Anthrax suspect dies in apparent suicide

[justdrew]

but wait, it couldn't have been a hoax, a person got infected with anthrax by one of them from St. Petersburg at least. I'm not seeing anything at anthraxinvestigation.com about petersburg except copies of news stories.

[chiggerbit]

This link:

http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/page-one.html

[justdrew]

NEVERMIND:

It soon came out, however, that the F.B.I. had recovered the wrong threatening letter. Laboratory analysis indicated that the white substance enclosed in the three St. Petersburg biothreats was nontoxic. Erin O’Connor must have been infected from another source. A fresh search of segregated NBC mail turned up a second letter, one with anthrax traces, likewise addressed to Tom Brokaw but written by someone else and postmarked on September 18 in Trenton.

(damn, sorry about that. reading all the way to the end... never a bad idea.)

[chiggerbit]

Here, this is the page I was remembering:

http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/Florida.html

[justdrew]

thanks!

[chiggerbit]

A bit off topic, but I keep wondering what this is about:

"...David Lee Wilson, the head of the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, says that the number of credible bioterror threats or incidents rose dramatically between 1997 and 2000, up to roughly 200 per year, or one biological threat every couple of days. "Most of them were anthrax hoaxes....'"

[stickdog99]

http://tinyurl.com/6lk9zc

"...In the case of Haigwood, now the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, she said she suspected Ivins in the anthrax mailings as early as November 2001, when he e-mailed her, his immediate family and other scientists a photo of himself working with what he called "the now infamous 'Ames' strain" of anthrax, which was used in the attacks. She reported her suspicions to the FBI in 2002 and, at the behest of investigators, kept in touch with Ivins by e-mail and shared their correspondence with investigators.

Haigwood, 56, met Ivins in the late 1970s when he was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, where she earned her doctorate. She was cordial to him, but she noticed that he took an unusual interest in her Kappa membership.

In the summer of 1982, Haigwood moved in with Scandella, then her fiancee, in a townhouse in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Montgomery Village. On Nov. 30 that year, Scandella awoke to find the Greek letters "KKG" spray-painted on the rear window of his car and on the sidewalk and fence in front of the home. Although a police report filed by Scandella does not mention any possible suspects, Haigwood quickly concluded that Ivins was responsible.

"My address wasn't published, and I only lived there a short while before Carl and I got married and moved out of state," Haigwood said Friday. "No one knew my address or my phone number. You had to stalk me to figure this stuff out."

Records show that Ivins was living on the same street, about a block away, shortly after the incident. It was not clear when he moved in. Scandella did not know that Ivins had been their neighbor until he was told Friday by a reporter.

"I was blown away by that," Scandella said. "I had no idea he lived anywhere in the vicinity ... I wonder if it's possible that Ivins moved to that location to be close to Nancy."

Soon after the vandalism, Haigwood bumped into Ivins - she doesn't remember where - and accused him.



"I said, 'This happened and I'm sure you're the one who did it,' and he denied it," Haigwood said. "And I said, 'Well, I'm still sure you did.' What can you do at that point?"

Ivins kept in touch with Haigwood via phone calls, letters and e-mails, and while some of the correspondence made her uncomfortable, she never cut off contact with him, a decision she later regretted. She said she sent him polite but curt replies.

"He seemed to know a lot about myself, my children, things I never remembered telling him, which always disturbed me," she said. "I kept him at arm's length as best I could."

She also suspected Ivins of writing a letter in her name to The Frederick News-Post that defended hazing by Kappa members.

Haigwood passed on her suspicions about Ivins to the FBI after the American Society for Microbiology noted that a microbiologist was probably responsible for the anthrax mailings and asked its members to think of possible suspects.

Their e-mail correspondence from 2002 on was brief and cordial, although Ivins did reveal that he was under a lot of stress.

Investigators have said that between 2000 and 2006, Ivins was prescribed antidepressants, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs. The Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., where Ivins worked, has offered no explanation for why he was allowed to work with some of the world's most dangerous toxins while suffering from serious mental health problems.

