* 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 *

* is that the FBI’s entire case against Dr. Ivins? Only by charging a dead man and avoiding the need to prove their case in court could the FBI make their paper-thin allegation that Dr. Ivins was the sole perpetrator … or even involved at all

Dr. Bruce Ivins

NPR interview of Dina Temple-Raston (2-19-10) …

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston was tracking the story for us two years ago when Ivins first surfaced as the FBI’s main suspect, and she joins me now. Dina, the FBI says Ivins was their man a year and half ago. And now today they’re formerly closing the case. What exactly does it mean to close the case?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, by formally closing the case, the FBI is no longer bound by grand jury secrecy requirements. So that means they can release a lot of the evidence that we didn’t get to see back in August of 2008 when the story broke.

SIEGEL: Well, does the new evidence that came out today, does it settle once and for all that Ivins did it?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, the fact that Ivins killed himself without a note before he was charged means that I think there will always be doubts in this case. But basically this is how the FBI lays out the case –

• that the strain of anthrax that was used in the attacks was a strain that Ivins and only a handful of other people had access to.

NOTE: In the Amerithrax Investigative Summary, the FBI puts the number higher than even Ivins’ defenders.  They say over 350 had access.

• And the FBI says that they’ve eliminated the other people as suspects.
• Back during that timeframe in 2001, Ivins was spending a lot of long hours in the lab alone and there was no big project going on the lab in September 2001 that would’ve justified his time there.
• And then Ivins explained the hours by saying he was having a difficult home life and was trying to get away from it.
• But he kept changing his story, so it made the FBI sort of doubt that excuse.

SIEGEL: There were reports in 2008 of some disturbing emails that Ivins had sent.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Exactly. The last time they released some information about this,

• the FBI released some emails that showed that he might have had some mental health issues,
• talking about feeling like he was two people and not one.
• He was stalking a co-worker. He was sending her presents and going to different cities to send them.
• These were all things that worried the FBI because the anthrax mailings were actually mailed from various cities with fake addresses.

read the entire interview at … http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123898323

LMW COMMENT …

and here’s what the FBI is not telling us …

• there is no physical evidence linking Dr. Ivins to the murders
• there are no witnesses linking Dr. Ivins to the preparation or mailing of the attack anthrax
• the timeline the FBI has proposed, for Ivins preparing the “weaponized” anthrax or going to Princeton to mail the letters, is impossible
• the DNA science, at best, links Dr. Ivins to a beaker to which 350 other scientists may have had access

******

CASE CLOSED by Lew Weinstein is a novel which answers the question …

why did the FBI fail to solve the 2001 anthrax case?

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *