By Courtney Mabeus News-Post Staff

"Scientists who worked with Bruce Ivins said it would have been impossible for him to produce the amount of spores necessary to carry out deadly anthrax attacks given the time frame and equipment available to him at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Ivins died five years ago today as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice prepared to formally charge him with carrying out the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five and injured 17 others in the wake of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He had worked as a top government anthrax researcher at USAMRIID since December 1980.
Ivins died from an apparent suicide as the result of acetaminophen overdose.

A National Research Council committee in 2011 said conclusions reached by the FBI about the 2001 anthrax attacks were not fully supported by science.
The committee said that “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in letters mailed to New York City and Washington, D.C., based solely on the available scientific evidence.”

9/11 Researcher Dr. Graeme McQueen's Radio Interview on KPFA's "Guns and Butter" with Bonnie Faulkner explains how the anthrax attacks, which began one week after September 11 and were made to look like Muslims did it, were later proven to have come from U.S. Military labs.

McQueen says the delivery of this weapons-grade strain of anthrax in envelopes marked "Death to America" and "Allah Is Great," to various parties including Senators Leahy and Daschle, were crucial in perpetuating the environment of fear and getting the Patriot Act passed (audio):

(The topic begins around 11 minutes into the show.)

Listen at

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/71693

"A ranking Republican Senator has written to the Justice Department demanding to know why it quickly retracted court papers that called into serious question a key pillar of the criminal case against Bruce Ivins, the FBI’s prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax mail attacks.

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, who has long questioned the legitimacy of the FBI’s findings in the case, wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller this week, regarding a filing by Justice Department civil lawyers in July that noted that the Army’s biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md., “did not have the specialized equipment in a containment laboratory that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.”

In other words, the filing noted that Ivins’ lab, often referred to as the “hot suite”, did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that ended up being mailed to members of the Senate and reporters in the fall of 2001".

Obama Veto Is Threatened on 2010 Intelligence Budget Measure
By Jeff Bliss
March 15 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, an administration official said.

A proposed probe by the intelligence agencies’ inspector general “would undermine public confidence” in an FBI probe of the attacks “and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions,” Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

On Feb. 19, the Obama administration released a 92-page summary of a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that said the late Bruce Ivins, a government scientist, was behind the attacks. Lawmakers including Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, have questioned the thoroughness of the investigation.

Anthrax-laced letters sent to lawmakers and news outlets nine years ago infected 22 people, killing five.

Scientists Slam FBI Anthrax Probe
November 03, 2008
New York Post

It was an open-and-shut case, the FBI said.

But three months after agents pinned the post-9/11 anthrax mailings on Army scientist Bruce Ivins - who committed suicide as the FBI closed in on him - his former colleagues have approached a lawyer to sue the feds for fingering the wrong man, The Post has learned.

They argue that the FBI abused its power and violated its own policies as they probed an innocent man for six months.

One of Ivins' former colleagues was being aggressively pressured to confess to the crimes just two months before Ivins killed himself on July 29, he told The Post. And he identified at least one other employee who was under the same pressure.

Terrific column in the Frederick News-Post today about the flimsiness of the govt case against Ivins. Please email Katherine Heerbrandt thanking her for naming the "elephant on the grassy knoll."

Note that contractor Battelle, who received this contract for $750 million, is a tax-exempt organization. No doubt they willl use the $750 million to heal the sick and bring comfort to the afflicted.

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/opinion/display_columnist.htm?StoryID=79410

Katherine Heerbrandt
If not Ivins ...
Originally published August 29, 2008

When Norm Covert, a conservative former Fort Detrick public affairs officer, and attorney Barry Kissin, liberal activist opposing Detrick's biolab expansion, agree that Bruce Ivins was not the anthrax killer, either the world's spinning off its axis, or the truth is staring us so hard in the face we'd have to be blind to miss it.

Covert's piece this week in thetentacle.com establishes what many in our community, including scientists and support staff at USAMRIID, past and present, know: Bruce Ivins had nothing to do with preparing or sending the anthrax letters. --

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/119065.php

They have worked for almost seven years in secret.