It wasn't until November 2007, after the FBI raided his Frederick home, that Fort Detrick revoked his laboratory access, effectively putting him on desk duty. In the meantime, Haigwood said she worried about what Ivins was up to in the lab.

"After a while, after I decided that he was probably the perpetrator, I was afraid of him," Haigwood said. "I thought that if he found out I had turned him in, he would go after me. And he knew how to do that. This is something his colleagues don't seem to recognize in him"

Haigwood said she was not aware of Ivins stalking any other Kappa sisters.

In an interview Friday, Kappa Kappa Gamma executive director Lauren Sullivan Paitson said the FBI asked in August 2007 for help documenting decades' worth of Ivins' contacts with the sorority, including breaking into the now-closed chapter house at the University of Maryland. The sorority disbanded at Maryland in 1992.

But before being contacted by the FBI, Paitson had been engaged in an editing war on Wikipedia.com with a writer by the name of "jimmyflathead" who threatened to post secret rituals and bad publicity about the sorority on the Web site. Court affidavits listed "jimmyflathead@yahoo.com" among Ivins personal e-mail addresses..."

OK, let's assume this woman is 100% right about what happened to her even though she has almost as little evidence as the FBI. So what? Because the guy spray painted "KKG" on her boyfriend's car window and acted a little creepy with her, he must be the mass murder who targets media outlets and the Democratic politicians with the most power to amend the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11 while trying to put the blame on Muslims? What sense does this make? What is the connection between having a weird obsession with a sorority girl in 1982 and becoming a mass murderer 19 years later?

[stickdog99]

chiggerbit, thank you. And please accept my apologies for some of my nasty comments the other night. I had had one shot too many and should have kept my trap shut.

To everybody: all I'm saying is that we do NOT have enough evidence to reach any conclusion at all about Ivins' guilt OR innocence.

I'm well aware of what a fed frame job looks like. A very close relative of mine got framed for political reasons. I don't trust the FBI at all.

On the other hand, as a lawyer, I can tell you that testimonial evidence, in general, is as reliable as physical evidence, and there is quite a bit of solid EVIDENCE that has emerged about genuinely disturbing and criminal behavior by Ivins, not just quirks. (It is a common misconception that physical evidence is categorically better than testimonial evidence. It depends. Both can be impeached. Very good physical evidence is usually more persuasive as a practical matter, but that is not required by the law.)

There is NO evidence, testimonial or otherwise, that paints Ivins as a homicidal maniac in 2001. He had an obsession with a sorority girl in 1982 and with the KKG sorority for his whole adult life. He wrote some weird poems about himself. He became angry with his psychological counselor for working behind his back with the FBI. That's it. No other stories about Ivins' supposed deranged behavior have sources, much less confirmation. The crap about him "almost" poisoning someone is a transparent smear with no basis and no source.

[stickdog99]

I see that the anthrax attacker would possibly have had a bone to pick with Daschle and Leahy, two pro-choice Catholics. Whether or not Irvins is the culprit, I'm wondering if non-Catholic terrorists would go so far as to single out, not one, but two pro-choice Catholic Congresscritters. Surely there were other pro-lifers who could have been chosen, possibly Protestant ones. Why Catholic ones? Were pro-life Catholic Congressmen more offensive to the attacker? Not that these two aren't offensive to possibly hundreds of thousands of law-abiding pro-life Catholics, but it is one more piece to consider as far as possible motivation.

You really find this "link" more compelling than the fact that these guys were the two Senators with the most power to amend the Patriot Act that was sitting on both of their desks at the exact moment of the mailings? Really? Truly? Are you actually serious? Really?

[stickdog99]

Percival, Jeff was not first on that idea. I've seen that for years and years.

I think chiggerbit is making an excellent point, which I think has already been touched on several times in this long thread.

