US Anthrax Scientist Bruce Ivins
Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government’s case against the late Bruce Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.
In the face of the questions, FBI officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science tracing the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the FBI has failed to make a conclusive case.
“That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to make a scientific judgment one way or the other,” Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The information that has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there.”
FBI officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Ivins, who killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But the scrutiny may only raise further questions.
The bureau presented forensics information to congressional and government officials in a closed-door briefing held in the past week, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinced that the FBI had the right man, and they said some of the government’s public statements appeared incomplete or misleading.
For instance, the Justice Department said this month in unsealing court records against Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that did not appear to have come from his laboratory. But FBI officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks. Because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Ivins’s failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the FBI did not realize that it was a correct match until three years later.
In addition, people who were briefed by the FBI said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the anthrax attacks - another piece of evidence used to link Ivins to the attacks - could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to believe.
Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has followed the anthrax case closely and requested the briefing from the FBI, said in an interview that he was not ready to draw any firm conclusions about the investigation. But he said: “The case is built from a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence, and for a case this important, it’s troubling to have so many loose ends. The briefing pointed out even more loose ends than I thought there were before.”
Naba Barkakati, an engineer who is the chief technologist for the Government Accountability Office and who also attended the briefing, said of the FBI’s forensics case against Ivins: “It’s very hard to get the sense of whether this was scientifically good or bad. We didn’t really get the question settled, other than taking their word for it.”
The bureau’s laboratory work has come under sharp criticism in recent years for problems over DNA analysis, bullet tracing and other important forensic technology. In 2004, the laboratory mismatched a fingerprint taken from the Madrid terror bombings to a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, Brandon Mayfield, who was then arrested. He won a $2.8 million settlement.
With their main suspect in the anthrax killings dead, FBI officials say they realize they will again face tough scrutiny over the strength of their scientific evidence against Ivins. Indeed, conspiracy theories are already flourishing on many Web sites, with skeptical observers asking whether the Maryland scientist was set up to take the fall for the attacks or, worse yet, was a murder victim. The fact that the bureau pursued another scientist, Steven Hatfill, for years before agreeing to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed and then later exonerating him has only fueled the skepticism.
In its case against Ivins, the FBI developed a compelling profile of an erratic, mentally troubled man who could be threatening and obsessive, as in his odd fascination with a sorority from his college days. But investigators were never able to place him at the New Jersey mailboxes where the anthrax letters were dropped, and the case against him relied at its heart on the scientific evidence linking the anthrax in Ivins’s laboratory to the spores used in the attacks.
It took the FBI several years to develop the type of DNA testing that allowed them to trace the origins of the “attack strain,” as it was called, and they concluded that the anthrax that Ivins controlled was the only one of more than 1,000 samples they tested that matched it in all four of that strain’s genetic mutations.
Dwight Adams, a former director of the FBI laboratory who was deeply involved in managing the anthrax genetic research until he left the bureau in 2006, said he was confident that the groundbreaking forensic effort would be validated by the broad scientific community.
Recalling the early skepticism that a genetic fingerprint of an anthrax could ever be obtained, Adams said, “I think the bureau and the national assets, including the national labs and others, that were applied as a team can very easily defend what they did and the results.”
But had Ivins lived and faced trial for the anthrax killings, Thomas DeGonia 2nd, one of his lawyers, said, his legal team would have quickly tried to have the genetic testing of the anthrax strains thrown out of court as unreliable. The type of testing the FBI developed, he said “has never been proven or tested by the courts.”
Even if a jury had heard evidence about the genetic testing, DeGonia said, the lawyers would have tried to show that many other scientists had access to that same strain of anthrax. He said the fact that the Justice Department had Ivins under investigation for perhaps two years or longer - and that it was executing search warrants in the case even after his death - suggests that the department itself had doubts.
“It’s interesting that they’re still attempting to gather evidence,” he said, “if the case is as strong as they say it is.”
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anthrax,
fbi,
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