hill’s coverage of the Mukasey appearance before the Sen. Judiciary committee, and the exchange with Leahy over the anthrax investigation, is dated July 9th. Emphasis added by me below:
Considerably less vivid/creepy than their actual exchange.
But the main point is that it appears that the hearing took place on Wednesday, July 9th. EW, your post of July 10th was based on C-SPAN coverage, yes?
In the context of events in Frederick, it could be significant to rectify the timeline if the Hill account is correct.
My post was based on liveblog–but I may have put the post up late enough to date it the following day.
You want to see what a total media blackout looks like?
Go to Google News and enter this:
“dr. philip zack”
It returns only 1 result.
Then go to Google blogs – and you’ll get 47 results
The ONLY media outlet even mentioning Dr. Zack is AntiWar.com
You think it’s just a coincidence that there is a total media blackout re: Dr. Philip Zack?
Ed Lake, the creator of the comprehensive site emptywheel links to, has a long rebuttal of this.
Thanks for the Ed Lake link, that clears up a couple of mysteries for me : )
Was there a letter accusing Assad (sp?) after the mailings? Or just the one in the nineties?
From EW’s link to Laura Rozen’s article:
It doesn’t state when the letter to the FBI was received, but it appears someone was trying to frame Dr. Assaad for an attack that hadn’t yet happened as far as the public knew.
My #122 is a response to this.
you know, this is precisely the kind of thing that pulls the culprit into stark relief. in other words, it would scream at me that whoever wrote that letter of accusation was also behind the anthrax letters.
yet, we hear no mention of this. begging the question, just where did that letter come from, and please explain the very bizarre timing.
Classic ADL propaganda…to the letter.
Google: Hasbara
or
Google: CAMERA + Myrav Wurmser
It’s a plant.
This LA Times writer questions the timing and content of Mr. Lake’s latest re: Philip Zack
Yes, a “total media blackout” on Philip Zack:
Hartford Courant series in December 2001 and January 2002 on security irregularities at Ft. Detrick prominently featuring Zack and Dr. Marian Rippy
Laura Rozen’s expose in Salon January 2002 on the Camel Club and the letter implicating Dr. Assaad, again focusing heavily on Zack and Rippy
Don Foster’s Vanity Fair story in December 2003 which recaps both the Courant and Rozen coverage
Granted, there’s been very little since, nothing in major dailies, and no hint that the FBI did anything to follow up. Which doesn’t mean that they didn’t; for all we know they did so, and turned up evidence that absolutely rules out Zack and others then at Ft. Detrick.
In the Congressional/commission hearings we imagine in the days of a better nation, since there will apparently never be a real court case, the FBI needs to show what they did to follow up on and rule out the leads involving Dr. Zack, other members of the Camel Club, and others who worked at Ft. Detrick at the time.
Google returns about 2,230,000 results for philip zack without quotation marks..
you really should learn how to operate the tools before you hurt yourself….
Speaking of tools…
I was referring to Google “NEWS” not just Google. Yup, there’s an entire section called “Google News!”
It’s in quotes in order to be precise.
Your two-million-plus hits are NOT all about this person, in fact less than 1% of them are.
There may be some that would find it humorous that you have taken it upon yourself to explain to Plunger how to “work the google.” Here’s a sampling
Choose your personal attacks more carefully…and happy Googling (without quotation marks)!
Let us know when you’re done reading those 2.2 million stories about “Dr. Philip Zack.”
The Hill article is correct; the hearing was July 9th.
And I was understating the case about EW being the sole source of the Leahy-Mukasey “pressure” publicity. Of the many examples of media coverage of the hearing that turn up in Google News, exactly one — the Hill article — even includes the word “anthrax”.
There were a lot of topics covered that day, so reporters had plenty to choose from: accountability for torture, politicization of DoJ, racial profiling, smooth transition to new administration, passport breaches, Siegelman, and more. I’d be interested to know at what hour of the day the anthrax exchange occurred, and when the hearing ended.
EW’s liveblogging of the end of the SJC hearing that day is here.
EW started that post at what I take to be 11.46 a.m. EDT, and that is the post that contains the exchange between Leahy and Mukasey re the anthrax investigation. There was another liveblog going on at the time, so there aren’t many comments on this thread, but two commenters make posts about the Leahy-Mukasey exchange at what would be 12.22 and 12.27 EDT.
Thanks very much for that, skdadl.
@EW: This entry on timelines 1 and 2 needs to be corrected:
July 10, 2008: Pat Leahy asks Mukasey about anthrax case;
to
July 9, 2008: At 12:20 pm, Pat Leahy asks Mukasey about anthrax case;
It would be worth adding the hour, if known, that Duley made her allegations against Ivins (other July 9 item in timeline).
Replying to Nell @ 126:
Actually, the chronology wording may be a little vague there. Duley didn’t make the allegations on July 9. She didn’t make them until her application for PO on July 24, sometime before 10:30am. One of those allegations was that Ivins left threats on Duley’s answering machine on July 9. I’m not sure we have time(s) of day on July 9 when she alleges the threats were left on the answering machine.
I’ve changed the date in my most recent timeline, thanks.
Thank you for all this hard work!
From today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (NY Times News Service as source):
Titled “Feds reveal anthrax links”
By David Stout and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times News Service
My understanding is that this information was not in the documents released yesterday. Where could this information have come from if it’s not in the documents? If true, this is really damning evidence and you’d think it would be all over the news. (When I say this, note that I’m keeping an open mind on this whole thing and I also realize that evidence can be real and it also can be planted.)
In the first place, as you note, where is the evidence of that, if they had it and it was of the nature inferred, they would have produced it. But secondly, he was known to write letters to the editor and what not of numerous publications and news outlets; eh, I do that too. I start many that I never bother sending. So?
Same questions. Do you have the link?
“People who were briefed by the FBI” said all this, not the documents.
Below you’ll find a link to the same article in the Int’l Herald Tribune, the international version of the NY Times. I read the article in the actual paper, and I had a hard time finding a link to the version of the article with this actual text in it. Hopefully the article I’m linking to will not be edited. (I found others on google that had the specific text “letters that had not yet been sent” and the search terms showed up on the Google results page, but when I clicked the link, the version of the article did not have that text in it. Strange.
Anyway, here’s a link to the version I just found with the text:
http://www.iht.com/articles/20…..nthrax.php
New article at WaPo on Ivins’ personality quirks. It all sounds bad, but, I have to tell you, this stuff very, very often tends to dry up and blow away or look far different when it is filleted open and subjected to investigation and cross-examination.
This is beyond pathetic and shameful to be convicting this man in the press by rote character assassination after you have driven him to suicide and he no longer has the ability to defend himself. This is the handiwork of craven cretins.
What is so daunting about this conspiracy, if there is one, is that the perpetrators really do have the power to shape reality and seed public consciousness — for example, anthrax and other bioterror stories go back for years before 9-11 and the mailings. There are a couple of crucial points of contiguity with reality, however, where physical people committed crimes and left physical evidence: a mailbox and/or a body.
In the emergent neo-liberal paradigm of arbitrage capitalism psych-ops and unattributed message control clearly surpass due process.
I got a bit lost in the WaPo article time horizons in that article. I’m also wondering if the therapist from 2000 was Duley or someone else. According to letters to the editor of the Frederick, MD newspaper, Duley was counseling patients in 2004. Was she working as a therapist for Comprehensive Counseling Assoc in 2000?
The poison-the-soccer-girl-if-she-doesn’t- win incident took place in 2000. The counselor quits working with Ivins and reports that he is homicidal. (Side note: being reported as homicidal did not seem to affect Ivins ability to get and keep security clearance to work with anthrax.) In July (of 2000, I presume) Ivins sends an email that things aren’t going well with that therapist.
different therapists.
the new one (forget the name; wapo article linked above somewhere here) was contacted by the fbi a couple of weeks ago. evidently she said there was only one client in all her career whom she felt would bring in the fbi.
i agree; sounds bad, but upon reflection….
what i fear is that, consistent with all the other circumstantial stuff, they zeroed in on this guy precisely because he had this history, making him vulnerable, an easy mark. so easy to build a case around a crazy guy. especially when he’s dead.
Googling zack detrick army produces more than a few hits. From one of them, a 12/19/2001 reprint in The Seattle Times of an article by Lynne Tuohy and Jack Dolan in The Hartford Courant, comes this:
I hope someone will ask about that.
The problem is it wouldn’t make much sense for the anonymous writer to send the libelous letter before the mailings if they were perpetrator(s) of the mailings.
On the other hand, 9-11 was fresh in everyone’s memory and it would have conceivably awakened an old animosity.
I agree, but what if the anonymous letter was mailed after the anthrax letters went out, but before the scare occurred. The perpetrator probably didn’t contemplate the likely time lag of sending the letters and their actually being received and identified at the other end. The timing of the Assaad letter strikes me as very suspicious, particularly in light of the animosity shown him at Ft. Detrick, which appears to be the source of the anthrax.
The postmark for the first batch letters is Sept. 18, so they were mailed that day or the business day before. You’d have to check if there really was a time lag.
Right, Stevens entered the hospital on Oct. 2nd, that’s the sort of a time lag (from a postmark of Sept. 18th) that I was referring to. Neil noted above (@138) the Assaad letter was postmarked Sept. 21st. So if the Assaad letter was sent by the anthrax perpetrator(s) they may have anticipated a quicker response to their first attack than early October.
Now that I think of it… it’s curious that there were 2 attacks with the postmarks exactly 3 weeks apart. Why not just send one batch all at once? I wonder if whether the response to the first attack was slow enough, that the perpetrator(s) were afraid it wouldn’t get the attention they were after. So then they fired off a second batch to members of Congress knowing that that would not escape attention. Huh.
The purity of the spore preps was very different in the two rounds of letters, too, wasn’t it? Two senders? Related? Unrelated? Was it Stevens who got the ‘brown’ anthrax?
I’m not clear on when receipt of the first letters was reported on, so maybe that lag is right.
Here’s confirmation of Nell, by the way, from the doj doc:
This is why Miller’s timing seems so significant: Oct. 2, smack dab in the middle (and exactly the day “Germs” was published, if I’m not mistaken).
Sorry, she got it Oct. 12.
Uh-huh, if attention/publicty is the goal of the mailing, and not the harm to recipients, handlers,etc. If this is the case, you have to consider the mindset of one who is focused on their mission and not having any regard for “collateral damage”, not unlike anti-abortion terrorists, oil grabbing potentates, or 9/11 hijackers for that matter.
Or — considering this administration’s obsession with controlling the Judiciary, together with their frustration after Jeffords’ defection left them kneecapped in the Senate — someone came up with the dastardly notion that they could kill several birds with one stone: stoke the national paranoia; bump off or incapacitate the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee; and evacuate the building, so they could tap into the computers of the Democratic members of the committee. Two outta three aint bad.
Remember the spying that went on for years, thanks to Manuel Miranda?
Remember Rove fussing inordinately about his office being bugged?
ah, phred, you’d have made a terrific criminal.
this thinking is making sense. i just can’t ignore the assaad letter’s coincidence with the anthrax letters.
Good to know I have a fall back option if this science thing doesn’t pan out ; )
You mean you didn’t steal all those foam cheeseheads?
Borrowed bmaz borrowed… just for the plane ride back home, you know… in case of a crash ; )
now wait a second. i don’t see that the timing is so off.
the agents approached assaad the same day stevens was hospitalized, which means he received his letter around a week earlier, as the first symptoms can take 7 days to manifest.
so, i still say this potentially links the culprit to both sets of indicents.
Uh oh….(OT) Kwame Kilpatrick ordered to report to jail.
“A judge revoked Kilpatrick’s bond after he found the mayor violated the terms of his bond by going to Canada and not informing the court.” I hope he didn’t take Greyhound….
Many of you who comment here are prone to notice the most-subtle details; not unlike those who notice inconsistencies, misplaced objects and glaringly obvious chronological errors in movies.
This ‘production’ is for mass consumption and will probably be a box-office ‘hit’, despite a number of ‘questionable’ scenes, pathetically poor ‘acting’ and a transparent ‘plot’ …
It is all about selling lots of buttered popcorn.
And our’s is a nation whose public adores junk food.
Maybe this link -USA Today (2004)- has been posted before but Ivins was probably working late because by Dec 2001:
(snip)…
It was a frantic time at the biodefense lab. The criminal investigation, dubbed Amerithrax by the FBI, was in full swing and USAMRIID was the only
national laboratory giving authorities round-the-clock biodefense analysis, spokeswoman Caree Vander-Linden says.
The six-member team that worked in the lab equipped to handle anthrax had swollen to a staff of 85. Most had to learn how to handle the bacteria “on the fly,” says USAMRIID’s commander Col. Erik Henchal, who headed the forensic effort. As many as 70 researchers slept in cars or on cots as they scrambled to keep up with a deluge of specimens flooding the lab.
Over roughly eight months, USAMRIID researchers ran tests on 30,000 suspect envelopes, packages and other items that arrived at the lab.
They also tested about 320,000 environmental samples from such places as the Hart Senate Office Building and Washington, D.C.’s Brentwood postal center, which lost two employees exposed to the lethal letters. (In addition to the Florida victim and the postal workers, an elderly woman from Oxford, Conn., and a Vietnamese immigrant from New York City were killed.)