I'm a very religious Catholic--a genuine true believer, with all kinds of mystical experiences to back it up. I'm pro-life. I just contributed $500 tonight to the Innocence Project, which tries to save people from death row. But I'm ALSO pro-choice, in that for complicated reasons I think there should be a legal right to abortion, although I also think it should be officially discouraged. I'm one of only two such Catholics in a LARGE Catholic family. My cousin and I are outnumbered about 200 to 2. Everybody else HATES, and I mean HATES, pro-choice Catholics like Leahy and Daschle.

It is entirely plausible to me that Ivins went after the two of them in the wake of 9/11, seizing an opportunity, and didn't know a damn thing about the Patriot Act.

As you know, coincidence does not imply causality.

And "plausibility" does not a mass murderer make. You are just as plausible a mass murderer as Ivins by your own estimation. Think about that for a second because it's true. You are convicting a guy based on zero evidence of means, motive(s) or opportunity. The FBI came up with a smorgasbord of possible motives -- money, Patriot Act love, rabid pro-life Catholic fanaticism -- with ZERO evidence for any of them. How can anyone buy into such crap?

Why would he have targeted the photo editor of The Sun? Could you please explain how that fits in with your nonsense crazed Catholic motive? If Ivins were really so rabidly pro-life, why no letters to the editor or politicians to this effect?

[stickdog99]

The anthrax letters were sent EXACTLY ONE WEEK before the Senate was to vote on the PATRIOT ACT and the TWO SENATORS who were leading a charge for a NO VOTE on the PATRIOT ACT, Leahy and Daschele, are the ones who recieved the letters in their offices. Both ended up voting in favor of the act, after spending weeks speaking out against it.

I don't seem to recall Paul Wellstone getting one of the letters. But he was a Jew, wasn't he?

Paul Wellstone was neither the majority leader nor the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Where are your critical thinking skills on this? Do you want the anthrax murderer to be a non-Jew so badly that you are willing convict Ivins with no evidence just to get your guilty gentile?

[Nordic]

Has this been posted here yet?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03731.html

Hair Samples in Anthrax Case Don't Match
Strands From Mailbox in Princeton Are Not From Ivins, Investigators

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 14, 2008; Page A02


Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.

FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.

The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence over which researchers continue to puzzle in the case, which ended after Ivins committed suicide July 29 as prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment.



Authorities released sworn statements and search warrants last week at a news conference in which they asserted that Ivins was their sole suspect. But the materials have not dampened speculation about the merits of the investigative findings and the government's aggressive pursuit of Ivins, a 62-year-old anthrax vaccine researcher. Conspiracy theories have flourished since the 2001 attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it will call FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to appear at an oversight hearing Sept. 17, when he is likely to be asked about the strength of the government's case against Ivins. A spokeswoman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a vocal FBI critic, said he would demand more information about how authorities narrowed their search.

The House Judiciary panel, meanwhile, is negotiating to hold a separate oversight hearing in September with bureau officials, in a session that could mark the first public occasion in which Mueller faces questions about the FBI's handling of the anthrax case.

Friends and former colleagues of Ivins, who died before he could see the full array of evidence prosecutors had gathered, continue to demand information about the DNA advances that authorities say led them to a flask in Ivins's lab.

Defense lawyer Paul F. Kemp yesterday said he wonders "where Ivins could have possibly stored this anthrax without any employees seeing it, or if he took it home, why there was no trace" of the deadly spores, despite repeated FBI searches over the past two years of Ivins's car, his work locker, a safe-deposit box and his house.

Meanwhile, government sources offered more detail about Ivins's movements on a critical day in the case: when letters were dropped into the postal box on Princeton's Nassau Street, across the street from the university campus.

Investigators now believe that Ivins waited until evening to make the drive to Princeton on Sept. 17, 2001. He showed up at work that day and stayed briefly, then took several hours of administrative leave from the lab, according to partial work logs. Based on information from receipts and interviews, authorities say Ivins filled up his car's gas tank, attended a meeting outside of the office in the late afternoon, and returned to the lab for a few minutes that evening before moving off the radar screen and presumably driving overnight to Princeton. The letters were postmarked Sept. 18.

Nearly seven years after the incidents, however, investigators have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001.