Most people did not know that the work in Ray Goehner's materials characterization department at Sandia National Laboratories was contributing important information to the FBI's investigation of letters containing bacillus anthracis, the spores that cause the disease anthrax. The spores were mailed in the fall of 2001 to several news media offices and to two U.S. senators. Five people were killed.

Sandia's work demonstrated to the FBI that the form of bacillus anthracis contained in those letters was not a weaponized form, a form of the bacteria prepared to disperse more readily. The possibility of a weaponized form was of great concern to investigators, says Joseph Michael, the principal investigator for the project. This information was crucial in ruling out state-sponsored terrorism.

Two important polls at http://www.opednews.com. You will need to login or register to participate.

http://www.opednews.com/Poll/WTC-7-Brought-Down-By-Fire-by-Gene-Cappa-080821-565.html
NIST Report on WTC 7 indicates "fire" alone collapsed the skyscraper building in a mere 6.5 seconds.

http://www.opednews.com/Poll/Poll-Anthrax-Attacks-Solv-by-Kris-Malmquist-080821-508.html
Do you agree with the government's conclusion that Mr. Bruce Ivins was solely responsible for the anthrax attacks of mid-September 2001?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/opinion/20wed2.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

August 20, 2008
Editorial
Too Little Information

An F.B.I. briefing on Monday was supposed to bolster the agency’s conclusion that a lone, disturbed bioterrorism scientist was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, sickened 17 others and terrified the country. It fell short of its goal.

The F.B.I. spent years pointing a finger at a different suspect. It is not enough for the agency to brush off continuing skepticism. “There’s always going to be a spore on a grassy knoll,” Vahid Majidi, the chief of the agency’s weapons of mass destruction division told reporters.

A group of independent experts needs to look hard at the F.B.I.’s technical analysis and detective work that combined to convince investigators that the mailed anthrax must have come from Dr. Bruce Ivins, a scientist at the Army’s bioterrorism lab in Fort Detrick in Maryland.

[Bad link]

by Sheila Casey / August 19th, 2008

US Attorney Jeff Taylor was sweating on August 6, as he laid out his case against the late Dr. Bruce Ivins at a news conference-and with good reason. Anyone familiar with the case is well aware that Dr. Ivins was railroaded, and that the news conference was a flimsy web of lies.

Ivins had nothing to do with the 2001 anthrax attacks. The attacks were almost certainly carried out by the only group that had the means to produce the highly weaponized anthrax in the letters: the CIA, its contractor Battelle Memorial Institute of West Jefferson, Ohio., and the Army at Dugway in Utah.

The DOJ-FBI frame-up of Ivins rests heavily upon the claim of new advances in genetic testing which supposedly prove that the killer anthrax could have come only from Ivins’ flask.

http://www.truthout.org/article/double-standards-global-war-terror

MONDAY 18 AUGUST 2008

Double Standards in the Global War on Terror: Anthrax Department

by: Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com

Oh, the spectacle of it all - and don't think I'm referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelps's thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo's one million dollar "bonus," a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I'm thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29 and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/08/cia-had-killer-anthrax.html

We previously heard that 16 labs possessed the RMR-1029 anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. It appears that we should now add the CIA and its contractors.

A December 2001 Washington Post article states that the CIA had Ames anthax.

Indeed, the articles states that "The FBI is focusing on a contractor that worked with the CIA".

The contractor could very well have been Battelle Memorial Institute, a long-time CIA contractor which had carried out anthrax experiments for decades. As the BBC noted:

Anthrax investigation should be investigated, congressmen say

Sen. Charles Grassley and Rep. Rush Holt want hearings into the Justice Department and FBI's handling of the case.

By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 8, 2008

Source: LATimes.com

WASHINGTON -- After seven long years, the FBI and the Justice Department say they are closing the books on the anthrax investigation.

But the investigation into the investigation is only beginning, and it will focus on what Congress members described Thursday as apparent missteps by authorities that dramatically prolonged the probe, unfairly maligned an innocent government scientist, and raised questions about whether federal agents had conclusively ruled out other suspects besides microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), frequent critics of the FBI, demanded a far more detailed release of documents by the bureau and the Justice Department to support the government's case, as well as congressional hearings into the investigation.