What the FBI Knows: For Bruce Ivins and for us - EXCELLENT OPED

[Guest guest]

Quote: " As a consumer of the BioPort vaccine himself, Bruce was as motivated as

anyone to get a better vaccine in place. "

What the FBI Knows: For Bruce Ivins and for us

http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-the-FBI-Knows-For-Br-by--Ferrari-\

080812-743.html

" I don't think the FBI knows what the FBI knows " – testifying

before the 9/11 Commission

In the summer of 2001, two hijackers were renting lodgings from an FBI asset

in San Diego, California. But the FBI couldn't be bothered to know in the same

way that they ran off O'Neill when he was " on fire " about Bin Laden and

they couldn't be bothered to listen to him. The next thing you know, thousands

of people are dead, O'Neill is dead and there's a scar in the heart of

Manhattan. In 2005, the FBI is sure, knows with cold institutional certainty

that Steve Hatfill is the anthrax mailer and before you can turn around, they're

paying out 5 million dollars for ruining the life of an innocent man and

publicly, too, by pillorying him in the press. You'd think they'd have learned

by now. You'd think they'd have a picture of Jewell up in every single

FBI office and a special promise to say silently every morning before sitting

down to the day's work.

You'd think by now the FBI would have a long needed moment of ontological

panic and ask themselves how they know what they know. In 2003, they mapped out

every single minute of Steve Hatfill's life on the days surrounding the two

anthrax mailings and they were not loathe to announce that to the New York

Times. But in the last few weeks, when they were accusing Bruce Ivins in the

press, they didn't seem to know that Ivins couldn't be in Frederick, land at

4:30 and in Princeton, New Jersey at 5:00 p.m. on September 17th, 2001, although

they seemed to know each fact separately. It's as if the FBI has had the

membrane connecting the two lobes of its institutional brain slashed, isolating

one working hemisphere from the other.

The FBI claims that new technology can trace DNA from the weapon to Dr. Ivins

when the tech to map a genome was available in 1998 and while withholding the

exact nature of that new technology. Do you believe in magic? They claim that

Ivins was the sole custodian of that flask of anthrax but do not mention the

origins of that anthrax at the Dugway Proving Ground and they also elide the

fact that ten other researchers had access to that same anthrax at Fort Detrick

alone. And that's without considering all the researchers and labs that obtained

samples from Dr. Ivins over the years, or the fact that Ivins helped evaluate

the letter sent to Tom Daschle. The FBI is dealing with a crime scene faceted

over space and time as if it was a simple plane, or a projection, a Power Point

presentation they can point to unambiguously. The FBI does not know what it

knows. e was right.

I'd like to ask them if Bruce Ivins was so careful that he could drive

weaponized anthrax two hundred miles and mail it without leaving any trace at

all on his person, in his car or around his residence or, if he was so careless

that he mailed anthrax to Pat Leahy and Tom Daschle and didn't know that postal

machines would pound the deadly powder out into the public sphere long before

the envelopes were delivered. Which is it?

The FBI has said Bruce Ivins was afraid his vaccine program would be canceled

and that motivated him to mail the anthrax. How is that possible? Ivins had a

new vaccine in the works. No matter what happened to the BioPort vaccine he had

been hired to fix, Dr. Ivins would get work. Make no mistake about it. Even if

BioPort's product went down in flames, Dr. Ivins had another vaccine in

development and his expertise would be in demand. There is always work for

skilled people like Bruce Ivins. As a consumer of the BioPort vaccine himself,

Bruce was as motivated as anyone to get a better vaccine in place.

In 2001, the FBI knew the anthrax mailer was a loner

Source: Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2001.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MEGAN GARVEY, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is increasingly convinced that the person behind the

recent anthrax attacks is a lone wolf within the United States who has no links

to terrorist groups but is an opportunist using the Sept. 11 hijackings to vent

his rage, investigators said Friday.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/lonerlikelyanthrax.ht...

The FBI is still pushing the idea that Ivins fits the " loner " description. But

he doesn't. He was a married man with two adopted children, with mentees and

colleagues and neighbors.