[justdrew]

You really find this "link" more compelling than the fact that these guys were the two Senators with the most power to amend the Patriot Act that was sitting on both of their desks at the exact moment of the mailings? Really? Truly? Are you actually serious? Really?

"most power to amend the Patriot Act " ???

these were senators in the minority. they probably couldn't have even sustained a filibuster. they had no real power.

[stickdog99]

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/conten ... thrax.html

FBI conclusions in anthrax probe meet skepticism

Robert Roos * News Editor

Aug 15, 2008 (CIDRAP News) – The Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) recently revealed conclusion that the late anthrax researcher Dr. Bruce Ivins committed the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 has been greeted with skepticism by many in the scientific community.

The FBI reported its conclusions and published a collection of documents about the long-unresolved case last week. The revelations came on Aug 6, only 9 days after Ivins, whom the FBI was about to charge in the case, died from an overdose of painkillers. In the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, five people died and 17 others were sickened after envelopes containing anthrax powder were mailed to two US senators and several media offices.

Ivins had worked at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for many years, doing research that included work on anthrax vaccines. Early in the investigation, he analyzed some samples of anthrax from the 2001 attacks, according to media reports.

The FBI's case against Ivins is mostly circumstantial. But at its core is a claim that FBI experts and other scientists developed a new DNA fingerprinting technique that enabled them to match the letter anthrax to a batch of anthrax that was in Ivins' custody at USAMRIID in Frederick, Md.

"That science—creating a DNA equivalent of a fingerprint—allowed investigators to pinpoint the origins of the anthrax," the FBI said in its Aug 6 statement. "The FBI laboratory, in conjunction with the best experts in the scientific community, developed four highly sensitive and specific tests to detect the unique qualities of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. This took several years to accomplish, but in early 2005 the groundbreaking research successfully identified where the anthrax used in the mailings had come from."

But expert observers have said it's not possible to evaluate the FBI claims about the DNA evidence implicating Ivins because the agency has not published the details.

Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, told CIDRAP News, "As others, including D.A. Henderson [who led the fight to eradicate smallpox], have said, we only have their word on this until they publish the details of this study."

In addition, some have argued that because Ivins was involved in analyzing the anthrax used in the attacks, cross-contamination in his work area might account for the match between the letter anthrax and the batch of anthrax that was in his custody.

Also, reports early in the investigation indicated that the mailed anthrax was a highly sophisticated preparation that Army scientists were unable to duplicate, which has caused observers to voice doubts about Ivins' ability to make the material on his own.

Previous stumbles
The history of the investigation has given rise to skepticism about aspects of the case other than the scientific and technical. Back in 2002, the FBI had publicly cited researcher Steven Hatfill as "a person of interest." But the agency never came up with any good evidence against him, and Hatfill eventually sued the FBI. He was awarded $5.8 million in damages, which the FBI paid in June.

Aside from the DNA fingerprinting link, the evidence cited by the FBI is circumstantial. As summarized in FBI documents and a recent Associated Press (AP) report, clues included the following:

* In the days before the mailings, Ivins worked alone at night and on weekends in the lab where the anthrax spores and production equipment were stored, something he had not often done before.
* Ivins did and said things that suggested consciousness of guilt and submitted a questionable sample of anthrax to the FBI.
* He had frequently driven to other places to mail packages under other names.
* He was a "prolific writer" of letters to Congress and the media—the targets of the attacks.
* An e-mail he wrote used language similar to that in the anthrax letters, including the phrases "death to America" and "death to Israel."

A DNA fingerprint
But the linchpin of the FBI's case seems to be the DNA fingerprinting evidence. The agency discussed that evidence in documents released last week (and posted online), many of which were affidavits in support of requests for search warrants.

One of these says that the mailed anthrax was the Ames strain, which was first isolated in 1981. "As a whole, the collection of all of the genetic mutations found in the anthrax used in the 2001 mailings, serve to provide a 'DNA fingerprint' which can and has been used to investigate other Ames isolates collected from laboratories possessing the Ames strain."

