17. According to family members, FBI agents publicly confronted and accused Dr. Ivins of the attacks, showed pictures of the victims to his daughter, and offered the $2.5 million reward to his son in the months leading up to his suicide. These aggressive, overt surveillance techniques appear similar to those used on Dr. Hatfill with the apparent purpose of intimidation rather than legitimate investigation. Please describe whether and to what degree there is any truth to these claims.

15 and 16 ask great questions too.

15. After the FBI identified Dr. Ivins as the sole suspect, why was he not detained? …

16. Had an indictment of Dr. Ivins been drafted before his death? …

Reporters should be lining up at Taylor’s office door getting answers to their questions.

Regarding the complex matter of the wnd compound used, there are many helpful links provided in the thread, only some of which I had time to explore; one of the links to a university site is broken already.

There was a presidential commission instituted in response to the BioWmd incidents under discussion, which I noticed many years later in a tech publication, Computerworld, which awarded a yearly prize to one of the consortia of outfits who responded to the president’s call for US Postal Service to develop a natively ‘intelligent mail‘ concept so future incidents would be more instantaneously traceable. CW reports the idea fell flat, but the award went out, regardless; the dossier CW has removed from its awards page, likely because it tied into the Swift scandal, as one of the ideas which emerged early was to employ banking act regulatory authority to snoop for terrist organization finance networks and treat them cryogenically, which roused the ire of eurobankers and Continent privacy watchdogs, yet, proved effective in shutting off funding to numerous ‘listed’, terrist organizations. Interestingly, one of the USPS officials responsible for overseeing integration with the administration’s request for smarter mail was a former oilfield GIS modelling expert transitorily at CiscoSystems*, of sorts, and prior to that served in some senior IT official capacity for Halliburton. It is commonly seen that experience in a wide variety of industries may correlate, at the IT level, so the career advancement sequence culminating, fairly recently, in the title “executive vice president and chief information officer of the U. S. Postal Service (USPS)” seems mundane.

My questions might include whether some of the presidential commission’s aggregated knowledgebase has fed subsequent projects, and whether any of this integrates with the fragments the news media are cobbling together incrementally in the Ivins BioWmd matter.
____
*This seems to be some oilco trade conference presentation literature he wrote likely 2007 while he working the energy modelling function for CiscoSystems.

The Honorable Michael B. Mukasey
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.,
Washington, DC 20530

The Honorable Robert S. Mueller, Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20535

Dear Attorney General Mukasey and Director Mueller:

Thank you for ensuring that Congressional staff received an advanced briefing yesterday of the information released to the public in the Amerithrax investigation. The three affidavits provided represent an important, but small first step toward providing Congress and the public a full accounting of the evidence gathered by the FBI.

At yesterday’s briefing, Justice Department and FBI officials invited follow-up questions after there had been time to read the affidavits. Indeed, there are many important questions to be answered about the FBI’s seven-year investigation, the basis for its conclusion that Dr. Bruce Ivins conducted the attacks alone, and the events leading to his suicide. To begin this inquiry, please provide complete and detailed answers to the following questions:
1. What is the date (month and year) that the FBI determined that the anthrax came from a specified flask in Ivins’s lab (”RMR-1029″)?

2. When (month and year) did the FBI determine that Dr. Hatfill never had access to the anthrax used in the killings?

3. How did the FBI determine that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the anthrax used in the killings? Was that because the FBI determined that Dr. Hatfill no longer worked at USAMRIID when the powder was made?

4. Was Dr. Hatfill or his counsel informed that Dr. Hatfill had been cleared of any involvement in the anthrax killings before the Department of Justice offered a settlement to him? Was he informed before signing the settlement agreement with him? If not, please explain why not.

5. Was Judge Walton (the judge overseeing the Privacy Act litigation) ever informed that Dr. Hatfill had been eliminated as a suspect in the anthrax killings? If so, when. If not, please explain why not.

6. Was Dr. Ivins ever polygraphed in the course of the investigation? If so, please provide the dates and results of the exam(s). If not, please explain why not.

