Did they ever find out who was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks?

Anthraxcelsior: the book?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062702344.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Whoa

link doesn't work for me

One of the nation's top biodefense researchers has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailing assaults of 2001 that killed five, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the past 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md., had been informed of the impending prosecution, people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and with the FBI investigation said.

Ivins' name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case that disrupted mail service and Senate business three weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Maryland scientist had for years played a pivotal role in research to improve anthrax vaccines, preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also had helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington, D.C.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after having ingested a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague who declined to be identified out of concern, he said, that he would be harassed by the FBI.

The death -- without any mention of suicide -- was announced to Ivins' colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, through a staffwide e-mail.

"People here are pretty shook up about it," said Caree Vander Linden, a spokewoman for USAMRIID, who said that she was not at liberty to discuss details surrounding the death.

is this dude not the guy that they basically implicated publicly a few years ago who got super defensive about it? who was that guy?

oh I guess that was someone named Philip Zack, who worked at the same facility.

Wow, does that mean that that military expert guy (can't remember his name) who said it was Iraqi/Syrian/Iranian ...oh, one of them goddamn axis of evil mad scientists - will admit he was slightly wrong?

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also had helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington, D.C.

"Yep, that's mine...I mean...that's not mine obviously...I mean, it's the kind of thing that I might know about...oh shit."

Any guess as to motivations? Did teh guy do this just to find some antrax-busting employment??

The eldest of his two brothers, Thomas Ivins, said he was not surprised by the events that have unfolded.

"He buckled under the pressure from the federal government," Thomas Ivins said, adding that FBI agents came to Ohio last year to question him about his brother.

"I was questioned by the feds, and I sung like a canary" about Bruce Ivins' personality and tendencies, Thomas Ivins said.

"He had in his mind that he was omnipotent."

job security

Well I'm glad this is all cleared up.

good job

MCCAIN: The second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.

Oct. 18, 2001

i'm not one for nutty conspiracy theories but this story doesn't sit right with me at all.

yeah really that's an awfully "convenient" suicide

my hardcore conspiracy theorist friends are of the mind that the anthrax scare was engineered by DubyaCo to implicate Iraq and kickstart the war but that it backfired and got out of hand and now the FBI is just cleaning up the mess

(none of which I really believe but the suicide is uh, deeply suspicious)

conspiracy theorists are always good for lols

ha, i know you're not suggesting that the CIA did it, right? dude was depressed and had been stalking someone at work, and this story said he was recently removed from work b/c of his erratic behavior

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/washington/02anthrax.html?hp

seems of a piece with all the 9/11 victim fakers; something big and horrible and game changing happens, and enough ppl at the margins with the right twinge of sociopathy want to be a part of it all, some way, any way

kind of explains conspiracy theorists too

Well, i feel much better knowing that a top biowarfare researcher in my country decided to have some fun playing god.

hell, i chatted with this dude back when it was recent news who seemed to refuse to accept that it could be anybody but a foreign body supplying the anthrax...

then again, these were the same idiots who claimed the news 'proved' Iraq was behind 9/11....

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121789293570011775.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

i'm sure the govt would never do anything like that

verrry interesting

http://www.bradblog.com/Images/AnthraxNote.jpg

I have a hard time believing a man in his position would be so illiterate! It's not like he's from fucking New Mexico.

yeah I'm sorry the more details come out about this anthrax case the more the gov't looks like fucking idiots and the more creepy questions get raised

dude he had a copy of THE PLAGUE he must be guilty

greenwald has been doing a bang-up job tearing this down

I am not usually of the mind to agree with my h/c conspiracy theorist friends but this seems really, really blatantly obvious that there is some super-sloppy bullshit cover-up going on

Ivins may as well have left an "I'm just a patsy" suicide note

Ivins's death leaves unanswered two puzzles. Scientists familiar with germ warfare said there was no evidence that Dr. Ivins had the skills to turn anthrax into an inhalable powder. According to Dr. Alan Zelicoff who aided the F.B.I. investigation "I don’t think a vaccine specialist could do it...This is aerosol physics, not biology". The other problem is the lack of a motive.