"Four individual, highly sensitive, and specific molecular assays capable of detecting four of the genetic mutations discovered in the Bacillus anthracis used in the mail attacks have been developed and evaluated," the affidavit states.

In the investigation, the FBI used these four assays on more than 1,000 samples of Ames strain B anthracis obtained from 16 US labs and from others in Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the document states. Only eight of these samples were found to contain all four mutations.

"The . . . investigation has determined that each of the eight isolates . . . is directly related to a single Bacillus anthracis Ames strain spore batch, identified as RMR-1029," the affidavit says. After noting where this batch was kept, it adds, "RMR-1029 was compiled in 1997 by Dr. Ivins, the sole creator and custodian."

However, the document doesn't explain exactly how the eight isolates were linked to the anthrax Ivins had, other than having the same four mutations, nor does it give any details on the mutations or how they were identified.

That bothers Dr. C. J. Peters, a veteran virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who worked at USAMRIID from 1977 until 1990 and had considerable contact with Ivins there.

"I want to see the data. I want to see the valid scientific links made," Peters told CIDRAP News. He said forensic microbiology, unlike the use of human DNA in crime investigation, is a new area that has undergone little scientific scrutiny or testing in court cases.

"I just think it's a really unsatisfying conclusion," Peters said of the FBI claims. "I don't deny that Ivins might be the guy, and given his alleged psychiatric history, I would believe it even, but I don't see any evidence that really ties it down."

Referring to the four mutations reported by the FBI, he said, "They're talking about a substrain of the Ames strain. Well, where did that substrain arise? It arose during the preparation of the Ames strain. If Bruce Ivins propagated it and got this strain, and someone else propagated it, how do we know they didn't get the same substrain?"

Peters said the FBI should publish its analysis in a scientific journal so that people who work in bacterial genomics can examine it. "I think it's something that can be done and must be done. If they don't do it, nobody's ever going to believe it," he said.

The FBI didn't return phone messages asking if the agency plans to publish the details of its DNA analysis.

Cross-contamination?
Another problem is that, as has been widely reported, Ivins himself was recruited by the FBI to analyze some of the letter anthrax early in the investigation. Critics have raised the possibility that cross-contamination in his lab might explain the reported match between the anthrax used in the attacks and the anthrax in batch RMR-1029.

Gerry Andrews, a University of Wyoming microbiologist who was a friend and colleague of Ivins', made this point in a New York Times opinion piece on Aug 9. Andrews said Ivins worked on analyses of the letter anthrax for years. "Might that explain why the anthrax used in the attacks was later found to have the same DNA footprint as the other anthrax preparations in Dr. Ivins' lab?" he wrote.

Hugh-Jones agreed that this was a possibility. "[Given] that Bruce was involved in the early investigations on the letter contents and knowing its [anthrax's] great ability to fly, it's not at all unlikely that there may have been some laboratory contamination," he said.

If it is established that the anthrax in Ivins' custody matched what was used in the attacks, the FBI's case still requires acceptance of the proposition that he was the only person who had access to it. Some critics aren't buying that.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, PhD, who has closely followed the anthrax investigation and has criticized the FBI's efforts in the past, told CIDRAP News via e-mail, "Even if the evidence is perfect, it is not incriminatory because something like 100 others also had access to the same stock."

Rosenberg, a former cancer researcher and retired professor of natural sciences at the State University of New York at Purchase, added, "Record-keeping was not reliable at USAMRIID. If the FBI could really eliminate all the others of the 100, how come it took so long to 'eliminate' Hatfill and focus on Ivins?"

What was in the powder?
Other key questions in the investigation include the precise nature of the anthrax powder used in the attacks and whether Ivins could have prepared it. The FBI has not made clear whether the powder was a simple preparation of dried anthrax spores or a much more sophisticated product with special coatings or additives that enhanced its ability to spread through the air (which necessitated expensive cleanups of contaminated buildings after the attacks). The second possibility would make it less likely that Ivins was the sole perpetrator.

Peters said anthrax is relatively easy to grow, but growing it in quantity and turning it into a powder that is easily aerosolized is much harder. "The details of that powder have never really been divulged. The real analyses of the powders in the letters to [Sen. Tom] Daschle and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy have never been made public, so we don't know how good they were," he said.

