FBI Director Robert Mueller
from DXer …
Perhaps the next FBI Director will reopen Amerithrax.
It was FBI Director Mueller who permitted the father of Ali Al-Timimi’s pro bono counsel to continue to head the prosecution and leak the hyped stories about Hatfill. He didn’t want to order polygraphs because it would be bad for morale — and yet simply asking the question of Daniel likely would have prompted him to describe his disclosures. AUSA Kenneth Kohl worked closely with Daniel for years and never changed his course. Even assuming the good faith and expertise of all involved, the apparent conflicts of interest made closing a case fraught with innuendo and inferences unacceptable given what was at stake.
Al-Timini (convicted of inciting his followers to train overseas for violent jihad against the United States), former deputy USAMRIID Commander and then Battelle consultant Charles Bailey, Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card
The threat the country faces from the Al Qaeda anthrax threat, we’re told, is of a mass aerosol anthrax attack on DC and NYC. Dress it up all you like but that is an existential threat for the United States of America.
I would think that FBI Director Mueller would want to rely on more than inference-upon-inference type case in an investigation that was riddled with massive conflict of interest among its scientists that was allowed to continue even into the NAS review… where the collection scientist from Ali Al-Timimi’s bacteriology division was not required to recuse himself.
The NAS may not have mastered this issue of conflicts of interest (see my friend Michael Jacobsen’s CSPI report) but the GAO knows conflict of interest analysis well.
see previous posts
* If it had become known that the Administration had allowed this infiltration — the Bush Administration would never have won a second term
* from DXer … Attorney Jonathan Turley regarding his client Al-Timini … is this the kind of connection it is critical for the Holt/Bartlett House committee to investigate?
* DXer: why should we trust NAS when they don’t comply with the statutory obligation to release the materials submitted by the FBI?
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LMW COMMENT …
The FBI’s publicly presented case against Dr. Ivins is clearly bogus: no evidence, no witnesses, an impossible timeline, science that proves innocence instead of guilt. So what really happened? And why doesn’t the FBI offer America a credible story?
As regular readers of this blog well know, I can imagine only 3 possible “actual” scenarios …
- The FBI has more evidence against Dr. Ivins but is, for some undisclosed reason, withholding that evidence … POSSIBLE BUT NOT SO LIKELY
- The FBI, despite the most expensive and extensive investigation in its history, has not solved the case and has no idea who prepared and mailed the anthrax letters that killed 5 Americans in 2001 … EVEN LESS LIKELY
- The FBI knows who did it (not Dr. Ivins) but is covering up the actual perpetrators, for undisclosed reasons …THE MOST LIKELY SCENARIO
The “fictional” scenario in my novel CASE CLOSED has been judged by many readers, including a highly respected official in the U.S. Intelligence Community, as perhaps more plausible than the FBI’s unproven assertions regarding Dr. Ivins.
