080608 News As Talked About on The Harry Thomas Show week in review

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Keith talks to David Willman of the LA Times about the recent news on the anthrax investigation.

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By LARA JAKES JORDAN and MATT APUZZO, Associated Press WritersSat Aug 2, 7:16 PM ET

Answers to one of the nation's most high-profile unsolved mysteries are in documents that could be released as early as this week — and help explain how the government chased the wrong suspect for years.

Prosecutors were mulling this weekend whether to close the investigation early this week, possibly as early as Monday or Tuesday. If that happens, court documents detailing newly developed scientific evidence that recently led the government to Bruce E. Ivins may be unsealed.

Five people died and 17 others were sickened when anthrax-laced letters began showing up at congressional offices, newsrooms and post offices soon after Sept. 11, 2001.

After wrongly investigating Army scientist Steven Hatfill, the FBI more than a year ago began looking at Ivins, who worked at the same military lab. Ivins, a decorated scientist who was working on an anthrax cure, killed himself last Tuesday.

Two U.S. officials said victims and their survivors could be briefed as early as Tuesday on the final piece of the bioterrorism attacks that confounded the government.

The Justice Department attributed the break in the case to "new and sophisticated scientific tools" that cost the FBI about $10 million. Investigators said the science focused, in part, on how the anthrax strains were handled and who had access to it at the time of the mailings.

FBI scientists were able to isolate strains used in the attacks, and determined they were not as common as previously thought. And that led investigators to Ivins.

Had the same process been available years ago, it would have cleared Hatfill much earlier, according to two people familiar with the FBI investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is not officially closed.

David R. Franz, a former commander of the Army's lab biological warfare labs at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked, said Saturday he thought it was "very important that the FBI present their case against Bruce and not just state that the investigation was over because it was him and he's gone."

Franz added, "I'm concerned about what closing this case without conclusive evidence might do to harm our life sciences enterprise. ... I think we as Americans need to see the proof."

Initially, FBI profilers said they probably were looking for a loner with a scientific background. Maybe he had a grudge against the lawmakers and news organizations. Investigators also considered possible links to al-Qaida, the terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks.

Intensive focus initially settled on Hatfill, who for years accused the government of unfairly targeting him. In late June, the government exonerated Hatfill and paid him a $5.82 million settlement.

With that, the government seemed no closer to solving the "Amerithrax" mystery. But, quietly, investigators were closing in on a different scientist, Ivins.

A murder indictment and the possibility of the death penalty could have produced a high-profile climax to the case. Shadowed by the FBI, Ivins died Tuesday from a Tylenol overdose, leaving the probe in limbo and a nation seeking answers.

"It's a shame the man is not here with us. We might have known more," said Maureen Stevens, whose husband, Bob, was the first anthrax victim.

Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said: "I think the FBI owes us a complete accounting of their investigation and ought to be able to tell us at some point, how we're going to bring this to closure." Daschle's office received a letter containing the deadly white powder in 2001.

Among the unanswered questions is why the anthrax was sent. The FBI was investigating whether Ivins, renowned for his work developing anthrax vaccines and treatment, released the toxin to test those cures. Ivins was one of several scientists named in an application for a vaccine patent 18 months before the attacks.

Another puzzle is what finally led the FBI to focus on Ivins a year or so ago. Ivins attracted some attention for conducting unauthorized anthrax testing in the six months following the anthrax mailings, but the FBI focus stayed on Hatfill.

As Ivins' name emerged, so did a portrait of a conflicted, troubled man. His friends knew him as the man who played the keyboard at church, a Red Cross volunteer who was an avid juggler and gardener.

Others saw a darker side. Police recently removed him from work, fearing he was a danger to himself or others. Social worker Jean C. Duley filed for a restraining order in a Maryland court.

"Client has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, plans and actions towards therapists," Duley wrote in court documents last week, adding that his psychiatrist had described him as homicidal and sociopathic.

Ivins' brother, Tom Ivins, said he had not spoken to Bruce Ivins since 1985, but acknowledged the possibility his brother may have been the anthrax mailer.

"It makes sense, what the social worker said," Tom Ivins said. "He considered himself like a god."

Ivins' lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, asserted the scientist's innocence and said he would have proved it at trial. Kemp said his client's death was the result of the government's "relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo."

Maryland's chief medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, confirmed Saturday that Ivins died Tuesday morning at Frederick, Md., Memorial Hospital; that the cause of death was found to be an overdose of acetaminophen, the active drug in Tylenol; and that it was ruled a suicide based on information from police and doctors.

Associated Press writers David Dishneau and Chrissie Thompson in Frederick, Md., Ben Nuckols in Baltimore, John Pain in Miami, AP researchers Susan James and Jennifer Farrar in New York and AP Television contributed to this report.

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[1] George Washington’s Blog
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2008

The government’s central piece of evidence against Bruce Ivins is that it has found anthrax in Ivins’ lab that matches the anthrax letters exactly.

Pretty persuasive, right?

No, actually . . .

According to a story today in [2] Time Magazine:

“It is hard to understand why the match could not simply be explained by the lab’s prominent involvement in the federal investigation, notes Randall Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and a senior associate at the Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

The FBI itself sent the anthrax letters to Ivins and his colleagues at the biodefense lab for analysis “almost immediately” following the attacks in 2001, confirms Caree Vander-Linden, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked.”

Even if the presence of anthrax in Ivins’ office was not so easily explainable, there were still perhaps a dozen people who had access to whatever anthrax Ivins was handling. As the Time article points out:

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Paul Joseph Watson
[1] Prison Planet
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Congressman Ron Paul fears that a staged incident exploited as a pretext to attack Iran may be the precursor to a national draft, as he responded to Sy Hersh’s astounding report that Dick Cheney proposed faking a Gulf of Tonkin style incident by killing Americans in the Straits of Hormuz and blaming it on Iran.

“The influence is still there that they want it to happen, they probably themselves don’t have a day set to do it but they’re waiting for an opportunity and something will come along,” Paul told the Alex Jones Show.

“They’re capable of doing anything,” said Paul, refering to the consideration unveiled in the Downing Street Memo, where Bush and Blair discussed painting a U2 spy plane in UN colors and goading Saddam to have it shot down as a pretext to invade Iraq.

Asked about Cheney’s proposal to kill Americans as part of a false flag attack to be blamed on Iran, Paul responded, “The sad part is a lot of people won’t be surprised….it’s tragic, it’s sad, all we have to do is have one our ships hit and a bunch of Americans killed and one or two news stations say it was the Iranians and the country’s going to be ready to go to war, they’d even be willing to call a draft to say we have to go to save Israel, we have to march in, so we need a draft - that’s the worst part that I fear,” said the Congressman.

Back in January 2007, Paul voiced his fears on the House floor of a “contrived Gulf of Tonkin style incident that may well occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran.”

During an appearance on the Alex Jones Show last month, Congressman Paul said that a strike on Iran has already been green lighted, judging from what his contacts in and around Congress were telling him.

“It is still totally bewildering to me when I see men and women in the Congress that I know and like doing this just to get along. Most of them will say “I agree with you on all you say but the Iranians are bad people and they might attack us some day… I hear members of Congress saying ‘if we could only nuke them’,” said Paul.

During an event at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, journalist Sy Hersh detailed how a meeting took place in Dick Cheney’s office on the subject of “how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” part of an ongoing effort to provide an excuse to attack Iran.

“There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war,” Hersh explains. “The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.”

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[1] Press TV
Sunday, Aug 3, 2008

Prominent journalist Seymour Hersh exposes details of a plan considered by US Vice President Dick Cheney on how to provoke war with Iran.

“There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war [with Iran],” Hersh said recently in reference to the subject of discussion at a meeting held at Cheney’s office.

In a July article published in the New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist revealed information about covert US operations carried out in Iran. He did not disclose the content of the talks with Cheney in his article.

In a recent interview with Think Progress, however, Hersh exposed that the meeting witnessed Cheney mulling over a proposal to dress up Navy SEALs as Iranians and shoot them in order to trigger a war with Iran.

“The one (plan) that interested me the most was why don’t we build - we in our shipyard - build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy SEALs on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Strait of Hormuz, start a shoot-up,” he revealed in his recent interview.

“Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of - that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation.”

“Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran,” he continued.

Hersh argues that should Washington engineer ‘the right incident’, Americans will ’support’ going to war with Iran.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Myron Hersh first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War.

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