“They were running just fantastic numbers of (anthrax) samples,” says biodefense expert D.A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh. “I’m not sure what they have accomplished is appreciated.” (….snip)
Anthrax slip-ups raise fears about planned biolabs
By Dan Vergano and Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY
Posted 10/13/2004 10:29 PM Updated 10/14/2004 3:21 AM
Link
As to motive, a blogger Allie has some chilling analysis of the targets of this attack. Courtesy Jason Raimondo, Antiwar.com.
The Allie analysis is here:
http://newsgarden.org/columns/…..gets.shtml
In a nutshell, the anthrax attacks targeted Bush enemies and those standing in the way of the PATRIOT act.
Certainly plausible given this administrations other crimes….
As I suggested earlier today, I’m wondering about the information relating to Ivins’ claim to have gone off the Special Immunization Program in spring, 2001 and then not back on it until September 7 or thereabouts. I’ve submitted the question to Dr. Nass in the hope that she can shed some light on what this is referring to, since she may well have discussed it with Ivins. What I want to know is whether Ivins would have lost access to the hot suite because of going off the vaccines and when that access would have been taken away.
At any rate, on the assumption that he was re-vaccinated and eligible for entry by October, the time spent in the lab in the first week of October could have another explanation than preparing material for the second mailing.
Robert Stevens entered the hospital on October 2. By early on October 5, CNN was reporting on it. Here is the transcript of a conversation between Aaron Brown, posted at 9 am on the 5th. It is clear from this transcript, and from the story later in the day reporting Stevens’ death, that the case initially was not a criminal or terrorist investigation, but was instead in the hands of CDC. It seems only natural to me that CDC would have been in contact with scientists at Ft. Detrick about the case since anthrax is so rare. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible CDC sent them cultures from Stevens’ blood to study.
It would be very interesting to know how many conversations, if any, went back and forth between CDC and Fort Detrick and whether any samples flowed. Note that the stories say meningitis was suspected but came back as anthrax when the spinal fluid was cultured. Stevens was admitted on the second, typing would have taken about 24 hours and Ivins’ activity spiked from 23 minutes on the second to nearly 3 hours on the third, when he first could have known. He stayed in the lab well past midnight on Friday night, the day Stevens died. Was he trying to help CDC? If so, was he doing it informally and afraid to admit he had received the material once the investigation began to be a terrorist invetigation?
Ooops. Dropped the link for the Brown interview of Gupta.
Most intriguing. But wouldn’t there be a record of CDC having sent the material from Stevens to the lab?
Replying to JimWhite @ 133:
Yes, I was thinking the same thing when EW asked on a previous thread what Ivins could have been doing those nights: Analyzing the samples that had to have been flooding into the lab would be the obvious thing. As the bull goose in the lab, he could well have taken on the most critical ones himself. The only part that doesn’t fit is the FBI story that he wasn’t able to explain what he was doing, and frankly to accept that as a problem you’d have to trust that the FBI is telling the truth about what Ivins told them; dubious under the present circumstances.
This may be a clue worth pursuing. What exactly constitutes an inability to explain. He must have told them something; it probably didn’t match their take on things,for good reasons, or not. Further, Ivins may have dissembled for some other reason than to coverup the activites being investigated. For example, was Ivins working on some project that he didn’t want revealed to … supervisors maybe, or taking risks in entering the hot room without his immunizations?
dr. phillip zack,
earlier listed here as lt. colonel phillip zack,
remains a person of interest to me, though primarily because so much has been written about his putative involvement in the anthrax mailings while so little of substance seems to be known about him. the guy sure has gotten a LOT of publicity, presumably very unwelcome.
what has been published includes the “facts” that he apparently has some anti-arab political leanings, is a dvm(vet), and has done some sort of work in biology/genetics for the u.s. government.
i would be interested in knowing his associations with the u.s. military – was he a career military man, a public health “military” guy, a reservist?
did he have a military career in biological weapons? one that would have left him capable of working with anthrax?
did he have any personal or close professional relationship with bruce ivins? or any other scientist working at dietrick in 2001?
did he have any personal connections to any of the neo-cons in the bush admin who pushed the invasion of iraq?
or to any of the shadow war cabinet of neo-cons who conspired with the inside-govt neo-cons?
lots of words have been written about zack but few that offer useful insight vis-a-vis the anthrax mailings.
Richard Clarke have anything interesting to say about Anthrax?
That is the timeline of the letter to Quantico. It was postmarked September 21, after the first anthrax mailing (to media targets), and before anyone was known to be affected by anthrax.
That timing does raise suspicions, certainly. Ed Lake makes the case for why it is not necessarily connected to the real anthrax mailings, in a link I can’t find right now but cited in comments a few days ago here. In this matter I am not a Lake-ist, but agnostic.
Could you clarify this comment and who you’re responding to?
Only if someone asked them. Did the FBI ask them? I don’t know. But the bottom line is beginning with Robert Stevens and going on to each infected victim, hospitals prepared live cultures with genetically derived from the attack material. Chain of custody analyses need to be carried out on each of those cultures.
pettrr @120
“It’s just a WAG, but I’d say that a certain Senior Administration Official wants this case closed by January 20, 2009, and there are folks at the FBI who are trying to do just that.”
this thought has been much on my mind, too.
there are many reasons why an sgo might wish this to happen. nor would this fervent hope be limited to only one sgo.
i’m sure mukasey and, especially, muelller don’t want any excuses left around that would merit opening this box back up in 2009.
in fact,
i would bet lots of money that the next few months will see the artificial/enforced public “closing” of many of the controversies which arouse during the bush/cheney reign.
think guantanamo, for one.
Out of the many odd things about the Anthrax mailings is the fact that the first letter was sent/received by the photo editor of The Sun paper in Fl. Why was he targeted?
Is there a complete list of to whom the rest of the real Anthrax letters were sent to?
See the link @ 132
Yes. The wikipedia page for ‘2001 anthrax attacks’ is a good starting point.
i believe someone on one of these EW threads mentioned that this photo editor stevens had printed that nasty photo of a knee-walkin’ and knee-humpin’ jenna bush in the sun (or nat’l enquirer?) in early 01.
fwiw. that one is so pointed, along with daschle and leahy, the targets just smack of the admin being behind all this somehow. or some poor sick slob in worse shape than ivins – or even him – except his politics just do not match.
This may have been mentioned already (haven’t read all the comments today), but just in case it hasn’t: a guest on Michigan public radio said today that people from Ivins’ lab said the freeze-drying equipment was kept in the hallway (so how many people had access?) and it, alone, wasn’t enough to turn wet anthrax into powder. There had to be a milling process, too, and the way the anthrax in question was milled, it was uniform and fine.
What’s missing from emptywheel’s and Lake’s timeline is information about when the receipt of the first batch of letters was reported on.
Yep, including the timing of key media reports would be helpful.
OT:
“GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – A military jury has sentenced Osama bin Laden’s former driver to 5 1/2 years in prison for aiding terrorism, making him eligible for release in just six months. Salim Hamdan was acquitted of conspiracy in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial.”
I’m still too angry to write about this, but I am hoping that EW will do a post. It signifies so much about what is coming, not just the biggest of the show trials but also the trial of Omar Khadr, scheduled to begin in September, which is such a frustration for most Canadians who aren’t Conservative politicians.
Heh heh, Stevens’ widow apparently still has an active case open and pending and is demanding the government ante up.
Yes, Stevens got the ’brown, clumpy’ anthrax.
.
I don’t think the letter or the material was recovered. He got inhalational anthrax that he died from and I’m pretty sure there were one or two other co-workers who inalational but recovered. The building also was extensively contaminated. That sounds like a pretty potent batch to me.
Jim, you’re right.
It’s not direct evidence, but inferred. The two media letters that were recovered (NY Post and NBC/Brokaw) had the brown and clumpy samples. The common mailing date (inferred from latency times for the development of disease and date of contamination of sites in the buildings) means that the going assumption is that all the media letters (ABC, CBS, NBC, NYPost in NY; AMI in Florida) contained anthrax of the same type.
This is yet another point of confusion for me. It was the latter type of anthrax (potent, effectively dispersed) but came before the Oct. 9 batch.
Did they say which kind of spores they traced to the mailbox: brown and clumpy, powdery, or both?
Interesting article, bmaz. I hate that the victims being convinced and having emotional closure is presented as compelling evidence that Ivins was guilty. When did victims get elevated to expert status?
[Responding to phred at 121, if ‘reply’ continues not to work; I’m on crappy dialup.]
what if the anonymous letter was mailed after the anthrax letters went out, but before the scare occurred.
Phred, that is the timeline of the letter to Quantico. It was postmarked September 21, after the first anthrax mailing (to media targets), and before anyone was known to be affected by anthrax.
That timing does raise suspicions, certainly. Ed Lake makes the case for why it is not necessarily connected to the real anthrax mailings here. In this matter I am not a Lake-ist, but agnostic.
The longer wheel goes between posts, the crazier my questions become. Is it possible not everyone in that lab had the same boss? Was it a mix of government employees, private contractors and employees and off the books covert ops? Cheney seems to have someone planted everywhere else. Why not here?
Dang, screwed up Lake link: it’s
Nell: I wait with bated breath…
Oh, yikes; it showed up in the preview. I’ll revert to hand coding.
Ed Lake addressing the view that the timing of the Quantico letter accusing Dr. Assaad was too suspicious not to link to the attacks:
Timing
There’s another argument against the notion that the slanderer of Assad was the culprit: it was an awful desultory attempt at framing, a letter with no other evidence to bolster it.
but – and this is key – of the letters were sent by the same person, he would know that assaad would soon become a major suspect in a major crime.
sorry for the gender bias.
Here is a portion of Lake’s timeline. The details about Miller and St. Petersburg haven’t been mentioned here.
Just curious, but is there any connection between David Kelley and Bruce Ivins?
I have a few comments on the sorority obsession.
This is how the New York Times reported it:
.
This is how the information appeared in the first attachment to the search warrant for a November 1, 2007 search.
This really is a pretty mild obsession and “paranoia” as far as I can tell. It looks to me like he was spurned by a sorority sister and then told to stay away from the KKG house. In retaliation for his humiliation he stole their secret handbook and offered the secrets to the public. He probably rightfully thought they would try to find him and seek some kind of justice if they knew, thus the POBox in an assumed name. The reported “pornographic pictures of blindfolded women” seems more likely to have been this information about use of blindfolds in the KKG initiation rites. Even if it involved pictures, there is no mention of pornography being found. The references to “fatwa” and “enemy” and “knowing more about KKG than anyone can” easily be seen as bragging by a mild-mannered science geek under the cover of anonymity.
Yes it’s kind of creepy that he kept up this obsession for so long, but it’s not really that frightening to me. It’s hard to get over your first crush. And you don’t get to be a world class researcher without some OCD tendencies. We all know we can do a quick search on the internets and find a lot of much more disturbing fetishes.
Boy, I hope I’m never the target of an FBI investigation. My research hobbies are true crime, the neurology of psycopathy and forensic investigation… I’ll be toast before I can blink.
I hope you guys dissect the “evidence” for me if it happens!
OK, I’ve read ew’s post and the comments, and listening to the press conference. Can anyone explain why Hatfill was considered the big suspect in the beginning of this investigation and not Ivins?
It sounds as if — from what Jeffrey Taylor, the US Attorney at the microphone says about Ivins, his behavior and th einformation on record (e.g the working overtime on just those specific days in Spetember of 2001, Ivins should have been the number 1 suspect. So what made Hatfill the suspect the FBI focused on? Was the FBI directed away from Ivins, if so, by whom and how? Was he vouched for by someone else — whom or whoms?
Ivins was interviewed over the course of the investigation “several times, three times in 2008 alone.” With the knowledge that the investigators had about him early on, why wasn’t he interviewed more often than “several times” –and sooner than three times in 2008? As a matter of fact, how many times was he interviewed -and when- BEFORE 2008?
Obviously the anthrax was created and mailed. Person or persons were involved in the crime. I’m not saying Ivins wasn’t involved, but I have reasonable doubts he was the lone mailman.
Replying to Elliott @ 205:
I believe we have a winner in our “Snarky Moniker for the FBI’s Crappy Theory” contest! Congratulations Elliott!!!
It would be a public service for someone to lay out the absolute minimum basics of what’s known about the anthrax letters, and how. But I’m not holding my breath, because bitter disputes break out at an early stage. I’m not sure everyone here could be brought to agreement on the dates of postmarking, location of mailing, and recipients.
All mailed from box on Nassau St. in Princeton, N.J.
Dates postmarked: Sept. 18 to NBC*, NYPost*, CBS, ABC all in NY, and AMI in Florida. *= letter recovered.
Oct. 9 to Daschle* (recovered Oct 15) and Leahy* (recovered Nov 16, went astray to State Dept mail facility by accident)
Contents: Media batch brown and clumpy, still fairly potent; cutaneous and inhalation sickness, but more cutaneous. Senate pair tan and powdery, almost 100% pure, four deaths from inhalation anthrax, other survival cases of inhalation, also some but less cutaneous.
After that, the food fight begins:
– coated or not? (you know where I stand)
– additives or naturally occurring silicon?
– purity: required specialty, ‘clean room’ lab, or no?
– small particle size: how achieved?
– meanings of the term ‘Ames strain’
– relationship/coincidence of various non-anthrax-containing letters (hoax letters, some sent to same targets as actual anthrax letters; Quantico letter)
And on and on.
No matter what Ivins did or didn’t do, he was hounded to his so-convenient-for-the-DoJ death. If it was the FBI’s idea for Jean Wittman/Duley to seek a peace order, putting a lot of confidential, deeply personal, and not at all easily verifiable information about Ivins on the public record, then they should pay.
Ditto if Ivins’ medications were screwed with, but that’d be much harder to prove. But an autopsy by independent actors with published results ought to be done ASAP, as well as the results of any already-done autopsy made available.
NeLL
There is this site which lays out much of the same thing.
Thanks, Jim. I was trying to find that link for Jackie at 188 and gave up; it’s much stabler than wiki.
Thanks to you too
Thank-you
Totally OT – EW, I surely hope to see your thoughts on this via TPM:
U.S. Attorney Scandal Probe Enters White House Circle
It is a dynamite read!
I didn’t see your post before I posted
That happens to me all the time too. *g*
NPR reports that Mrs. Ivins is/was a “Pro Life” activist,and there was a article in his house, and that explains the letters to Dachle and Leahy. Well that should end all speculation from teh left Eh ?. Now we should just all be satisfied ’cause he was an “anti abortion nutcase”.
sorry, OT…Murray Waas has this at HuffPo:
US Attorney Scandal Probe Enters White House Circle
“The Justice Department investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress, according to numerous sources involved in the inquiry.
The widened scope raises the possibility that investigators will pursue criminal charges against some administration officials, and recommend appointment of a special prosecutor”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..17548.html
No “sorry” necessary for this OT, Quzi, I would think. This has been coming on in slow time for a long time. Thanx for posting the news here.
Waas piece says it will be “more about the coverup than the firings.” Humor there.
Won’t get a special prosecutor any time soon, though.
But I do love the sound of “criminal charges”…if only
Lotta sturm, no drang. Sampson, Taylor and Jennings should have been charged with false statements and obstruction a year or so ago, lined up and asked who wanted to get the ball rolling by, you know, rolling with the pena;ties sought against each one to be in direct relation to how quickly they acted. Mukasey should be given an ultimatum – do your job and make the appropriate conflict provisions and get on with the prosecution or be impeached. This is just ridiculous.
A lot of things should have happened a yr. ago, agreed. Special Prosecutor on the USA firing mess, for one of many.
AG Mukluk wanted to be a BushCo team player, & now only does what he’s told is acceptable. Yr. rep is down the crapper, Mike, & for all time.
and oh yeah, i still don’t know why they weren’t more aggressive about this case against him earlier than a year ago, if he was such an obvious suspect. i mean, the timing with the demise of their hatfill case, and the egg in their face on that one, just too coincidental.
coming soon, the “mad scientist” defense.
not from ivins’ lawyers.
from the fbi/doj: “it was just a crazy scientist. who knew?”
as condi rice put said of the hijackers: “who would ever have guessed that ….”
Alot of useful information (if that is what you call press) at this site:
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bio…..ters_a.htm
This is one on possible sources, the coating, sophistication and what kind of TEAM it would take to do this. Has this (fine anthrax spores of 1.3 to 3 micron size in Dashle letter) been rebuted effectively?
Also notice how much disinformation there is about coating, color, clumping, particle size,….all attributed to leaks from investigators or government. HMMMMMMM.
Source: Washington Post, October 28, 2002.
FBI’s Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bio…..ubted.html
I wish I could tell how much of this was true and how much of this was crap fed to Gugliotta and Matsumoto.
There’s one word in that article that I would have expected to see if I hadn’t known it was about known attacks using anthrax on Americans.
I’d have been looking for “nanotech”.
Nanoparticles, specifically nano silica.
That would change the complexion of this situation entirely.
I’m coming awfully late to this discussion with this question:
Certainly there will be some congressional examination of this new development in the anthrax case. How likely is it that Jeffery Taylor will be called? Anyway that such an investigation might lead to getting rid of this particular patriot act appointee?
If I recall, Taylor was reappointed by the chief judge in DC and is there lawfully.
Right you are:
Just goes to show that not only can I not write whole sentences, neither can I read them. (It was an awfully long sentence.)
But I guess that only addresses half of the question I was thinking about. Could be there is some disagreement with the idea, but Taylor doesn’t look too good right now and probably will look worse tomorrow. I suppose its a political question I was asking rather than a legal one.
Nah, he’ll probable be celebrated as the man who put the anthrax killer behind bars (posthumously) and become McCain’s Atty General.
But wait, Wikipedia doesn’t actually say that he was appointed by the chief judge of the DC district court… (however I do believe you bmaz.)
Welcome to the Bannana Republic of the USA. We have the stupidly named Patriot Act. It included all kinds of crap in it that had nothing to do with security. It used to be that the judge would extend the appointment of an interim USA. Formerly after 120 days the Chief Judge in the district could appoint someone or extend the term of the interim.
Now an interim USA has no term limits thanks to the the USA Patriot Reauthorization Act of 2005.
Voting Obama will help move Jeff Taylor out of his office and ensure the fuckhead is not part of an already band of idiots on the federal bench. Bush has appointed approximately 230 little Federalist society puppets to the federal bench including trial and appellate vacancies. He will never appoint another one. See my post earlier. All the Bush appointments to the judiciary are done now despite the bitches Cronyn and Chambliss complaining.
It will be difficult for him to become McCain’s AG. Perhaps he can be yard man at their place in Arizona. McCain is not going to have an AG.
phreds comments which i am of the same mind on.. i see all this as very central to this case… >>I am also curious whether Ivins was a member of the clique at Ft. Detrick that had it in for Arabs. If so, can they tie him to the letter sent about Dr. Asaad? If not, then who did send that letter?
There was a concerted effort to tie the anthrax to Middle Eastern terrorism/Iraq, both on the part of the person who sent the Asaad letter and on the part of the administration in terms of Iraq. Those are the connections that interest me most about all of this.
Pararito @228 has an interesting contribution.After reading it, I have a question that I hope someone can answer. It is my understanding that Bentonite has been referred to as a dispersal additive. It has also been described as a common commercial binder. If it is a binder, wouldn’t it cause the spores to clump together and, instead of drifting up one’s snout, rather would fall on the desk, like rice, or sand?
NEW POST ALERT:
The White Man Has Screwed Teh Native Americans Again: The Cobell decision is in.
