Posts Tagged ‘Hartford Courant’

* Hartford Courant: Anthrax Attacks Still A Mystery After 10 Years … LMW: is it possible FBI Director Mueller, an intelligent man for sure, doesn’t know the FBI has failed to make a convincing evidence-based case against Dr. Ivins? … and what does it mean if he does know but won’t admit it?

Posted by DXer on October 4, 2011

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Mueller & Ivins

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After the World Trade Center was destroyed 10 years ago, death arrived once again — in the mail. Anthrax, a terrifying and deadly bacterium that multiplies rapidly when inhaled, began to appear in letters sent to a variety of places.
Among these were the New York Post, the offices of two U.S. senators, the office of NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and, bizarrely, the home of 94-year-old Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford.
Mrs. Lundgren and four others died; 17 were injured. Thousands were exposed and had to take powerful antibiotics. The government seemed paralyzed.
The FBI investigators careened from one false lead to another.

For years, the FBI harassed scientist Steven Hatfill as the only suspect in the case until the agency was forced to apologize and award him $5.8 million for slandering him and destroying his career.
After Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins committed suicide in 2008, the FBI announced that he was the likely source of the anthrax attacks.

But the agency’s case is circumstantial and important questions remain unsolved:

The anthrax spores were “weaponized” with a high percentage of silicon, making the bacteria even more lethal. Yet there’s no evidence that Dr. Ivins either had the equipment or was capable of the elaborate process necessary to add the silicon.

One of the 9/11 hijackers, Ahmed Alhaznawi, reported to a Florida hospital with a dark wound that the attending physician told the FBI was consistent with cutaneous anthrax, which causes skin lesions.
The cave at Tora Bora where Osama bin Laden hid for a time twice tested positively for the same strain of anthrax found in the letters, according to Pulitzer-prize winning author Laurie Garrett, author of “I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks.”
The Government Accountability Office is currently examining the FBI’s botched investigation.
U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, from whose New Jersey district the perpetrator mailed the anthrax-laced letters, has for years proposed congressional hearings into the anthrax attacks. So far, nobody’s listened.
Such hearings are the least that should occur. A decade without clear answers is infuriating — and unacceptable.

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