Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Frank van Rutten van De Financiële Telegraaf schrijft op 23 juli 2015 het volgende:

‘Ondernemers, let op uw saeck. „De onderwereld rukt met intimidatie en witwaspraktijken op in de bovenwereld”, waarschuwden MKB-Nederland en justitie onlangs. Individuele criminelen of complete (motor)bendes zullen de komende jaren proberen hun achterste op uw directeursstoel te manoeuvreren. Inclusief geweld en bedreiging. Zo kan uw met bloed, zweet en tranen opgebouwde zaak zomaar verworden tot ordinaire witwasserette. Weg bedrijf. In de horeca zijn de voorbeelden bekend. En ook de beveiligingsbranche is kwetsbaar. Maar ook andere sectoren zullen de komende jaren hiermee kennismaken. Ondernemers die reeds slachtoffer zijn, of concrete voorbeelden uit hun omgeving kennen, wordt nu met klem gevraagd aangifte te doen of hun verhaal te doen. Desnoods anoniem. „Als we niks doen, gaat het van kwaad tot erger”, onderschrijft MKB-NL deze oproep. Maar staat het belang van de getroffen ondernemers daarbij wel voldoende voorop? Het heeft er alles van weg dat dit vooral een wapen is in de jacht op de beruchte motorbendes, momenteel topprioriteit in opsporingskringen. Dat is op zich goed, maar gedupeerde ondernemers zullen nu niet ineens massaal uit de school klappen. Dat deden ze hiervoor ook al niet, uit vrees voor hun eigen gezondheid en die van hun familie of omdat ze chantabel zijn gemaakt.’

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Deze week kwam de politie veelvuldig in het nieuws. Er waren verschillende rechtszaken tegen schietende politiemannen en dat pakte niet altijd goed uit. Niet voor de slachtoffers, maar ook niet voor de politiemannen. En dat zorgde voor erg veel onstuimigheid bij de doorgaans zo rustige mannen. Het was ook wel een hard gelag.

Eén politieman werd veroordeeld tot maar liefst twee jaar gevangenisstraf voor het neerschieten van de bijrijder van een man die ervandoor wilde gaan tijdens een mislukte aanhouding. Twee andere politiemannen moesten terecht staan voor het doodschieten van een onruststoker met een bijlachtig voorwerp. Opmerkelijk was dat de man in de rug werd geschoten. Beide slachtoffers wilden er dus vandoor gaan en hadden het niet per se gemunt op de politiemannen. Toch voelden dezen zich zeer bedreigd. Een soort verlatingsangst wellicht?

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Een prachtig verhaal over een politieman en hoe het gaat met vrijheid wanneer je eventjes niet goed oplet.

De politieman is commissaris Bouman. Dat is er niet zomaar één. Commissaris Bouman is de grote baas van de Nederlandse politie. De allerhoogste chef. Vlak onder de minister van Justitie en Veiligheid. In een rechtsstaat is het zo geregeld dat de minister, als vertegenwoordiger des volks, de verantwoording heeft over het politieapparaat. Hij is dus de baas en hij is verantwoording schuldig aan het parlement. We zullen dus uitleggen wat een rechtsstaat eigenlijk is. Wikipedia zegt het volgende hierover:

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

In de landelijke voortgangsrapportage Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs juni 2015, doet de politie bijna juichend verslag van de resultaten die zij inmiddels hebben geboekt in hun strijd tegen ‘criminele motorbendes’. Al vorig jaar deed de politie uit de doeken in de rapportage van juni 2014, wat het uiteindelijke doel was van die rapportages: het publiceren en bewust maken van het publiek en instanties omtrent de ware aard van de Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Nu kun je weliswaar onderzoeken wat je wilt, wat uiteindelijk telt in een rechtsstaat zijn de resultaten. In een rechtsstaat doet de rechter uitspraak en beslist daarmee of een verdachte schuldig is of onschuldig. Je kunt dus net zoveel zeer kostbare onderzoeken verrichten als je wilt, het is pas nadat de rechter een uitspraak heeft gedaan dat je kan spreken van resultaten. Een onderzoek is geen resultaat. Een hongerige leeuw ging eens op onderzoek in de jungle naar een lekker hapje. Dat deed hij elke dag meermaals. Een ondernemende leeuw. Het arme dier zou sterven van de honger, want zijn onderzoek leverde niets op. Een domme, incapabele, slecht doorvoede leeuw dus ook, die met zijn kletspraat ieder op het verkeerde been zette.