Interesting from BBC:
Source: Newsnight, BBC News, March 14, 2002.
Anthrax attacks
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bio…..tacks.html
How much credence should be given to the report today in World Net Daily?
Revelations there include:
Very interesting info, but totally based on unnamed “sources”.
Oh wow. Is there a link between the anthrax vaccine and the epidemic of US military suicides?
Sorry, that was cryptic. What I mean is, if (big if, I realize) the vaccine (or an interaction of the vaccine with other medications) made Ivins go wobbly yea even unto suicide when under extreme pressure, then statistically speaking wouldn’t some percentage of the military recipients of the vaccine have a similar reaction?
Could it result in higher than expected PTSD and assaults/murders of family/friends as well?
Believe me, it’s crossed my mind more than a few times, having a family member suffering from PTSD post-Iraq, and post-anthrax vaccines. Troops have frequently been treated automatically when they muster out with Wellbutrin and other meds…is that to help ease their transition, or mask symptoms until they are fully re-inserted and re-engaged at home?
There hasn’t been any side effect remotely like that in the civilian series of vaccines being tested–depression, suicide, or delusional behavior. I haven’t really drilled into what’s going on with the armed forces but I doubt there have been significant psychiatric side effects from the anthrax vaccine, alone, or as an interaction to other medications.
Re 56 and 41
Yeah, I’m confused about where the letters were mailed. WaPo and the wikipedia article both refer to Florida mailings. (And various sources mention a London address for Judith Miller’s fake anthrax letter.) Were there Florida mailings? Did some of the fake mailings have the same kind of handwriting/letter/envelope?
EPU’d on the Ivins with Flask post:
I goofed in that post. I didn’t mean Nancy. I meant the unnamed therapist Ivins called “out of the blue” and then the FBI called her last week. Duley had her info when she made the protective order request.
Just noticed Ivins’ late night work commences 1 week after going back on the vaccine program. Could it be explained by some sort of manic reaction to the vaccine itself?
This is not a random act of violence by a madman that is getting even with society or parental surrogates. It has a logical construct but is simplistic on a moral ethical level, indicative of a group as opposed to an individual. Individuals have more complex motives than a propaganda/political one when acting purely alone and undetected. The fact that it is against specific targets and executed in an organized manner suggests a group of people involved.
A lone actor’s actions will be based upon individual obsessions or otherwise chaotic constructs and is more likely to involve family, neighbors, workmates or random persons in proximity. It would be obvious to any adult that the chance of any of the named addressees opening the envelopes were much less than the chance of an unknown employee in the offices addressed would, and thus be infected. So the addressed targets matter only as a statement and real victims are collateral and innocent. If specific addressee were infected, that would be more than lucky.
The person in charge of mailing had enough geography to find the same mailbox again. That’s all that it indicates, assuming that the same collection box was used, which is to say FBI found no residue in other collection boxes in that go to the same sorting center. The driving to the mail box would have been a very high pressure exercise. The off chance of having an accident or being pulled over would have been a source of anxiety to the driver. It would best be left to one person as his sole job. The person would have had to know what the mailings were, as any paid help would have been unreliable and compromised the delivery. There is no reason to assume that the person creating the mailing and the deliverer to the collection box is the same.
The grand jury is also having difficulty, no matter how they squint, to see the similarity between the picture of a ham sandwich and Dr. Ivins. The handwriting analysis has proved inconclusive as there will be similarities in handwriting amongst people speaking and writing the same language. Anybody that believes envelopes are serial number controlled so that cartons when picked at the warehouse only go to certain geographies may see a similarity between a ham sandwich and the man in question
And those same people may miss other similarities under their noses.
There’s a Biosafety Level 3 and 4 lab in at least one location in Maryland.
There’s a strong possibility there’s a Biosafety Level 3 lab in at least one location in New Jersey. Both the Maryland and New Jersey locations do biological research.
And they have nothing to do with Ft. Detrick, but because everybody has been told to look at this ham sandwich, dammit, they will not notice these other labs.
Now you’re becoming a Lake-ist! ;>
No, not a Lake-ist.
While Mr. Lake could be the emptywheel of the anthrax case, I’d rather not read his work. I’d rather form my own opinion, and in this situation, if the argument is that ONLY Mr. Ivins had the means to commit this crime, it’s a mistaken assumption.
Maryland has at least one other B3 lab — probably two — and one of them is a government lab.
New Jersey has at least one B3 lab — possibly two — and one of them is operated with some federal monies for research.
Can’t find one in Florida, but maybe I’m not looking with the right criteria.
“…The person in charge of mailing had enough geography to find the same mailbox again….”
An interesting point not so much that the perpetrator was able to find the same mailbox, but that the same mailbox was used.
On the one hand, the theory goes that Ivins was skilled, capable, premeditated and cunning to execute the plan. On the other hand, why use the same mailbox when any other mailbox in a 150-200 mile radius would do just as well. I suppose the argument would be the sorority obsession, but that sure is a week reed.
Part of what could be included in EW timeline is that it was being reported prior to the second, of the Stevens’ case in Florida and the suspicion that they was a terrorist incident brewing. I haven’t tried to check other news sources, but if the theory is that Ivins sent the second mailing because there hadn’t public notice of the first, it not true. It likely that either he saw the Post article, he was informed of it at work, or USARMRIID was notified.
Source of Florida Anthrax Case Is Sought; Victim Dies as 50 Investigators Search
[FINAL Edition]
The Washington Post – Washington, D.C.
Author: Rick Weiss
Date: Oct 6, 2001
Start Page: A.05
Section: A SECTION
Text Word Count: 1075
There is no evidence that [Mohamed Atta] ever flew a crop duster or had access to anthrax or any other biological agent. Nonetheless, rumors of a large-scale anthrax attack got further stoked yesterday when word spread that one hospitalized patient in Miami who was being tested for anthrax was a co-worker of [Bob Stevens], who handled photos for a supermarket tabloid, the Sun.
Officials from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Stevens was first recognized as possibly having anthrax by a local laboratory that handles most blood tests for the JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, between West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, where Stevens had been admitted. That lab found characteristic purple-staining rod-shaped bacteria in his blood and spinal fluid. A state public health lab made the diagnosis with more sophisticated tests, and a CDC lab confirmed that finding using a high-tech DNA test.
Bill Patrick, who was involved in the U.S. biological warfare program at Fort Detrick, Md., before the United States signed an international treaty banning such programs in the early 1970s, said it may be that inhalation anthrax is a bit more common than has been thought but that cases have been misdiagnosed. Stevens’s case may be the first of several that will be identified, he said, now that health departments are becoming more vigilant.