these are huge gaping holes in the oddly convenient conviction of a dead guy

his therapist in court testified that he had threatened to poison people. i'm not saying there wasn't a cover up, just sayin

I don't like the circumstantial evidence piling up with no solid links being made but uhhh

okay I will lay off the hyperbole lolz

but yeah main point is everything is circumstantial and if the guy wasn't dead no way in hell would he get convicted on the evidence they've released to-date

This is such a horrible story. Lots of parallels with this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_David_Kelly

I'm perfectly content to believe this guy actually committed suicide as a result of the unbelievably crass and stupid FBI strategy to "break" him. Have you guys read the things they apparently did? Showed pictures of the anthrax victims to his daughter, saying "Your father did this"? Offered his son millions of dollars and the sports car of his choice if he'd "flip" on his dad? What the fuck??

the emails sent a few days before the attacks seem pretty suspicious

where and how did he get counseling by this social worker? that doesn't make any sense to me. was this private therapy or something he was sent to?

also, what emails?

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5icCsDXbi3Yojuvo5W4j01VxWio0wD92D10NG0

No need to verify any of this information in court or anything I guess. Case closed!

http://dailytentacle.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/storybritneycnn.jpg

Honestly, I think we should just trust our government in every decision that it makes and we should just support that.

Of course, if he did do it, that bentonite stuff becomes drudgesiren.gif

hey the prosecutors are confident! what more proof do you need.

I like how there's no description of who that e-mail was sent to or what the subtext of it was. Considering there are a LOT of people in the country following 9-11 who believed that Bin Laden had access to bioweapons and that further attacks on Jews and Americans were imminent.

n the e-mail, Ivins wrote that "Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas" and have "just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans."

seriously I think I got a similar e-mail from Dick Cheney.

yeah i guess the emails haven't been released in full?

the fbi's entire approach to this, with the press carnival and selective release of "evidence," is completely despicable

I added DOJ to my list of places I would never ever work in this town just the other day btw

It used to be just the FBI but fuck it why not take it up to cabinet

if the evidence is so overwhelming that this is the guy, why did it take five years for the investigation to focus on him and why was the govt so interested in hatfill?

Maybe in another two years or so DOJ will be OK again?

has the FBI successfully done anything in, like, the last 20 years? It seems like every high profile thing that happens involving the agency entails them being colossal fuckups

Waco, Ruby Ridge, 9/11, anthrax attacks etc etc

I guess they got McVeigh

I was going to cite some stuff then realized I was thinking of the x-files movie

In addition, searches of Dr. Ivins’s home in Frederick, Md., turned up “hundreds” of similar letters that had not yet been sent to media outlets and members of Congress, people who were briefed by the F.B.I. on Wednesday said.

AWKWARD

Still, it would be nice to know who the "people" were that were briefed about this, and why we don't know their names, and why the F.B.I. hasn't released those letters, or why the F.B.I. hasn't actually said this themselves.

the "people" who are not named are victims and victims' families, I believe

the time view of his late night in the hot room by himself is pretty goddamn conspicuous. I may be turning around on this, but that doesn't change my opinion of the way it's been handled, and whether I think he's guilty or not is quite certainly not the point, so fuck you anyway FBI

Yes. He does seem to be a pretty disturbed guy. Of course there are lots of explanations for things. If he'd set up a P.O. box to receive photos of blindfolded girls (!! This is a crazy, 1940s style detail), his reticence to talk about his "long nights alone in the lab" and even his eventual suicide might all kind of be connected.

I may be turning around on this, but that doesn't change my opinion of the way it's been handled, and whether I think he's guilty or not is quite certainly not the point, so fuck you anyway FBI

Indeed. The feds haven't exactly earned my trust in how they handle investigations post-9/11 but Ivins certainly strikes me as the biowarfare version of John Orr

Point of Origin is awesome(ly bad)!

has the FBI successfully done anything in, like, the last 20 years? It seems like every high profile thing that happens involving the agency entails them being colossal fuckups

having worked at HQ and with similar functions of our proud federal system I would postulate that anything that smells of "high profile" attracts the worst and the dumbest of grandstanding special agents; meanwhile anybody who knows how to do the job quietly toils away trying to do one case after another in the face of mind-boggling institutionalized incompetence.