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Op 11 oktober 2013 berichtte Nrc.nl het volgende:

‘OM niet-ontvankelijk in fraudezaak na liegen en bedriegen

De rechtbank van Maastricht heeft het Openbaar Ministerie vanmiddag niet-ontvankelijk verklaard in een jarenlang lopend onderzoek naar omvangrijke vastgoed- en belastingfraude. De 62-jarige hoofdverdachte Joep Janssen en alle medeverdachten in het zogeheten Landlord-onderzoek gaan vrijuit omdat zij door liegen en bedriegen van het OM geen eerlijk strafproces hebben gehad.

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Verschillende instanties zijn betrokken bij de bestrijding van motorclubs. Wie zijn de mensen bij deze instanties en is er op die mensen niets aan te merken? Het lijkt er niet op dat deze mensen een schone lei hebben.

Allereerst is er het Landelijk Strategisch Overleg OMG’s. De voorzitter van dit orgaan is de oud-burgemeester van Enschede, nu burgemeester van Groningen, Peter den Oudsten. Den Oudsten wordt genoemd als één van de beste bestuurders na Aboutaleb van Rotterdam. Je kunt in dit land gemakkelijk tot de besten behoren, wanneer de politie je een beetje behulpzaam is. Zo reed Den Oudsten in augustus 2008 door een rood verkeerslicht. De website binnenlandsbestuur.nl bericht hierover op 20 maart 2009: ‘Uit logboekgegevens van de verkeerspaal blijkt dat de burgemeester door rood licht reed. Den Oudsten heeft altijd beweerd dat hij groen licht zag, waarna een omhoogkomende paal de onderkant van zijn auto ramde. De politie stelde vast dat het rode licht niet brandde toen de burgemeester langs de paal reed en gaf hem geen proces-verbaal. Den Oudsten neemt nu de logboekgegevens voor kennisgeving aan, aldus zijn woordvoerder.’ Het gaat hier dus niet zozeer om het door het rode licht rijden, maar om het feit dat de politie de burgemeester op zijn woord geloofde. Krijgt de burgemeester nu wel een proces-verbaal nu de logboekgegevens het tegendeel bewijzen? Zonder aanziens des persoons geldt dus alleen voor gewone burgers en niet voor burgemeesters?

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

omroepn.nl kwam met een prachtig staaltje nieuws gisteren: ‘De gemeente Barneveld is op de vingers getikt door de rechter in een zaak rond de Hells Angels. De rechter is van mening dat Barneveld fouten heeft gemaakt bij de procedure die voorafging aan het besluit om beslag te leggen op het clubhuis van de motorclub. Oorzaak is het ontbreken van een rechtsgeldige aanmaning, waardoor de bevoegdheid tot invordering van de dwangsommen is verjaard en er dus door de gemeente niets meer te vorderen valt. Ook zou onvoldoende zijn aangetoond dat het clubhuis openbaar toegankelijk was voor publiek. Daarmee zijn de opgelegde boetes voor de aanwezigheid van alcohol onterecht, aldus de rechter. Het clubhuis is inmiddels overgenomen door buurman Bijkerk Recycling. De onteigening van het pand is volgens Barneveld overigens wel rechtsgeldig.’

