* more emails to & from Dr. Bruce Ivins (#2 post today)
Posted by DXer on April 3, 2010
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CASE CLOSED ... what really happened in the 2001 anthrax attacks? 
DXer said
In March 2002, he performed a test of a sporicidal agent, Sporocidin. He concluded it didn’t work and said bleach was still the most effective agent for the public to use.
DXer said
In an April 26, 2002 email titled “Anthrax strain” he is frantically looking for a “strain he had frozen down for ________.” It is the “I-1” strain. I believe he in 302 interview statements explained that was a “national security sample” he had been asked to analyze. That was labelled something vague like that. It was from a country he refused to identify without permission. Was that the dry powdered sample from South Africa? Did he ever find it?
DXer said
Note his statement — a formal statement made in the investigation of the contamination — that he sometimes left virulent Ames on his desk overnight in advance of shipping. This is not sole custody and control. This is a situation where the DOJ estimates that as many as 377 had access, to include the night janitor.
DXer said
Who was the female who refused to allow her desk to be swabbed?
DXer said
It apparently was a contract technician from Clinical Research Management.
Old Atlantic said
Presumably, the FBI did not find this suspicious. She was not a lone white guy preparer and mailer, therefore she couldn’t have got the anthrax and given it to someone. Besides, it was so long since the mailings, it wouldn’t matter if anthrax were found at her desk even if it matched.
DXer said
In an email, Dr. Ivins expresses displeasure at the thought that workers might be stopped and searched and found to be carrying magazines that might embarrass them. The results from the search of his office show, for example, that he kept his Kappa Kappa Gamma related materials at his office. He and his colleagues say that he viewed the office and hot suite as a “safe” place. It was at his office where he pursued interests that would meet the disapproval of any wife. It is no way evidence of murder and it is specious to suggest that it is.
DXer said
“FBI had, then tossed anthrax type used in attacks
AP ^ | August 18, 2008
FBI Assistant Director Vahid Majidi said Monday the initial anthrax sample that Ivins took from his Army lab in February 2002 and gave investigators did not meet court-ordered conditions for its preparation and collection.”
“He gave investigators a second sample of anthrax from his lab in April 2002 to comply with standards in a subpoena issued in the case. But that sample contained a different strain than what he submitted two months earlier in what prosecutors call an attempt to deceive or confuse investigators.
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Does this email suggest that Dr. Majidi was mistaken as to when the slant was prepared, who prepared it, and the reason that it did not follow the specified protocol? The email is to Dr. Ezzell, the FBI’s anthrax expert since 1996. He was at USAMRIID. When I interviewed him (offhand, I think it was in July 2009), he told me that he was under a gag order and that his telephone was likely wiretapped. But he confirmed that he had made dry powdered anthrax for DARPA as I had heard.
The Investigative Summary also provably mischaracterizes Dr. Ivins’ emails (see, for example, an entire section that is based on a gross mischaracterization of Dr. Ivins’ email to the CDC). Such a memo should attach documentary evidence and accurately characterize it.
The AP story states:
“In a briefing for reporters, Majidi said the sample kept at the FBI lab was destroyed because the bureau believed it might not have been allowed as evidence at trial.”
The AP story continues:
“Looking at hindsight, obviously we would do things differently today,” Majidi said.”
Looking to the future, Dr. Majidi should make sure the DOJ and FBI complies with FOIA given that so many things the DOJ says does not square with the documentary evidence. For example, the DOJ’s continued failure to produce the toner examination — which contradicts the DOJ’s allegations — is Dr. Majidi’s responsibility along with Dr. Bannan’s responsibility given their senior position. The buck has to stop somewhere.
“Majidi, who heads the FBI office in charge of investigating weapons of mass destruction, led a panel of government and private-sector scientists who detailed the scientific case against Ivins. They credited new ways of looking at the DNA of anthrax to whittle the list of labs and suspects who could have produced it. … As part of the February 2002 subpoena, Ivins gave investigators two samples of the unique Ames anthrax strain known as RMR-1029 that he created in his lab. One went to the FBI lab, where it was destroyed. The other went to the lab of Dr. Paul Keim, a geneticist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz.”
Keim still had his RMR-1029 sample in 2006 when the FBI realized it could match Ivins to two batches of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The anthrax letters killed five and sickened 17 after turning up on Capitol Hill, in newsrooms and postal facilities.
DXer said
In contrast to Dr. Majidi’s statements, the emails produced by USAMRIID indicate that it was on May 24, 2002 that Dr. Ivins received and forwarded instructions regarding submitting slants.
BugMaster said
Isn’t Comedian Idiot Majidi a “Battelle Alum”?
Anonymous said
Actually Majidi was with Los Alamos after being a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Kentucky. Los Alamos is one of the few national labs that is not manged by Battelle.
Since he’s an ex-professor of analytical chemistry there is no excuse for him not knowing that the FBI’s statement that there was “not enough sample” to determine the quantity of silicon present in the New York Post, Daschle and Brokaw powders is a fairy tale. His job, of course, is to lie for the FBI (much like the job of a diplomat is to lie for their country to other countries).
BugMaster said
I find it almost comical that one of his questions he posed to the NAS was something like:
“How easy is it to contaminate a culture with b. subtilis?”
Sounds like he knows as much about microbiology and has as much actual real-lab micro experience as Ed!