Closing the Books on the Anthrax Case: The Case against Dr. Ivins

Over the past 12 years we have witnessed the FBI at its worst. False accusations, harsh surveillance techniques, brutal disregard for personal rights and, when it is all over, payouts to people whose lives have, sometimes, been almost irretrievably wrecked by the investigation and media coverage of it, have dogged the agency since 1996. First it was Richard Jewell, the security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, who really was a hero when he identified a suspicious backpack placed (we learned in 2005) by Eric Rudolph and then cleared the area. But he became a suspect in planting the bomb and, in language strikingly similar to that used yesterday by Interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeffrey Taylor describing Dr. Bruce Ivins, was often described as mentally oppressed, a loner, a person seeking some kind of glory for his own failed life. Even though he was exonerated and received payments from news outlets, among others, he died in 2007, at age 44, having spent the rest of his life trying to vindicate himself.

I could go into detail about similar abuses of power in the cases of Wen Ho Lee (racial profiling); Brandon Mayfield of Portland, OR (religious profiling); or, most recently, Steven Hatfill, the man whom then-Attorney General John Ashcroft identified as a "person of interest" a year after the anthrax mailings late in 2001, who settled his case against the government for nearly $6 million within the past three months. In all of these cases we had overreaching by zealous and often misguided federal investigators, spurred on no doubt by an anxious media and concerned citizens.

Thus, when Interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeffrey Taylor, produced about 200 pages of documents yesterday and held a news conference, flanked by lead FBI and postal inspector investigators, arguing that Dr. Bruce Ivins was certainly the one and only perpetrator of the anthrax letter scandal of Sept/Oct. 2001, he was speaking in the context of the FBI's past dozen years of missteps. Even though the FBI and the US Attorney may have had a great case here (comment below), the subject of their investigation committed suicide last week, thus not enabling the FBI to have the "redemption" of a legal victory in court. The rest of this and the next essay will focus on the "case" against Dr. Bruce Ivins, who had worked at the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, MD for nearly two decades.

The Evidence--Introduction

Though there was some pretty damning evidence presented yesterday, let's begin with a Biblical statement. From the Book of Proverbs we have this:

"The one who first states a case seems right, until the other comes and cross-examines," (Prov. 18:17).

We must realize not only that this was the Government's case, without rejoinder, but it also was the "cherry-picked" or best evidence in that case. It was a powerful presentation, but the evidence certainly has significant gaps in it. Of the many lingering questions, however, are those relating to why it took the FBI so long to get to the bottom of this case (some of the answer may be that Ivins deliberately tried to mislead them); how the more than 100 other people having access to the identified anthrax spores were eliminated from suspicion; how it was possible for Ivins to have driven to Princeton, NJ to have mailed the offending letters; whether the FBI techniques here were ethical and above-board, etc. In addition, at the briefing yesterday the FBI agent-in-charge, Joseph Persichini, didn't want to comment on when the chief piece of evidence against Ivins (the anthrax DNA "match") would be published. He gave the impression in the news conference that it was as a result of this case that anthrax research in the forensic context had taken leaps forward. My reading of the work of Dr. Paul Keim, the Northern Arizona University Professor who is the leader in anthrax research in America, however, is that his technique for identifying mutant and specific strands of anthrax was already mostly in place by the time he was contacted late in 2001 to examine the anthrax spores on the envelopes sent to many locations in the East.

Really--to the Evidence

The case against Dr. Bruce Ivins consists of an interlocking network of facts, with some speculation, that rests on one "smoking gun," two pieces of very strange or hard-to-explain behavior (except that Ivins was up to no good) and a few gaps. The "smoking gun" is a technical scientific point, for which we have not yet seen the evidence, and that is that scientists can now identify, with a growing degree of certainty, the origin of the particular strains of anthrax found in tained letters which killed five and injured more than a dozen in two Fall 2001 mailings. Anthrax samples, at one time, was thought to be largely indistinguishable. They were all just examples of Bacillus anthracis. But because of the work of Dr. Paul Keim at NAU, scientists can now identify not only whether an anthrax spore comes from a natural or lab source, but they can, with precision, identify the lab or batch of anthrax from which it came.

There were 16 labs in the United States with anthrax spores on the eve of the letter mailings, which happened just after 9/11. According to what we have been told (the evidence has not yet been published), however, the anthrax spores found in the initial (Sept. 2001) mailings have four genetic mutations which only match the "Ames" strain of anthrax coming out of a supply called RMR-1029, which was housed in the B3 biocontainment suite in Building 1425 of USAMRIID. Dr. Ivins, a senior scientist with many publications on various issues in anthrax research, had been the sole custodian of this anthrax, we are told, since it was first grown in 1997. So, we must await the publication of the data and the critical review of scientists to ascertain if the "genetic match" of the anthrax samples is as certain as was suggested yesterday.

The rest of the evidence is in the next essay.

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