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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2824 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 24, 2024

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Anyone have any thoughts on the 2001 anthrax attacks, particularly whether the accused perpetrator was truly guilty? If this is something you have researched let me know.

There are a few things that I think are at least pretty interesting and are well-agreed upon (e.g. you can find them on Wikipedia, you don't need to go down rabbit holes). The FBI and CDC almost immediately deleted a huge chunk of physical evidence:

The FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) both gave permission for Iowa State University to destroy the Iowa anthrax archive and the archive was destroyed on October 10 and 11, 2001.[80] The FBI and CDC investigation was hampered by the destruction of a large collection of anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Many scientists claim that the quick destruction of the anthrax spores collection in Iowa eliminated crucial evidence useful for the investigation. A precise match between the strain of anthrax used in the attacks and a strain in the collection would have offered hints as to when bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, as to how widely it had been distributed to researchers. Such genetic clues could have given investigators the evidence necessary to identify the perpetrators.[80]

The National Academy of Sciences rejected the claim that there was solid evidence pointing to Ivins:

In what appears to have been a response to lingering skepticism, on September 16, 2008, the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct an independent review of the scientific evidence that led the agency to implicate U.S. Army researcher Bruce Ivins in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001.[10] However, despite taking this action, Director Mueller said that the scientific methods applied in the investigation had already been vetted by the research community through the involvement of several dozen nonagency scientists.[10]

...

The NAS committee released its report on February 15, 2011, concluding that it was "impossible to reach any definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in the letters, based solely on the available scientific evidence".[160] The report also challenged the FBI and U.S. Justice Department's conclusion that a single-spore batch of anthrax maintained by Ivins at his laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland was the parent material for the spores in the anthrax letters.[160][161][162]

I don't know whether Bruce Ivins was a perpetrator, but I do know that the law enforcement responsible for investigating this royally fucked up the investigation, arrived at scientifically unsound conclusions, and were incentivized by the administration to wrap the answer up in a tidy package for public consumption. That ol' paragon of virtue, Bob Mueller, was the FBI director at the time. I would be unsurprised to find that Ivins was effectively bullied into committing suicide by an overzealous FBI that wanted to put a bow on the crime. I have no opinion on his actual guilt though.

I think it was a process of elimination thing. As I say below, Anthrax is so deadly that it would be very, very difficult to put it in an envelope and mail it to someone without killing yourself. If you or I were to get our hands on some anthrax and start to mess around with it, it is extremely likely that we would die a horrible death within the next few weeks. The number of people who have the technical expertise to use anthrax as a murder weapon is very limited, and anthrax itself is extremely difficult to obtain. Only a very limited number of people have any access to it. Since there are only a limited number of people in the US who have the technical expertise to carry out this kind of attack, and it was trivial for investigators to compile a list of 60 or 70 names, the FBI started out, so to speak, in field goal range, if not exactly in the red zone. The problem was that when they looked into the lives of these people individually they couldn't find anything approaching solid evidence that any one of them committed the crimes. Ivins was the one they liked the best, and as such, the brunt of the investigation fell on him. I remember there was some suggestion that he was behind false information that was leaked suggesting that Iraq was behind the attacks, and the guy definitely seemed to have a widget loose. Either way, even if the case against Ivins contains a lot of eyewash, the FBI was confident enough with it to proceed with prosecution, and after his suicide it was easy to pin it on a dead man and say "case closed". I don't know that there are any other good candidates.

I'm not sure either way, but some points against the accused person being guilty:

  • The feds always love to lead with anti government white people as the assumed perpetrator. The actual DC snipers were interviewed by police but released because they were both black and the profile said it was a white guy.
  • The National Enquirer got anthrax envelope sent to their corporate HQ. The company name is "American Media". That's the sort of mistake I'd expect to happen if it was done by someone foreign.
  • The first one was mailed 7 days after 9/11, which to me fits in more with a pre-planned follow up than someone coming up with the idea and implementing it after 9/11.

The argument against foreigners having doe it is that it takes quite a bit of technical expertise to handle anthrax and avoid killing yourself in the process. The envelopes were postmarked domestically, and the idea that a foreign national would be able to either smuggle anthrax into the US without triggering an infection in the process or being able to obtain it domestically are slim.

With hindsight, also that anthrax isn't consistent with the MO of any of the likely foreign suspects. The only foreign actor known to have the means and inclination to send anthrax letters is Russia, and Russia had no reason to poison a large number prominent Americans in autumn 2001.

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