August 6, 2008
FBI Releases Evidence Against Anthrax Suspect Bruce Ivins
The Washington Post has their lengthy report up on the evidence released by the FBI this afternoon against Bruce Ivins, the bioweapons researcher who killed himself last week after he had become the government's main suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Some of the evidence the FBI shared with the public today included that Ivins sent emails with wording that was sometimes identical to the language used in the anthrax-laced letters, that he kept odd, late hours in the Ft. Detrick lab where he worked in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and that Ivins was the custodian of the particular strain of anthrax used in the mailings that killed five people.
The Post story does a pretty good job of staying skeptical -- not something we can say for many others we've read over the last week. Since he died of an overdose of Tylenol and is not around to speak for himself, little tidbits of the troubled life Ivins reportedly had been living have dribbled out. Ivins had big problems with alcohol and sleeping pills. He was obsessed with a college sorority. He was acting funny, and had serious mental health issues. Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald describes the "FBI's coordinated leaking" as "quite dubious, in some instances laughably so."
Today, the Post went with the headline, "Anthrax Investigators Unveil Some Evidence Against Ivins," which isn't bad. That 'Some' is pretty key there. Compare that with the Associated Press, which appears to have been writing up every leak it gets from the FBI without hesitation (and was responsible for the whole sorority story, which successfully made Ivins seem really creepy, but didn't actually place him at the New Jersey mailbox the anthrax was mailed from). The AP went with "Documents, US officials: Ivins only anthrax killer". That's pretty interesting, considering The New York Times story points out in its second paragraph that Ivins was "not the sole person with access to that anthrax," and The Washington Post similarly ends theirs by noting that "the science leaves open the possibility that someone else had access to a flask of bacteria Ivins prepared."
What do you think of the FBI's case against Ivins? Are you convinced?
(AP Photo/Frederick News Post)
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I'll hold my opinion; but the FBI & Press ruined the first guy's life and now the FBI literally scared this one to death.
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I was really confused by that sorority reference. They seem to be saying that he was obsessed with Kappa, generally, but not the Princeton chapter specifically. Nonetheless, he drove all the way to Princeton to mail the letters, somewhat near the place that Kappa keeps its robes (and presumably sharpie markers used to helpfully identify fat to pledges who might have missed it).
What kind of a weird obsession is that? It would be like as if there was this girl in college who was on the track team you were obsessed with, so thirty years later you pick a clock tower down the block from a Footlocker and start shooting at people.
Frankly, I really don't buy this yet. I'm not convinced that he didn't do it, but from what I've seen so far, I doubt they'd have found a jury to convict him.
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He'd be a perfect patsy if his behavior was all pre-established.
I'd like to believe he was guilty and that a trial would've proved it. But a trial will never prove it, I have a hard time believing that he's truly guilty.
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Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. This whole thing stinks and comes off to me as a chance for the FBI to place blame and look good for the press. All the evidence I have read about is circumstantial at best AND the bully tactics that the FBI used (offering the reward money to his son to say Ivins did it; showing pictures of the anthrax victims to his daughter saying "your father killed these people"; and confronting him in a mall saying he killed these people) all scream that the FBI had nothing real on this guy. To top it off, they are basing this all on a brand new science that didn't exist before this case. Calling me skeptical is an understatement.
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wow. all the crackpots are coming out in this thread. clearly the guy did it because the govenment says so. end of discussion.
also, lee harvey oswald, acting alone, shot and killed john f kennedy.
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They just needed a fall guy. Assign blame on someone who both had access to the stuff and behaved irrationally, case closed. Everyone's happy.
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it's pretty messed up that we live in a place where nobody trusts the government. i don't either, for what its worth.
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it's pretty messed up that we live in a place where nobody trusts the government.
Ask yourself when was the last time they gave us a reason to trust them. Set the Wayback Machine to before Katrina, Nixon, Vietnam, the JFK assasination, and you're hitting Pearl Harbor which itself was probably a setup. Hell, go back far enough and John Wilkes Booth was a patsy. Further? This country was founded by a bunch of Freemasons and deists and DC was designed as part of an elaborate luciferian conspiracy.
Point is, people have never trusted government. Which is as it should be. Would you want Bill Clinton babysitting your teenage daughter? Would you trust George Bush with your liquor cabinet? Would you want Marion Barry buying meat for your barbecue? These questions MUST be asked.
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I dunno.. there are certainly questions that still remain. But if it is true that this guy was in the lab at odd hours, had access to the stuff, signed out a special piece of drying equipment, apparently did a cleanup of anthrax without telling anyone... it's pretty damning. But I agree that the Princeton link through the sorority seems to be grasping at straws.
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The question is: did this guy do it and off himself to avoid prosecution, or was this guy unstable already and this accusation put him over the edge?
You also need to "follow the money:" who has the most to lose from a continued investigation and the most to gain from a prompt closure of this case? By process of elimination, you can come to only one conclusion: unrepentant cannibal and summer jobs program supporter Marion Barry.
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If you're the FBI and have been embarrassed in the past over the case, you'd like nothing more than to find a plausible but unstable suspect, confront him aggressively with very weak circumstantial evidence, and then have him kill himself thereby avoiding trial.
I mean if you were writing a conspiracy plot, it would look like this. The next thing to happen in this movie plot is that someone else that works in my building gets infected with the same anthrax and then we all have to say, doh - got the wrong one! (S)He's still out there!