[from WaPo article of Oct. 6]: [Bill Patrick] … said it may be that inhalation anthrax is a bit more common than has been thought but that cases have been misdiagnosed. Stevens’s case may be the first of several that will be identified, he said, now that health departments are becoming more vigilant.
Wow. Thanks, dcgaffer. An almost literal “nothing to see here, folks; move along” response.
FWIW it’s hard to find a clear source for the postmark date on Judy Miller’s anthrax-free letter. Seems to be October 5.
Hey wait a minute. How can the FBI be claiming to pin all the anthrax attacks on Ivins when the first wave was postmarked Florida? Or are they admitting they haven’t solved the Florida mailings?
Sorry — Correction, “mailing” singular — only Judy’s was posted in Florida.
The letter sent to Judy Miller was a hoax. It didn’t contain anthrax.
There isn’t a necessary connection between the actual crime of sending lethal spores through the mail and sending a hoax letter.
Any time there’s a public scare, there are floods of copycat responses. People are herdlike and stupid, especially when they’re scared and/or events are dramatic. Some people love the attention they receive as “victims”; I’d imagine that’s particularly true of someone who’d made a career of hyping a particular threat.
Treating the sending of hoax letters as integral to the crime doesn’t add anything to the search for the perpetrators, and IMO actually takes away from it.
in trying to make sense of the actions/statements of the fbi/doj spokesmen these days, there is a tendency to consider them as “prosecutors” arguing the guilt of bruce ivins.
i think their actions are put in better perspective by thinking of them as defense attorneys who are trying to poke holes in the “prosecution’s”
case in order to emotionally influence the “jury”, i.e., the congress and the american people.
thus the focus on relatively trivial but easy to understand “facts” such as ivins’ night work at the lab, his history of mental illness, his sexual fetishes, his (non-anthrax-related) court troubles with a therapist.
as a class, these facts seem more like the disconnected but emotionally resonant probes by a defense attorney attempting to impeach a witness.
thus wherever gov’t spokesmen are involved, it makes most sense to me to approach their effort as a DEFENSIVE effort to protect the fbi/doj.
best possible outcome?
get this “case” dismissed from public view prior to jan, 2009.
on another matter,
the central “fact” in the case, so far as i am concerned, is the dna analysis of anthrax bacteria linking the bacteria used in the attack directly to fort detrich (at least, and maybe to ivins’ lab),
but that is only a spokesman’s assertion. it has not been independently evaluated or even commented on that i have read.
how sound is the science (of genes mutation, not of dna in general)?
and how sound is the particular analysis of the dust from ivins’ lab linking it to the mailed anthrax?
we don’t yet know.
and i would not depend on the bush doj (or little brother, fbi) to tell me the whole truth at this particular moment in history.
finally,
that an american may have mailed the anthrax spores does fit into a historical pattern, to whit, virtually all terrorism in this country is of domestic origin.
the sept 11 attack was an aberration.
Unless the 9/11 terrorists, too, had green cards.
Terry McDermott, author of Perfect Soldiers, a book researching the 9/11 hijackers, claims in an LA Times October 2005 op ed that several American women told him they had married Atta. McDermott never mentions whether he proved or disproved their claims. What if?
I’ve posted about it before here:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake……911-story/
Here’s an excerpt of McDermott’s unconvincing armchair logic. I say, forget the idea of fitting facts to the presumed timeline. Creat the timeline based on verifiable facts.
For instance, were those women telling the truth that they were married to Atta, whether Atta was going by that name or by an alias?:
McDermott:
I think you need to check out this website run by investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, who appears to have been rather more diligent than Mr McDermott in following up these “sightings”:
http://www.madcowprod.com/index.html
and search on stories about Amanda Keller, Atta’s former girlfriend. This is a good place to start:
http://www.madcowprod.com/11162006a.html
What convincing reason has anybody given for the October 2001 destruction of the anthrax cultures at Ames? Do we know for certain that they really were destroyed? More particularly, how much confidence can we have that the RMR-1029 ancestor strain culture at Ames really was destroyed, and not shipped to some secret lab somewhere?
Ugggh, I give up — this whole thing is just far too maddening, the sheer number of ridiculously loose ends creates an overwhelming mass of low-hanging but nutritionally empty intellectual fruit. (To mix metaphorical horses midstream.) Sorry all for posting so much, I thought it was going to get better… but as I looked closer and closer, it just kept getting worse and worse.
Now there YOU go, giving up, when people like me have been inspired by your and others’ dogged grip on the meat of a story, that’s being passed around like a souffle,(or some such metaphor in return). When the Nazis marched into France, there were some collarorators (blue dogs), but there were resisters that held out, in spite of the seeming hopelessness of it. Some were shot for their efforts; no low fruit there. I guess I sense that if anyone is going to solve this national crime, it may have to be us. As EoH (?) noted, someone sent a horribly deadly powder thru the public mail, panicking a nation, threatening its institutional leaders, murdering 5, and has gotten away with it for 7 years. Just because the executive branch has given up doesn’t entitle us to, in fact it makes it more important for the people to put our collective shoulders to the wheel (the emptywheell?) and push. Damn, I’m mad; not at you, but those cowards that hold elected office, are compromised, and instead of resigning, continue to hold on, presumming it will all blow over.
Well, thank you, R.H. Green. I have felt like a total flailer for days here, and am very surprised that anyone finds the performance remotely inspiring. I think I may just need a short break. But thank you very much for the encouragement.
My 298 was for you, but I forgot to punch reply
I figured. And don’t worry, the head still fits through the doorway. I live (as the Late Late folks know) to serve.
seriously, I would like to see a comparison of what the FBI had on Hatfill vs what they had on Ivins — with a timeline.
Some interesting new info here (new to the press anyway).
Did y’all see this report that Ivins took time off work on the day the letters were mailed? Why didn’t this come out at the presser?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..id=topnews
in my mind there is no question this man was involved however there is also no question there are other men involved
I do not believe this is a single man operation, if you look at the ko tape, the equiptment needed to produce this level of sophistication was not available to this scientists
Which is scarier?
1) There were others involved and FBI haven’t a clue who they are.
2) “They” know who done it and are covering up.
3) They don’t know who done it but are trying to make the embarrassment go away.
The real scary thing is that unless it was 2), a government (or part thereof) sponsored (pre or post) event, there is a good chance that the culprits may strike again. (But that won’t explain the seven year gap built up already between a repeat.)
I assure you without any shadow of doubt that drugs related to Cipro, when taken with antidepressants, can produce those side effects. I just went through hell this past weekend because of it. The term “side effects” sounds way too tame to fit the all-consuming delirium I experienced. I felt like I was on a fast track to insanity.
