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WASHINGTON (AP) — A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.
The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government’s biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been told about the impending prosecution.
Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year.
Just last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, who had been identified by the FBI as a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks. The government paid Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department in which he claimed the department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.
The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006.
After the government’s settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said. It quoted a longtime colleague as saying Ivins was being treated for depression and indicated to a therapist that he was considering suicide. Family members and local police escorted Ivins away from the Army lab, and his access to sensitive areas was curtailed, the colleague told the newspaper.
Ivins was one of the nation’s leading biodefense researchers.
In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.
(USA Today) Oct. 13, 2004 – Bruce Ivins was troubled by the dust, dirt and clutter on his officemate’s desk, and not just because it looked messy. He suspected the dust was laced with anthrax.
And he was in a position to know. Ivins, a biodefense expert, and his officemate were deeply involved in Operation Noble Eagle — the government’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans and the anthrax attacks that killed five more less than a month later.
It was December 2001. Ivins, an authority on anthrax, was one of the handful of researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., who prepared spores of the deadly bacteria to test anthrax vaccines in animals.
Rather than reporting contamination to his superiors, Ivins said, he disinfected the desk. “I had no desire to cry wolf,” he later told an Army investigator.
Months later, Army investigators would see Ivins’ desk cleanup as the first sign of an alarming anthrax contamination at the nation’s most renowned biodefense laboratory. A 361-page U.S. Army report on the events of that winter and the following spring, recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, opens a rare window into the government’s guarded biodefense establishment. (Related: Where labs are located or planned)
Operation Noble Eagle: Joint Biological Rapid Response Team [pdf – slide show]
anyone wondering why the indictment wasn’t a sealed indictment..arrest and then reveal the indictment. did the DOJ send him a “target letter”. whatever happen to using the Patriot Act to snoop around and then tell the suspect later.
Allowing this person to commit kill himself and not see justice is a failure.
Uh? What might Ivins have said in court? About the bioweapons program? Surely his lawyer would question his sole access and starting asking embarassing questions about secret labs that might also have access to that strain of anthrax.
A very convenient suicide.
took a long time this investigation – botched from begining to end. Did the DOJ not have to settle with another person they had slimed with the anthrax?
Yes, the investigation was clearly botched, since it took so long to bring anyone to trial, while the list of possible suspects couldn’t have been that long, since the perp had to be a bioweapons expert working in an American lab.
The LA Times appears to be the paper that’s been on top of this story: from a FOIA request, it found that the guy who killed himself had been investigated by the Army for breaking protocols for dealing with possible anthrax contamination around the time of the 2001 anthrax attacks. It also states that investigators “ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006.”
So what appears to have happened is a classic case of the lead investigator stopping entertaining other possible suspects once he had thought he had got his man.
Ingesting Tylenol is an awful way to kill yourself: once the toxin gets to your liver, there is nothing that can be done, but it takes a few days for you to die. (It is a scandal that acetaminophen was ever approved as an over-the-counter medication, by the way, given that the ratio of a fatal dose to a therapeutic dose “is about 2:1 – and even lower if your liver has been compromised by hepatitis or alcohol… Acetaminophen overdose is the leading cause for calls to Poison Control Centers (more than 100,000/year); it accounts for some 60,000 emergency room visits annually… The marketing of Tylenol is one of the all-time triumphs in the annals of corporate public relations.”)
It wasn’t Tylenol he took. He took Tylenol (likely acetaminophen) plus codeine. That’s a controlled substance. So, how did he have such a large supply of a controlled substance? Was he just saving it up for a rainy day? He just popped over to the medicine cabinet and thought to himself, “I’m gonna off myself with some old medicine I have lying around here someplace.” This whole episode doesn’t pass the smell or laugh test, which is tragedy because American citizens died because somebody decided terror needed to be spread. Cui bono?
a lot don’t add up.
This guy was assisting the investigation: FT –A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.
Tylenol with codeine, he’s does not have to travel very far to buy this OTC.
Given that he made it to the hospital apparently not too long after he lost consciousness (from the codeine), the Tylenol is probably what killed him, not the codeine. My remarks directed at Tylenol specifically where in parenthesis; I did not mean to suggest that the guy got the meds he used to kill himself over-the-counter.
As to this guy being involved in the investigations of the 2001 anthrax attacks: that does add up. See the Greenwald piece mentioned in Booman’s post about this.
NBC Evening News just reported that he took the pills Sunday but died Tuesday, which is consistent with the cause of death being liver damage induced by acetaminophen.
I also watched the Lehrer News Hour, which had a guy on from NPR. It was funny how the NPR guy said that the FBI was saying absolutely nothing until the next week, whereas NBC News was able to get some new details out of the FBI and/or Justice Department.
No one mentioned that the FBI investigation went after Ivins after the head of the FBI replaced the lead investigator, or the role that ABC News played in all this — and that it still isn’t revealing its sources (which apparently were involved in a criminal conspiracy).
Robert Mueller has been a coverup artist. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega and the Pan Am 103 case, both of which required extensive sweeping up after the fact.
That he decided in 2006 that Ivins was the guy seems to fit a pattern, like he found that it was the Libyans and not the PLFP-GC and Monzer al-Kassar (the drug and arms dealer working with North’s Enterprise), and like he made sure that all those cocaine connections and money-laundering business in Panama didn’t get back to GHW Bush or Ollie.