News reports based on the FBI information released last week said Ivins worked with lyophilizers, or freeze-drying devices, which can convert anthrax to powder form. However, Peters said it wasn't clear to him whether Ivins ever worked with powdered anthrax. In Peters' time at USAMRIID, anthrax preparations used to "challenge" animals in vaccine tests always involved liquid aerosols, not powders.

"The fact that he's the guy who made the materials to challenge the animals has absolutely nothing to do with making the powder," Peters said.

Various press reports early in the investigation indicated that the mailed anthrax was a highly sophisticated preparation; Rosenberg traced some of these in an article titled "Gaps in the FBI's Anthrax Case," which she circulated through an e-mail forum of the Geneva-based Bio-Weapons Prevention Project.

For example, in 2002 the FBI asked the Department of Defense's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to try to reproduce or "reverse engineer" the mailed anthrax. Close to a year later, in 2003, an FBI official acknowledged that this effort had failed, which convinced the agency that the culprit had special expertise, according to Rosenberg.

Richcard Spertzel, former head of the biological weapons section of the UN Special Commission and a member of the Iraq Survey Group, added support for this view in an Aug 5 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. He said information released by the FBI over the years pointed to "a product of exceptional quality," with particles just 1.3 to 3 microns in diameter.

"Apparently the spores were coated with a polyglass, which tightly bound hydrophilic silca to each particle," Spertzel wrote. "That's what was briefed (according to one of my former weapons inspectors at the United Nations Special Commission) by the FBI to the German Foreign Ministry at the time."

Spertzel asserted that USAMRIID does not have the equipment to produce such a substance and that, in any case, it could not have been made there without many other people being aware of it.

By e-mail, Rosenberg told CIDRAP News that the FBI in recent years has tried to downplay the idea that the mailed anthrax was a very sophisticated product. This effort included an article published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology in August 2006 in which the FBI called the idea "a widely circulated misconception." Rosenberg said the FBI's effort seems to have worked, "since no one is questioning the assumption that the spores were merely purified and dried."

Hugh-Jones summed up the issue this way: "We are getting all sorts of stories now on the nature of the letter product, from claims that it was naked to a highly sophisticated coating and additives. It is said that it took some 18 months to not be able to replicate it at Dugway, which, if true, would indicate that something had been added. Confusion. All in all this would seem to have been beyond Bruce's [Ivins'] experience and capabilities. But if he couldn't make it, who at Detrick could have?"

Proposing a 'court of science'
Another infectious disease expert, Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, suggested that a full and fair consideration of the FBI evidence in the case will require a special task force or process. In the wake of Ivins' death, the FBI wanted to quickly present its case to the anthrax victims and families and the public, but in acting quickly, the agency couldn't present the case fully, as it would have in a trial, he said.

"Now we have to find a way for that case to be completely shared within the scientific community in such a way as to create a court of science as opposed to a court of law," said Osterholm, who is director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, publisher of CIDRAP News.

"At this point I for one am completely open-minded as to whether or not the FBI data are sufficient to provide a convincing scientific argument that he [Ivins] was the source," he said. But he added that he has seen people becoming polarized on the issue, despite the incompleteness of the available information.

"I think the next step will be a critical one for the FBI, and that is finding a proper venue for a comprehensive scientific review of the information," Osterholm said. "I would suggest, for example, that the Institute of Medicine or a special advisory committee to the attorney general, made up of scientists who have expertise in these areas and who have no obvious conflicts of interest. That's the process I hope happens soon."

[stickdog99]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/washi ... KAiAC+MADA

F.B.I. Will Present Scientific Evidence in Anthrax Case to Counter Doubts
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON — Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government’s case against the late Bruce E. Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.

In the face of the questions, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science used to trace the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the F.B.I. has failed to make a conclusive case.

“That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to make a scientific judgment one way or the other,” Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The information that has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there.”

F.B.I officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins, who killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But the scrutiny may only raise fresh questions.

