The government has released a bunch of documents on the anthrax case. You can peruse them at The Smoking Gun. What do you think? Case closed?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I don’t think we’ll ever know. One of the most bizarre and fascinating theories I’ve heard is that Ivins was so upset that the agency stopped working on an anthrax vaccine that he decided to prove that it was still necessary. And, according to the story, it worked for a time.
Other than that and other sheer speculations we still have no motive and no evidence that he was alone in the crimes.
What I really want to know, what CAN be traced, are the statements by government “intelligence” sources at the time that the mailed anthrax included strains that could only have come from Saddam’s labs in Iraq. Who exactly said that, and was it a functional lie or just punting for headlines? Who authorized the lies? Of course the “news” media has no interest in ancient history. We are supposed to just focus on the wonder of today and tomorrow.
That theory just doesn’t pass the smell test, particularly based on what Ivins’ colleagues and others have said about him.
There is a very good set of interviews on Democracy Now, this week, including an anthrax scientist who knew him professionally. Well worth a listen or a read.
I would just note that there is no actual evidence that Ivins did anything. What there is is a psychological profile of a dead man created so that you can insinuate that he somehow did something, even though there is no evidence that he did anything.
There is proof that the anthrax envelopes were part of a batch of 45 million envelopes printed for the Post Office and sold in machines in Pennsylvania and Maryland… AND IVINS LIVED IN MARYLAND! Except that the rationale for isolating the envelopes to Pennsylvania and Maryland is weak, weak, weak.
I’ve been going through the documents and keep waiting for something, anything.
I’d also add that so far I’ve come across documents generated by a Postal Inspector. After a couple of decades as a union rep in the Post Office I can assure you that PIs are trained to write their reports to take the most derogatory, most inflammatory slant on their targets of interest. I suspect Feebs are the same.
Having said that, it would be nice if there were a shred of evidence in the documents. There are even some misstatements of facts, parts of phrases left out that would mislead the reader.
Oh well, back to the docs.
So long as Keith Olbermann is relying on Gerald Posner re this case, I don’t believe we WILL get the truth.
I’d like to see the FBI’s evidence…
I just watched Posner on Countdown and I didn’t notice anything unreasonable.
Judging from Glenn Greenwald’s remarks about the released documents, it doesn’t appear that the FBI has enough evidence to convict in a fair trial.
As far as I can tell, this is about shutting the investigation down before a Democratic administration gets in the White House.
Modified limited hangout, as they used to call it in the Nixon Administration. Don’t trust Posner about anything.
Posner is the least reliable ‘journalist’ in America.
You wouldn’t. I’ve been watching you.
points to one guy.
So I guess that means someone else did it.
Isn’t that how it goes in Bizarro World?
All the evidence? What evidence?
At best there is circumstantial evidence, very weak circumstantial evidence better described as inference, but even that is just what the FBI has released. We don’t know what else they have. For five years the FBI said that Hatfill was the lead suspect. Wouldn’t it be illustrative to see what kept them occupied with the other guy all those years? Surely, they must have had something to keep them on his trail.
If this is the best evidence that they have then they have nothing. At best they hounded a man to death. At worst they killed him. I hope that Mrs. Ivins sues their asses.
Meanwhile, Ross hasn’t come clean…
Look at the first paragraph:
new information about the government’s probe of the late government employee whom prosecutors believe was solely responsible for the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks.
One thing we already know: He could not have designed the delivery system (the aerosol form) nor the target list (of victims to receive the anthrax).
There had to be a TEAM. Who are they? Well, that is what his “suicide” is meant to cover up. And it is working.
You mean “alleged suicide.” There was no autopsy.
Do I detect a stench.
An autopsy would be unlikely to contradict the finding of suicide. What would you expect an autopsy to find, bruises on Ivins’ throat from someone shoving Tylenol 3’s down his throat? I don’t doubt the coroner’s finding that liver failure caused by Tylenol poisoning was the cause of death, which is the reason the coroner said that no autopsy was performed. (A blood sample allegedly indicated that Ivins had enough acetaminophen in his system to kill him.) Autopsies are performed when the cause of death is uncertain.
Still, given the extreme national significance of Ivins’ death, I find it remarkable that an autopsy was not performed, simply for appearances’ sake.
On a different note, I haven’t seen anyone raise the issue of why Ivins would do himself in by ingesting Tylenol, when he reportedly owned a Glock pistol. Did the police or his family take it away from him?