Yeah, it must be this Ivins guy, says Mueller.
There’s no evidence he killed himself!! He was found overdosed on painkillers – and could as easily have been killed by someone who wanted to keep the operation silent.
I was screaming mentally at the dumb TV commentators reporting this – so what if there’s no evidence of suicide. Anything else is unreportable, right?
Can someone please tase the conspiracy theorist and tell her the government would never hurt us? And send her some copies of “24” for good measure.
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Normal dose nineteen times, right?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Um, that’s if they have a broken back. If they have full range of motion, maybe 40 or so.
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Pete Velis, the author who identifies himself as “just an American,” uses the available evidence and obvious logic to show that the anthrax attack was almost certainly carried out by perpetrators in an off-budget military program, most likely at SAIC — men who have protection against FBI investigations and whose motive, without a doubt, was to create panic and ease the passage of draconian security and war measures.
The evidence has been in the public domain for months. The attacks were carried out exactly in the manner and using the same size of supermilitarized spore specified in an earlier secret military report on “how to carry out anthrax attacks.” They coincided with the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, and stopped once the policy objectives were accomplished — i.e., once the police state was cemented with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and big appropriations for biowarfare, war and new covert operations. What kind of lone nut terrorist would show the discipline to stop after just 8 letters?
THE EVIDENCE
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As if all that weren’t enough, the ABC report of Brian Ross told us that since the list of lab scientists whom the FBI had thoroughly investigated and found to be totally clean, the FBI received unofficial recommendations that if they wanted to find other scientists who had access to the anthrax, they would have to go to the “off-budget” – secret – US biolabs to find others who may have stolen it. This door was slammed shut to the FBI.
SAIC report “How Best to Mail Anthrax”
≈ Cross-posted from BooMan’s diary — Anthrax Questions ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
at-Largely by Larisa Alexandrovna:
…
Now it is likely the case that someone working at Ft. Detrick was directly involved and it is possible that this person was Bruce E. Ivens. But he did not and could not have acted alone. He could not have informed the White House to start taking Cirpro. He could not have had a private interest to start a war with Iraq and somehow insert the talking points into the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology report. He could not have told Iowa University to destroy the spores. He had no reason to target the National Inquirer. He had no reason to blame the attacks on Muslims. Even if he was the most extreme Christian fundamentalist, why would he have an interst in blaming the attacks on Iraq and then someone manage to insert that connection into the Dick Cheney talkings points on Prague?
(AP) – Bennet Bolton, a friend of the first anthrax victim — Robert Stevens — was suspicious about Ivins’ suicide and whether the government will disclose what happened.
“I don’t think this guy was involved,” Bolton said, questioning what led investigators from his dead friend — a tabloid photo editor in southern Florida — to the scientist at the Army’s biological warfare labs at Fort Detrick, Md.
“What is the connection?” Bolton asked. “What did he do or not do?”
(Huffington Post) – On a related note, John McCain was among the first politicians to link the anthrax letters to Iraq, as a clip from the October 18, 2001 Late Show with David Letterman, where McCain appeared as a guest, reveals. ThinkProgress has the story.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."What happened with the person who was seen entering the lab unauthorized named Phillip Zack?
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A supposed bigot who taunted his Arab colleagues during his tenure at the facility, Dr. Philip Zack was also monitored breaking in and conducting experiments during off hours… while no longer employed at the lab.
Zack has been a prime suspect for years – the Hartford Courant wrote a piece about missing anthrax in January 2002, and Salon pursued its own investigation later that year. Suspicion arose from an allegation against Egyptian microbiologist Ayaad Assaad, a former coworker of Zack’s. Assaad was fingered anonymously as a potential bioterrorist in the aftermath of September 11 but before victims were identified. Though cleared of all charges by the FBI, the fact that Assaad’s accuser knew so much about his life raised suspicions that said accusations were personally motivated. That dozens of lethal samples of anthrax, ebola and hantavirus disappeared during Zack and Assaad’s watch in the 1990s only compounded misgivings that Zack was responsible.
UPDATE: Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks
Dr. Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991 amid allegations of unprofessional conduct. The Jewish scientist and others were accused of harassing their co-worker, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, until the Egyptian-born American scientist quit, according to an article in Connecticut’s The Hartford Courant, the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication. Dr. Assaad sued the Army, claiming discrimination after Zack’s badgering.
Although Dr. Zack was let go, he returned frequently to visit friends, and used the Fort Detrick laboratories for “off-the-books” work after hours. After reports of missing biological specimens — including anthrax, Ebola and the simian AIDs virus — came to light, as well as reports of unauthorized research, a review of surveillance camera tapes recorded Dr. Zack entering the lab late on the night of Jan. 23, 1992, according to The Hartford Courant report. He was let in that night by Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack’s, although she now says she has no memory of the evening. She did say that Zack occasionally visited and that other friends let him in.
2002 – FBI profile of suspect
[The anthrax strain was no more than 2 years old – Oui]
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."this story just get’s more unbelievable by the day…now the “motive” may have been “profit?” from the LAT:
“tens of thousands…”…l don’t think that story line’s going to get much traction.
Wasn’t Rummsfeld involved in that Ciparo(Spelling?) vaccine that was being sold to the US to stockpile in case of future attacks?