Dr Bruce E Ivins, the 62-yar-old US biodefense scientist who was reportedly going to be charged with killing five people by mailing them letters containing finelly milled anthrax spores in 2001, was planning to kill his co-workers, a therapist told a Maryland court on 24th July, a week before Ivins committed suicide.
Under most circumstances, many people might see this news as further evidence of guilt, that Ivins, whom psychotherapist Jean Carol Duley had been treating for six months, was indeed sociopathic and homicidal, as described by psychiatrists who had examined him (Duley told the court), but there has also been a lot of criticism of the FBI’s handling of the case, lending credence to the suggestion that perhaps Ivins’ erratic behaviour leading up to his suicide was the result of enormous pressure and persecution of an innocent man and not the act of a guilty one.
Duley, who sought a protection order because she feared Ivins would come after her when he found out she had cooperated with the investigators, told the court that in group sessions, Ivins had also said he had bought a bulletproof vest and gun and was planning to go out and stab someone on the streets. She said he described in great detail an elaborate plan to “kill his co-workers because he was about to be indicted on capital murder charges”, said a report in the Los Angeles Times. Ivins had also claimed that around the year 2000 he had tried to “murder several people” using poison.
However, while this account of Ivins’ behaviour is troublesome, it does not constitute proof or a confession, and thus in order to indict the scientist the FBI would have had to bring robust evidence that Ivins was indeed the person behind the worst bioterrorist attack in the US that killed 5 people, caused the postal system to almost grind to a halt and cost an estimated 25 billion dollars. But there appear to be many questions, and the picture is further clouded by the fact that the FBI is not revealing much.
An FBI assistant director, John Miller, said in a press statement on Sunday that:
“As soon as the legal constraints barring disclosure are removed, we will make public as much information as possible.”
“We will do that at one time, in one place. We will do that after those who were injured and the families of those who died are briefed, which is only appropriate,” added Miller.
The FBI investigation into the case is being described as one of the largest and most costly in the history of the bureau (New York Times), and there is much media frustration about the lack of official information on a case that has been ongoing and pursued relentlessly by the bureau for the past seven years, both domestically and overseas, as Tom Ridge, who was President Bush’s secretary of Homeland Security during the attacks, told ABC’s This Week.
The frustration is possibly also because while there has been no official information in the last seven years, there have been “leaks”, much of which have proved to be false, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Tom Daschle, from South Dakota, who received one of the letters when he was Democratic leader of the Senate, told Fox News Sunday that from the very beginning he had had “real concerns about the quality of the investigation” and although admitting he had not been briefed yet by the FBI, he was not convinced Ivins was the only culprit.
He referred to an out of court settlement announced in June where the government agreed to pay another scientist Steven J. Hatfill who worked at the Fort Detrick research centre where Ivins also worked, the sum of 2.825 million dollars, plus 150,000 a year for life, as compensation for the FBI naming him as an anthrax suspect and persistently pursuing him for years:
“Given the fact that they already paid somebody else 5 million dollars for the mistakes they must have made gives you some indication of the overall caliber and quality of the investigation,” said Dacschle, according to a report in the New York Times. Daschle said he did not know if the switch to Ivins was “just another false track”, because “We don’t know, and they [FBI] aren’t telling us,” he said.
According to the New York Times, there have been instances of shoddy investigative work right from the beginning. Democratic representative Rush D Holt, who is a physicist told the paper recently that he had his first doubts about the quality of the investigation after anthrax was found in his Congressional office in October 2001, but nobody from the investigation team came back to carry out tests.
Rush also said that it took investigators seven months to test several hundred mailboxes linked to a contaminated New Jersey mail processing centre and find the one the letters had been mailed from. Why didn’t they just send “50 people to wipe all those mailboxes”, he asked.
And that is the problem, there are too many questions and not enough answers, and where there are, they are supplied by leaks, and this is not inspiring confidence in the justice system.
There is much media speculation, based on leaks, that Ivins fits the profile of a clever but very unhappy man who is capable of being very destructive. His therapist filed for a restraining order against him, and said she believed the psychatrists when they called him homicidal and sociopathic. She said he was unstable and had tried to poision people in 2000. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), new techniques (again based on leaks) have traced the strain of anthrax used in the attacks back to the lab Ivins worked at.
But Ivins’ legal team said he was innocent and killed himself because of the pressure of the government’s relentless pursuit. He lost his lab, he could not work, and felt under siege. Other experts, such as Richard Spertzel, a former Army biodefense official and UN inspector, have also suggested Ivins did not have the necessary means to turn laboratory anthrax into the fine spores used in the attack. And he was only one of 10 people working there who had access to the anthrax.
It would seem, as the WSJ put it, “the anthrax episode doesn’t inspire confidence” and yet the credibility of the FBI, and “public accountability is crucial because it relates to how we should respond to future biological or chemical attacks”. The bureau needs to reassure Americans that it has not just targetted another innocent man, because he “fit their psychological profile”, and cases of mass terror should not take seven years to solve.
The WSJ echoed the sentiment of many,when it called for the justice department to:
Make its evidence about Ivins public for anthrax experts and the media to inspect.”
Sources: Lost Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD