FBI may have ended anthrax investigation too soon; Scientist Innocent?

[Godot showed up]

http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100423_7154.php

Scientist Innocent of Anthrax Mailings, Former Colleague Says
Friday, April 23, 2010

A former colleague of the U.S. Army scientist suspected of producing and mailing anthrax spores that killed five people in 2001 told a scientific panel yesterday that there was no way that Bruce Ivins could have committed the crime, the New York Times reported (see GSN, March 22).

Microbiologist Henry Heine told the National Academy of Sciences committee that Ivins had "absolutely not" conducted the anthrax attacks. "Among the senior scientists" at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., "no one believes it," Heine said.

Generating the large amount of spores used in the mailings would have required a minimum of a year of concentrated work utilizing Army laboratory equipment, Heine said. Other researchers would have noticed that level of activity, but laboratory personnel who worked alongside Ivins did not see any suspicious conduct, he added.

Heine said that biosafety measures in place in Ivins' work space would have been insufficient to keep the spores from creeping into nearby offices and animal cages.

"You'd have had dead animals or dead people," Heine said in what the Times said constituted a significant public rejection of the FBI's findings.

Ivins committed suicide in 2008 before facing charges in the case. The Justice Department formally ended its probe into the mailings in February by concluding that Ivins had alone committed the anthrax attacks with the hopes of creating a public panic that would lead to increased funding for his scientific research (see GSN, Feb. 22).

The congressionally sanctioned science panel was assigned to study the scientific methodology used by the FBI to come to the conclusion that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. That conclusion remains controversial.

"Whoever did this is still running around out there," said Heine, who no longer works at the Army facility. "I truly believe that" (Scott Shane, New York Times, April 22).

For my part, I never believed that this was the whole story. And Ivins' supposed suicide-by-tylenol--no autopsy, mind you, in this extremely high-profile case--also smelled to me of "make this look good," ie, like an accident.

I've bolded the line you see just so you can read it over and over and chew on it a bit. Are you thinking, "how convenient for the Justice Department?" Because I was, and am.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Law enforcement generally tends to ignore everything else once they have a suspect they deem solid, and devote all their efforts to dredging up any sort of evidence against him they can.  When you have the entire resources of the FBI crime lab behind you, and have already closed your mind to accepting or even contemplating any other perpetrator, it is depressingly easy to develop enough circumstantial evidence against almost anyone to proceed to charging him. 

Evidence other than fingerprints, DNA, and ballistic or other toolmarks that can be directly tied to a suspect in an actual case is usually much more ambiguous in meaning than the idiots who think CSI is anything like real life can comprehend.  Sadly there are people in the FBI and the rest of DOJ who really do believe that.