The bureau presented forensics information to Congressional and government officials this week in a closed-door briefing, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinced that the F.B.I. had the right man, and they said some of the government’s public statements appeared incomplete or misleading.

For instance, the Justice Department said earlier this month in unsealing court records against Dr. Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that did not appear to have come from his laboratory.

But F.B.I. officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Dr. Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks, but, because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Dr. Ivins’s failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the F.B.I. did not realize that it was a correct match until three years later.

In addition, people who were briefed by the F.B.I. said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the anthrax attacks — another piece of evidence used to link Dr. Ivins to the attacks — could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to believe.

Representative Rush Holt, the New Jersey Democrat who has followed the anthrax case closely and requested this week’s briefing from the F.B.I., said in an interview that he was not ready to draw any firm conclusions about the investigation. But he said: ‘The case is built from a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence, and for a case this important, it’s troubling to have so many loose ends. The briefing pointed out even more loose ends than I thought there were before.”

Naba Barkakati, an engineer who is the chief technologist for the Government Accountability Office and who also attended this week’s briefing, said of the F.B.I.’s forensics case against Dr. Ivins: “It’s very hard to get the sense of whether this was scientifically good or bad. We didn’t really get the question settled, other than taking their word for it.”

The bureau’s lab work has come under sharp criticism in recent years for problems over DNA analysis, bullet tracing and other important forensic technology. In 2004, the laboratory mismatched a fingerprint taken from the Madrid terror bombings to a lawyer in Portland, Ore., Brandon Mayfield, who was then arrested. He won a $2.8 million settlement.

With the main suspect in the anthrax killings now dead, F.B.I. officials say they realize they will again face tough scrutiny over the strength of their scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins. Indeed, conspiracy theories are already flourishing on many Web sites, with skeptical observers asking whether the Maryland scientist was set up to take the fall for the attacks or, worse yet, was a murder victim. The fact that the bureau pursued another scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, for years before agreeing to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed and then later exonerating him has only fueled the skepticism.

“Do you believe Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks?” The Frederick News-Post, the hometown newspaper in Fort Detrick, asked its readers this week. (Of those who responded, 34 percent said no, compared with 26 percent who said yes.)

In its case against Dr. Ivins, the F.B.I. developed a compelling profile of an erratic, mentally troubled man who could be threatening and obsessive, as in his odd fascination with a sorority from his college days. But investigators were never able to place him at the New Jersey mailboxes where the anthrax letters were dropped, and the case against him relied at its heart on the scientific evidence linking the anthrax in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory to the spores used in the attacks.

It took the F.B.I. several years to develop the type of DNA testing that allowed them to trace the origins of the “attack strain,” as it was called, and they concluded that the anthrax that Dr. Ivins controlled was the only one of more than 1,000 samples they tested that matched it in all four of that strain’s genetic mutations.

Dwight Adams, a former director of the F.B.I. laboratory who was deeply involved in managing the anthrax genetic research until he left the bureau in 2006, said he was confident that the groundbreaking forensic effort would be validated by the broad scientific community.

Recalling the early skepticism that a genetic fingerprint of an anthrax could ever be obtained, Mr. Adams said, “I think the bureau and the national assets, including the national labs and others, that were applied as a team can very easily defend what they did and the results.”

But had Dr. Ivins lived and faced trial for the anthrax killings, Thomas M. DeGonia II, one of his lawyers, said his legal team would have quickly tried to have the genetic testing of the anthrax strains thrown out of court as unreliable. The type of testing the F.B.I. developed, he said “has never been proven or tested by the courts.”

Even if a jury had heard evidence about the genetic testing, Mr. DeGonia said the lawyers would have tried to show that many other scientists had access to that same strain of anthrax. He said the fact that the Justice Department had Dr. Ivins under investigation for perhaps two years or longer — and that it was executing search warrants in the case even after his death — suggests that the department itself had doubts.

“It’s interesting that they’re still attempting to gather evidence,” he said, “if the case is as strong as they say it is.”