Oh man I just remembered the ending to Point of Origin. Seriously everybody has to see thim movie immediately.

This makes for very interesting reading:

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/anthraxmissingarmylab.html

Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from the Army's biological warfare research facility in the early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there, documents from an internal Army inquiry show.

more on the timeline

Have you guys read this article from 2002? Man, Ft. Detrick sounds like a real gem of an operation.

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/01/26/assaad/index.html

In an among the bizarre cliquey harrassment that went on there, the total lack of standards and organization, the purposeful mislabelling of flasks, etc, there's this tidbit, which makes Ivins' "late nights" seem like part of the dysfunctional culture of the place:

A big problem at the lab, which apparently contributed to specimens going missing, was that after the Gulf War, USAMRIID decided to phase out work some scientists had been doing on projects that the Army lab no longer considered crucial to their core mission of researching vaccines against bioweapons. Many scientists who had been engaged in other projects, such as Lt. Col. Phil Zack, who had been researching the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), were eager to continue working on projects USAMRIID said they should stop. What followed, the documents reveal, were scientists sneaking into the Army biowarfare lab to work on pet projects after-hours and on weekends, former workers like Zack, who left in 1991, still being let in to do lab work, pressure applied to technicians to help out, documents going missing, and deliberate mislabeling of specimens among other efforts to hide unsanctioned lab work.

Of course, the weirdest part is this:

On Oct. 2 (2001), Ayaad Assaad, a U.S. government scientist and former biowarfare researcher, received a call from an FBI agent asking him to come in for a talk. It was well before anthrax panic gripped the nation -- in fact, it was the same day that photo editor Robert Stevens, 63, was admitted to a Florida hospital. It wasn't until the next day that Stevens was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, and another two days later, on Oct. 5, when he would become the first of five eventual fatalities caused by the apparent bioterrorist attack.

The day after hearing from the FBI, Assaad met with special agents J. Gregory Lelyegian and Mark Buie in the FBI's Washington field office, along with Assaad's attorney, Rosemary McDermott. They showed Assaad a detailed, unsigned, computer-typed letter with a startling accusation: that the 53-year-old Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who filed an age discrimination suit against the U.S. Army for dismissing him from a biowarfare lab, might be a bioterrorist.

This whole thing is just so insane.

"FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials"

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/08/02/2008-08-02_fbi_was_told_to_blame_anthrax_scare_on_a.html

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/24273

I'm reading Libra and all this shit is resonating.

This Kappa Kappa Gamma stuff is pretty weird. I guess the mailbox in Princeton is right down the street from a KKG house. . .??

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/06/AR2008080604020_pf.html

I’m a little dream-self, short and stout.
I’m the other half of Bruce — when he lets me out.
When I get all steamed up, I don’t pout.
I push Bruce aside, then I’m free to run about!

Mom writes:

…

I AM getting a hoot out of his Kappa obsession. One of
his acts was to keep changing the Kappa Wikipedia site
to post derogatory info. Never got over being dissed
by a Kappa in his undergrad days. Pathetic.

I guess the mailbox in Princeton is right down the street from a KKG house. . .??

not exactly

My summary for The Register. I've covered bioterrorism as part of a national security gig since 9/11.

Very nice, Gorge!

I guess the mailbox in Princeton is right down the street from a KKG house. . .??

not exactly

-- gabbneb, Thursday, August 7, 2008 8:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

whatever. it's still, um, pretty weird.

what is? his mailing letters from a location near a sorority storage house? for what purpose - to pin the anthrax mailings on a sorority? i see no evidence that members of the sorority used the mailbox in question. and why princeton, where there is no house, when he was presumably within comparable or easier reach of a school that had one?

What's bizarre is that he seemed to have an obsession with KKG for over 2 decades.

George, a very concise clear article--made sense to someone who's been trying to get their heads around this for a few days.

Also makes you (re)realise how someone who is simply very odd can appear extremely criminal under the right circumstances. Not sure if that's the case here, but it could be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/13/AR2008081303731_pf.html

it's the science, stupid