Fairfield resident recalls time at Fort Detrick; worked with suspected anthrax

terrorist

While civilians like Battersby work at Fort Detrick, the site has military

management, she said. And some people, such as those who want to advance their

careers, have stayed quiet about their experience there, according to Battersby.

(Emphasis added.)

But the few people not worried about talking about their experience with the

government should talk, she said. " It's painful to me on a whole bunch of

levels, " Battersby said. " I feel like I should tell my story because I know I

can. " (Emphasis added.)

http://www.eveningsun.com/news/ci_10157273

Are people who knew Bruce Ivins afraid to speak out for fear of losing their

jobs if they disagree with what the FBI " knows " ? Battersby seems to say exactly

that.

The reality is that this case hinges not on what the FBI knows but what the

American public can be made to fear. Again. When asked last week why the FBI

didn't take Ivins into custody, a Defense Department spokesperson (spokes

spinner?) said the FBI didn't want to compromise the investigation – when the

whole neighborhood saw how Bruce could barely get around FBI vehicles to get

into his own driveway. It's one of the few acts of solidarity seen lately

between DoD and Justice. They haven't co-operated so well since the Justice

Department came up with the rationale for torture and the Defense Department

found the means to implement that policy. (And here there is a subtext of

corruption so profound that you wonder how long, if ever, it will take to clean

up the Justice Department and how long it will be before we can again believe

the Defense Department deserves the respect our uniformed young people pay it by

their service.)

To grease the hinge of this case, last week the FBI fronted Duley, a low

level mental health worker, in a much challenged recovery herself to be generous

or just plain " wet " in the vernacular of alcohol rehab. She lit up the media

like a Christmas tree. Instead of quietly seeking a restraining order in

private, she chose to go to a public hearing and to do a very bad impression of

the clinician she is not. She accused Ivins of being a revenge killer, of hating

women, of being a homicidal sociopath as if that was a diagnosis in the DSM IV,

which it is not.

It's worth mentioning that while Ms. Duley was making these serious

accusations, Ivins had no criminal record at all but, she did.

The media lit up like Macy's on Christmas Eve when the Salvation Army bell is

ringing loudest over the heads of hassled shoppers. In particular, there was a

pair at the Associated Press that could not recycle these outlandish claims

often enough and without a shred of skepticism. From that venerable fount, these

claims were spammed all over the American press and the cable channels. The fact

that Ms. Duley was only recently out of house detention for her own problems or

that she had no degree in psychology or that she had only seen Ivins a handful

of times over the period of six months or that she was firmly in the hands of

the FBI while making these claims, never seemed to make it into even the fifth

paragraph of any of these cloned stories.

Predictably, the resulting spam from the AP hit pieces wind up reducing Bruce

Ivins into a stereotype at Wikipedia, where as late as last night he is

described as a " conservative Catholic " . Bruce Ivins was not a conservative. His

letters to the Frederick News-Press are the letters of a curious, left-leaning,

inclusive writer. A person with a quiet and persistent sense of humor that is

often turned on himself. A thoughtful person who believes women should be

included in the priesthood, that people are indeed born gay, that all people

deserve the respect of their fellows. Someone who cared deeply about his

community. These are not the letters of a hidebound ideologue or an abortion

clinic bomber. But, like those iconographic portraits of Renaissance monarchs,

Bruce Ivins the person is becoming indistinguishable from the FBI Bruce Ivins

caricature at Wikipedia, illustrated but not represented.

Contrast this public misrepresentation with the issue of coerced silence brought

up by Battersby who remembers the actual man. The best example of that silence

may be the hundreds of people attending Ivins' two memorials last week in

Frederick, ironically one private and one public, their very attendance a

rejection of the official story in favor of honoring the man they knew who

juggled with their children and wrote songs to celebrate their promotions.

In the middle of the Ivins tragedy and in the middle of the FBI claiming to know

more than they know and more than they will tell the public, the Department of

Health and Human Services took new bids for the national stockpile of anthrax

vaccines from contractors in land. The news item stuck in my mind because

July 31st is my son's birthday.