And yes, Hmmm, I think the dangerous interaction of these drugs might have something to do with the high suicide rate among Iraq veterans. Even I, living a pretty humdrum life, was ready to end it all while I was in the grip of the toxic cocktail. It may also have something to do with Gulf War Syndrome.
Somehow the whole anthrax vaccine thing reminds me of the body armor fiasco. I wonder who profited.
Hmmm. I think maybe PetePierce and nightlight need to have a little chat about how possible interactions of the anthrax vaccine are. I hope you’re OK and getting the right medical care, nightlight!
I’m doing fine now, thanks. But the whole ordeal has given me an awe-inspired appreciation for a brain and body that function relatively normally. I had taken that for granted all my life.
Here is an interesting tidbit I just came across regarding Richer:
From an article today at The Plank at TNR.com article titled “Speed Reading Suskind: War Games”
MSNBC’s current anthrax headline:
>Despite demons, Ivins stayed on at biolab
>Privacy concerns, bureaucracy, demands of case allowed Ivins to keep job
It’s an AP story. Among other things, the story suggests that Ivins might be guilty if it turns out records of his recent Internet session at the Fredrick Public Library (http://www.fcpl.org) contains all the necessary clues. Which doesn’t make much sense. Unless Ivins uploaded photos of himself making and mailing anthrax, I don’t think a string of URLs, etc. can plug any of the larger holes in their case. Or not. It is true, I’d look at the case completely differently if, say, Ivins was only googling zombie vaccine sites or uploading videos of Rove and Libby in biosafety suits stirring a giant brass kettle on a kitchen stove a previously unknown FL-based Skull and Bones lodge.
The subhead is lovely:
>Privacy concerns, bureaucracy, demands of case allowed Ivins to keep job
His bosses let him keep his job. And, so far, “privacy concerns” and “demands of the case” seem to relate more to his job termination than to his continued employment.
Don’t let it go to yer head; you aren’t the only one. In fact I think it was IIIphd, a few days ago that somehow pulled me out of lurker mode. It was the idea that we, the ordinary, that can grapple with the necessary. You seemed to be throwing in the towel. Later I calmed down at dinner, and was embarrassed that here I had gone out in public and went on a “I’m mad as hell and won’t take it anymore” rant. Then I read an FDL entry by Ian Welsh about the “judge” in the Hamdan trial whom he called a good guy who was nonetheless complicit in enabling the kangaroo trials, rather than resign. I felt vindicated. Best to you and thank you for teaching me.
New NYT story includes this:
Was he taking pictures in the lab late at night?
Same article:
Nice. CNN’s front page anthrax story lead on the Fredrick library seizure is–surprise–very straightforward:
…Federal agents hope two computers seized from a Frederick, Maryland, public library yield more clues…
Federal agents and citizens alike.
Maybe this will be of help….
You know what? The BSL-3 (and possibly BSL-4) labs I’m thinking of are NOT on that list.
That’s because everybody keeps looking at the damned ham sandwich.
As a coda to this thread:
Gerald Ford was an FBI snitch on the Warren Commission.
Truly Frightening!
Sophisticated Anthrax murderers remain free, are likely federal government employed/trained, and no police agency will ever pursue them.
The FBI, whose job is
to protect us fromcrime on the home turf, are a bumbling, politicized keystone cop-shop staffed by dim-bulbs selected solely for fealty to an idiot president and his party.The DOJ, whose job is to uphold
the law of the landandnot toprotect an imperial president from the will of the people is a polital arm of the OVP.And congress,
whose jobisto provide oversight on the executive branch and defend against foreignanddomestic enemy of the Constition, full of spineless cowards (called democrats).You’d absolutely hope the investigators tasked to track down the perp in the anthrax caper would at the very minimum be able to identify the person responsible at the government laboratory for manufacturing the strain used. That would be the very least they could do given the positions they held in the DOJ. If they couldn’t even accomplish that basic task, they should never have been recruited by the agency in the first place.
But that was as far as they got; the bare minimum which was merely preliminary to making a case for who had done it.
There will be very successful lawsuits coming out of this, I fairly certain.
Furthermore, the whole business of the legality of bioweapons development and manufacture should be addressed by Congress, stat. This case blows that kettle of fish wide open.
Letter today (h/t TPM):
I believe the staffers may have been reading us!
That’d be a letter from Grassley, by the way, and here’s the linky as per custom.
Now we has a measure of confirmation about how the FBI interacted with Dr Ivins family.
15 and 16 ask great questions too.
Reporters should be lining up at Taylor’s office door getting answers to their questions.
Reading the thread without much study of ‘news’ on the wmd issue regarding researcher Ivins, elicited the gloss from some reading I do as part of my employment, that in certain individuals there is a known paradoxical metabolic and mental reaction to the benzodiazepine Celexa, though it is efficacious in most people. Prescribing experts monitor for those few individuals, and, substitute alternatives rather than something from the bzdp family of compounds. Which is to say I defer to the experts and fda but citalopram (Celexa) is prescribed with careful monitoring in some individuals; trade bzdp level lab testing is standard fare in individuals exhibiting many kinds of socially inappropriate behavior.
Regarding the complex matter of the wnd compound used, there are many helpful links provided in the thread, only some of which I had time to explore; one of the links to a university site is broken already.
There was a presidential commission instituted in response to the BioWmd incidents under discussion, which I noticed many years later in a tech publication, Computerworld, which awarded a yearly prize to one of the consortia of outfits who responded to the president’s call for US Postal Service to develop a natively ‘intelligent mail‘ concept so future incidents would be more instantaneously traceable. CW reports the idea fell flat, but the award went out, regardless; the dossier CW has removed from its awards page, likely because it tied into the Swift scandal, as one of the ideas which emerged early was to employ banking act regulatory authority to snoop for terrist organization finance networks and treat them cryogenically, which roused the ire of eurobankers and Continent privacy watchdogs, yet, proved effective in shutting off funding to numerous ‘listed’, terrist organizations. Interestingly, one of the USPS officials responsible for overseeing integration with the administration’s request for smarter mail was a former oilfield GIS modelling expert transitorily at CiscoSystems*, of sorts, and prior to that served in some senior IT official capacity for Halliburton. It is commonly seen that experience in a wide variety of industries may correlate, at the IT level, so the career advancement sequence culminating, fairly recently, in the title “executive vice president and chief information officer of the U. S. Postal Service (USPS)” seems mundane.
My questions might include whether some of the presidential commission’s aggregated knowledgebase has fed subsequent projects, and whether any of this integrates with the fragments the news media are cobbling together incrementally in the Ivins BioWmd matter.
____
*This seems to be some oilco trade conference presentation literature he wrote likely 2007 while he working the energy modelling function for CiscoSystems.