7. Of the more than 100 people who had access to RMR 1029, how many were provided custody of samples sent outside Ft. Detrick? Of those, how many samples were provided to foreign laboratories?

8. If those with access to samples of RMR 1029 in places other than Ft. Detrick had used the sample to produce additional quantities of anthrax, would that anthrax appear distinguishable from RMR 1029?

9. How can the FBI be sure that none of the samples sent to other labs were used to create additional quantities of anthrax that would appear distinguishable from RMR 1029?

10. Please describe the methodology and results of any oxygen isotope measurements taken to determine the source of water used to grow the spores used in the anthrax attacks.

11. Was there video equipment which would record the activities of Dr. Ivins at Ft. Detrick on the late nights he was there on the dates surrounding the mailings? If so, please describe what examination of the video revealed.

12. When did the FBI first learn of Dr. Ivins’ late-night activity in the lab around the time of the attacks? If this is powerful circumstantial evidence of his guilt, then why did this information not lead the FBI to focus attention on him, rather than Dr. Hatfill, much sooner in the investigation?

13. When did the FBI first learn that Dr. Ivins was prescribed medications for various symptoms of mental illness? If this is circumstantial evidence of his guilt, then why did this information not lead the FBI to focus attention on him, rather than Dr. Hatfill, much sooner in the investigation? Of the 100 individuals who had access to RMR 1029, were any others found to suffer from mental illness, be under the care of a mental health professional, or prescribed anti-depressant/anti-psychotic medications? If so, how many?

14. What role did the FBI play in conducting and updating the background examination of Dr. Ivins in order for him to have clearance and work with deadly pathogens at Ft. Detrick?

15. After the FBI identified Dr. Ivins as the sole suspect, why was he not detained? Did the U.S. Attorney’s Office object to seeking an arrest or material witness warrant? If not, did anyone at FBI order a slower approach to arresting Ivins?

16. Had an indictment of Dr. Ivins been drafted before his death? If so, what additional information did it contain beyond the affidavits already released to the public? If not, then when, if ever, had a decision been made to seek an indictment from the grand jury?

17. According to family members, FBI agents publicly confronted and accused Dr. Ivins of the attacks, showed pictures of the victims to his daughter, and offered the $2.5 million reward to his son in the months leading up to his suicide. These aggressive, overt surveillance techniques appear similar to those used on Dr. Hatfill with the apparent purpose of intimidation rather than legitimate investigation. Please describe whether and to what degree there is any truth to these claims.

18. What additional documents will be released, if any, and when will they be released?

Please provide your responses in electronic format. Please have your staff contact (202) 224-4515 with any questions related to this request.

Sincerely,

I believe the staffers may have been reading us!

In short, while Taylor talked a lot about the possibility of making an entirely circumstantial case and claimed repeatedly that, had they tried this, they would have been able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Bruce Ivins was “acting alone,” they tried to dodge admitting that while they have fairly strong evidence tying Ivins to the anthrax used in the case, their evidence goes to shit as soon as you try to prove that Ivins then took that anthrax and mailed it to reporters and senators.

You’d absolutely hope the investigators tasked to track down the perp in the anthrax caper would at the very minimum be able to identify the person responsible at the government laboratory for manufacturing the strain used. That would be the very least they could do given the positions they held in the DOJ. If they couldn’t even accomplish that basic task, they should never have been recruited by the agency in the first place.

But that was as far as they got; the bare minimum which was merely preliminary to making a case for who had done it.

There will be very successful lawsuits coming out of this, I fairly certain.

That’s because everybody keeps looking at the damned ham sandwich.

Sophisticated Anthrax murderers remain free, are likely federal government employed/trained, and no police agency will ever pursue them.

The FBI, whose job is to protect us from crime on the home turf, are a bumbling, politicized keystone cop-shop staffed by dim-bulbs selected solely for fealty to an idiot president and his party.

The DOJ, whose job is to uphold the law of the land and not to protect an imperial president from the will of the people is a polital arm of the OVP.

And congress, whose job is to provide oversight on the executive branch and defend against foreign and domestic enemy of the Constition, full of spineless cowards (called democrats).

Gerald Ford was an FBI snitch on the Warren Commission.