I need to get this clear for my son, in the way that mothers always need to

get danger real clear. The anthrax attacks were terrorism, not discrete attacks

on individuals. Whoever mailed that anthrax meant to terrorize, not to attack

specific targets. Those envelopes were all mailed to executives and anyone

sophisticated enough to mail that substance was sophisticated enough to know

that executives don't open their own mail. So, when the FBI makes claims about

Ivins' motives regarding the addressees, it just makes them look impotently

disconnected from their own purpose. Ivins had no motive to send those envelopes

to those people. No one did. That mail was sent to frighten a people, not to

attack anyone in particular.

And as for Dr. Ivins in particular, there is nothing in his mountain of writings

that demonstrates he ever imagined hurting other people in particular or in

general. When his relapse was pounding him, he drank, he wrote to his friends

and he went to his doctor. He made up silly jingles about his symptoms in the

way that optimists deploy humor against danger. But there is not one sentence

anywhere that indicates he even considered harming another as a solution to his

distress. The FBI cannot place him at the scene of the crime – not physically

and not in imagination. If there is more, we haven't seen it.

This has been the the biggest investigation the FBI has taken on in its entire

history second only to 9/11. What a spectacular failure. And how identically

twinned that failure has been by our media's failure to interrogate, at every

point and over and over, the shoddy media circus that has passed for crime

solving.

Rush Holt and Pat Leahy are rumbling about Congressional hearings but as well

intentioned as they are, there is no reason to have confidence that our Congress

will resolve this crime against the American people, against Ivins, his family,

or the Fort Detrick community just there is no reason to have confidence that

appointing an independent investigative panel will mend our broken justice

system. How sad is it that we cannot rely on our institutions to take care of us

in this most basic way.

We have slipped so far down the rabbit hole of unaccountability, I only hope

that the next time someone decides to send vectors into the public sphere, the

deaths will not be too terrible and the fear will be more mercifully short. At

some point, though, you have to wonder who our media believes will consume its

product if we are rightfully unwilling to handle our own mail.

The anthrax attacks were deadly and we can never forget those terrible losses.

It's equally true that the Bush Justice Department and its shameful media gaggle

have been more destructive than the person who deliberately put that deadly

substance into our mail. Between them, they misled us into bombing an innocent

people – enabling hundreds of thousands of deaths, the displacing of millions

and the irresolution of this case which speaks to the foundation of any

government: the safety of its citizenry. There is no reason to have confidence

in either the remains of the Justice Department or in the remains of our news

media.

And in the meanwhile, Bruce Ivins was driven to suicide. How can anyone feel all

right with that when there is not only a " reasonable doubt " of his guilt, but a

doubt so big that the Grand Canyon could safely use it for a pit stop?

Who can feel safer today knowing Dr. Ivins is dead and will not get a day in

court? Without that process, who can trust that this case has been closed

against future harm to the American people? Some wise guy said, " Trust but

verify " . When did verifying the most basic elements of our system of justice

become so impossible in our country? I don't trust the FBI to know what it

knows. I don't see our media checking behind them. To quote Mr. Poe of Texas,

" And that's just how it is " .

" Gerard P. s, another of Dr. Ivins' former colleagues, said he knew that

Dr. Ivins was frustrated, but that he doubted that Dr. Ivins would consider such

a step. "

I'm with you, Mr. s. A lot of us are frustrated. I don't know if Bruce

Ivins did the crime that he has been convicted of in the press. I sincerely

doubt it. That we allowed him to be so convicted is more destructive than the

original crime.

If the civil, peaceful and private expression of frustration is now a

terrorist activity by implication, rumor or assertion, and without resort to a

court of law, then the attacks on us, on the American people are ongoing, no

matter what the FBI believes it knows or refuses to know, and no matter how

cheerfully this doubtful " knowledge " is broadcast by a contaminated press.

Randi J. Airola, © 517-819-5926