* Bugmaster reports … Dina Temple-Raston swallows the FBI’s anthrax story without any apparent concern about the facts … Dr. Ivins deserves better from a serious reporter

 

NPR's Dina Temple-Raston

 

Bugmaster reports …

• I attended Dina Temple-Raston’s lecture last week. Very little was about the anthrax case.
• When asked to respond to the recent news that the GAO was getting involved, she was rather dismissive of the new development.
• She feels very strongly that Ivins was guilty, and one reason she believes so was that “Ivins and Hatfill were co-workers for a period of time, and it was really Ivins who was responsible for all the FBI attention given to Hatfill”.
  • Actually, it was media hype that played the main role in Hatfill’s vilification.
  • Perhaps Temple-Raston and others in her profession are taking a page from the FBI’s playbook: Blame It On The Dead Guy!
• Also, from Ms. Temple-Raston: “All his co-workers think Ivins did it”.
  • Really! What about Dr. Adamovicz, Dr. Heine, and Dr. Bryne?
• “Ivins had the skills to do it”. Not exactly.
  • The skills to produce the raw material he certainly had, but to convert the wet spores into the deadly form sent to Senator Leahy (without contaminating the area where the material was being processed and killing the cat) would have required the knowledge of a protein chemist, not a microbiologist.
• Temple-Raston does not have near the technical knowledge to be able to speculate how this crime was committed. And if she believes Ivins was guilty, fine, but as a NPR reporter, I still think she has an obligation to state actual facts, not exaggerations or FBI bullshit.

LMW COMMENT …

Not such a good week for NPR. Too many reporters simply accept what the FBI has said, without probing through the paper-thin veneer to disclose that their case (or at least the case they’ve told the world about) is totally bogus: no evidence, no witnesses, an impossible timeline, science that proves innocence instead of guilt.

So what really happened? And why? 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.

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *