
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?