Why are journalists on corporate payrolls so averse to putting two and two together?
This has been discussed on other blogs: Tylenol is one of the worst methods you could use if you were really trying to kill yourself, and it is not so great as a “cry for help” either.
So he owned a Glock? Better and better. Skipped an effective method in favor of a poor one!
Clearly, whoever did him in did not manage the cleanest, most realistic job ever. It must have been quite a botched affair, with the tylenol being an improv solution to a messy hit.
Wouldn’t be surprised if an autopsy had shown he had “strangled himself.” ;D Whatever the reason, they probably knew full well why they didn’t want to conduct one.
Actually, yes, there could have been bruises. There could have been needle marks. There could have been toxins or poisons found in Ivins’ various organs that don’t normally show up blood tests.
Poisoning inconvenient people has been done before.
The best evidence of a coverup of the anthrax letters by the FBI is the abysmal lack of evidence that the government shoveled on this dead man. The lack of autopsy only adds to suspicions of prudent observers of this administration. After all, should these guys ever be taken at their word? If the general odds for finding something suspicious in the “suicide” death of someone is low, maybe the odds go up if its the autopsy of a suspect in one of the great crimes of this young century.
I was impressed by the timing of his after hour visits to the lab, which spiked in the periods before the mailing of the two sets of anthrax letters. It’s also interesting that the first spike begins in late August 2001, which implies that Ivins is not responding to the September 11 attacks at all, and it is only coincidence that they happen about the same time.
The obvious question is, did it take the FBI 6 years to start looking at the records of after-hour lab visits? Once it was established that the facility was the likely source of the anthrax, which happened quite early in the investigation, it seems that would be the first thing to look at.
Impressed with someone working overtime?
What you don’t see are the hours Ivins worked overtime in all the non-crucial periods of time in 1998 or 2004 or 1987 or whenever. And you also don’t see the overtime worked by other people who work at the lab. And you also don’t see any explanation for how Ivins manufactured aerosolized quantities of anthrax in a lab which as far as we know did not have the capabilities to manufacture aerosolized anthrax. And you don’t see any explanation about how somebody made weaponized anthrax in the lab without anyone else noticing. Or how he smuggled it out. Or how he loaded the envelopes. Or where he loaded the envelopes. Or why he was writing “Death to America! Death to Israel! Allah is Great!” in the letters. Or when he drove to New Jersey to drop the stuff into the mailbox near Princeton. I guess it wasn’t those nights he was working overtime.
Aside from that, that’s VERY impressive.
Actually, what’s impressive is how well publicly smearing a guy can work.
The graphic that I saw covered a two year period, and the periods when Ivins was spending a lot of his own time in the lab correlated exactly with the times preceding the anthrax mail drops. The report said that the other employees did not have lab use records that matched up and that there was no work-related reason why Ivins should have been spending that much time there. When questioned about it, he said he was having troubles at home and needed to get away. It’s circumstantial evidence, nobody is denying that, but it seems fairly strong. The overtime hours drop off abruptly to zero at exactly the time he would have been driving to Princeton.
He also had this weird obsession with a sorority that was located 60 yards from the mail drop in Princeton. Maybe his initial idea was to make it look like the sorority was involved in the attacks, but after September 11, he changed his plan to make the anthrax appear to be related to September 11.
Except that the sorority wasn’t located yards from the mailbox. In fact, there is no actual sorority house at Princeton. What was located near the mailbox was a storage room where the sorority stored stuff that they used in their rushes. Psychotic mad murderers always symbolically mail anthrax letters from near storage facilities of their obsessions, I guess.
The false return address “Greendale School” was used to implicate Hatfill before it was used to implicate Ivins.
The three days in a row when he was on OT for 2:15 exactly is a little peculiar. Maybe a clerical error, eh?
And what does it prove? Who else was around? You don’t know. Do the Fort Detrick security guards go home at night? And let’s say he was there all by himself for three nights. It takes weeks to whip up a batch of anthrax. Did he hide the stuff in his sock and take it home at night? No one noticed during the day? “Don’t open my locker. I’ve got some fresh Ames strain brewing in there.”
And the FBI makes no explanation of how Ivins, or any one person, manufactured the weaponized version of anthrax. The FBI never gives us a handwriting analysis. You figure that they must have tried to match his handwriting, eh? No fingerprints, no DNA on the envelopes. Pretty clean operation for a psychotic madman. You’d figure he would have drooled on at least one envelope. The FBI never even places Ivins in New Jersey during those periods.
So we have Ivins as the criminal who has no way of making the “weapon” (lab scientists like Ivins aren’t in the military manufacturing end and don’t have the equipment), is never connected to the weapon by any physical evidence, and can’t be placed anywhere near where the weapon was deployed when it was deployed. And whose implied motive doesn’t make any sense. Solid.
Here’s an example of the quality of the evidence against Ivins:
The Associated Press wrote:
In 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.” The letters to Daschle and Leahy said: “WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . . . DEATH TO ISRAEL.”
But the AP is apparently doing a little suspicious editing here (following the feds’ lead). If you read the actual email it reads: “Tonight I heard that bin Laden…” That is, he wrote to a friend that he heard that the terrorists had anthrax and sarin gas. And if you look google the date of the email, sure enough there was a news report that day that said that bin Laden’s group had anthrax and sarin gas and that they’d issued a threat. That means that if you heard that news story and told a friend about it then you are a suspicious person, according to the FBI. Logically, if you were really looking for the killer(s) you’d look for whoever released that false story, but guess who’d that go back to.
This is the official smearing of a citizen. Sleep tight, patriots.
I don’t think there’s a smoking gun here (like fingerprints on the envelope), but there are a lot of pieces that fit into the general picture. I suppose any one piece could be dismissed as a coincidence or insignificant, but when they accumulate, you start to have a case.
I know that there is no actual sorority house near the Princeton mail drop, and I don’t think that makes a difference. If the intent was to cast suspicion on the sorority, it’s fine if it’s an office — as long as somebody connected to the sorority would be using that mail drop, it serves his purpose. I think he dropped the sorority angle when the September 11 attacks occurred, but he kept the plan of using that mail drop.
The Greendale School, 4th grade, fits into the puzzle also. A Christian organization that Ivins supported initiated a case concerning a fourth grader at a Catholic School called the Greendale School in Wisconsin. Certainly not conclusive evidence of anything, but it’s another piece that fits into the puzzle.
As for whether Ivins had the expertise to produce anthrax with the specific properties of the anthrax found in the envelopes — particularly its ability to “fly through the air with the greatest of ease” as Alan Zelicoff of the CDC put it — I don’t know how to evaluate those claims. Maybe the case falls apart there, but it’s not something I can speak about intelligently.
I like a good conspiracy theory as well as anybody, but my gut feeling here is that they got their man.
It’s not an office, it’s a storage room.
There is no evidence of Ivins being in New Jersey at that mailbox in the time periods in question.
And here’s a question. Did the FBI check Ivins’ movements on the dates in question? Did they see whether he had the time to go to New Jersey and back in order to mail the anthrax? Of course they did. And if they’d found out that he had a gap in his timeline that would have allowed him to mail the anthrax they would have said it. They didn’t.
There’s no evidence that Ivins possessed the technology to manufacture weaponized anthrax.
After someone’s dead you can invent all sorts of reasons to blame him for something. They had nothing on Ivins. They still have nothing.
I agree. The FBI got their man. They just didn’t get whoever’s responsible for the anthrax letters.
We’ve gone from the Lone Gunman theory to the Lone Bugman theory…
neither cuts it.
Like a big hairy guy in his skivvies.
no images in comments now? last two tried to link to this:
http://bp0.blogger.com/_yJKbTGbmTZg/R73gbxdyVII/AAAAAAAAAsU/gVBPxdYDO0E/s1600-h/HairyMan.jpg
Jeffrey A. Taylor was the U.S. Attorney who was behind the motion to unseal the documents and thus close the investigation. From Wiki:
From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Taylor served as majority counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he advised Chairman Orrin Hatch and drafted provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Just saying. Okay, folks, move along.
case closed. This administration is doing all it can to tie up all the loose ends they have left hanging before The Chimp leaves office. He needs everything all tidy for the “legacy”.
They should be wheeling out bin laden any day now…dead of course with his face blown off so we cannot be 100% sure.
Just another Bush lie folks. Run along nothing to see here now.
I don’t believe any of this matters. With the Dems unwilling to pursue any real investigation with teeth and consequences, I think it’s all for naught.
I’ll be even more cynical and say that anything other than what’s gone on is a big fat waste of money.
All that went on was a big fat waste of money. It was a coverup.