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Vandaag, 9 juli 2015, is er eindelijk in Duitsland een belangrijke rechtszaak in het voordeel van de motorclubs uitgevallen. Het is een lang verhaal, dat zeer ingewikkeld in elkaar steekt, maar het komt er op neer dat tot vandaag alle Duitse motorclubs die één of meer chapters (afdelingen) hebben die waren verboden door de overheid, een colourverbod hadden. Dat wil zeggen dat al die clubs in zijn totaliteit een verbod hadden om waar dan ook in Duitsland rond te lopen, te rijden, of zelfs in de auto te zitten met hun colours. Ook tatouages met de naam van de club, T-shirts, stickers of welke andere tekst dan ook die openbaar zichtbaar was, was verboden.

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Gisteravond was een uitzending van EenVandaag te zien met in de hoofdrol de Kerkraadse burgemeester Jos Som. Hoofdrol, geen glansrol. Want het lijkt er sterk op dat de man niet meer helemaal weet waar hij het over heeft. Ten eerste valt het op dat de man praat alsof hij net uit het café komt. Misschien een borreltje voor de zenuwen gedronken bij zijn dochter, de eigenaresse van Café Suus? Erger nog zijn de onwaarheden die hij de ether in slingert.

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Op Wikipedia staat het volgende: ‘Laat Honderd Bloemen Bloeien’ was de slogan van een kortstondige liberalisatiecampagne in de Volksrepubliek China van 1956 tot 1957, waarin de autoriteiten kritiek aanmoedigden met, naar eigen zeggen, als doel om misstanden in het bestuur te kunnen opsporen en aanpakken.

De campagne was het initiatief van premier Zhou Enlai, maar een belangrijk deel van de partijleiding, waaronder Mao Zedong, was geschokt over de felheid van de kritiek die toen los kwam. De Communistische Partij van China ging toen snel over tot vervolging van de personen – intellectuelen, boeren en arbeiders – die deze kritiek hadden durven uiten. Het aantal slachtoffers liep in de honderdduizenden, zo niet miljoenen.

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Dupont op Justitie en Veiligheid

Mooie praatjes!

Grote bedrijven hebben meestal specialisten in dienst die slecht nieuws over dat bedrijf kunnen omzetten in minder schadelijk nieuws. Dat is op zich niet zo heel raar, want bedrijven hebben natuurlijk een commercieel doel en moeten verkopen. De politie doet het beter, want zij proberen heel erg slecht nieuws om te zetten in winst. Dat is op zich natuurlijk wel raar, want de politie is helemaal geen commerciële organisatie. Of zijn er toch commerciële bedoelingen die een rol spelen?

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Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Agent In Charge of Amerithrax Investigation Blows the Whistle

The FBI head agent in charge of the anthrax investigation – Richard Lambert – has just filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit calling the entire FBI investigation bullsh!t:

In the fall of 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, a series of anthrax mailings occurred which killed five Americans and sickened 17 others. Four anthrax-laden envelopes were recovered which were addressed to two news media outlets in New York City (the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC) and two senators in Washington D.C. (Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle). The anthrax letters addressed to New York were mailed on September 18, 2001, just seven days after the 9/11 attacks. The letters addressed to the senators were mailed 21 days later on October 9, 2001. A fifth mailing of anthrax is believed to have been directed to American Media, Inc. (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida based upon the death of one AMI employee from anthrax poisoning and heavy spore contamination in the building.

Executive management at FBI Headquarters assigned responsibility for the anthrax investigation (code named “AMERITHRAX”) to the Washington Field Office (WFO), dubbing it the single most important case in the FBI at that time. In October 2002, in the wake of surging media criticism, White House impatience with a seeming lack of investigative progress by WFO, and a concerned Congress that was considering revoking the FBI’s charter to investigate terrorism cases, Defendant FBI Director Mueller reassigned Plaintiff from the FBI’s San Diego Field Office to the Inspection Division at FBI Headquarters and placed Plaintiff in charge of the AMERITHRAX case as an “Inspector.” While leading the investigation for the next four years, Plaintiff’s efforts to advance the case met with intransigence from WFO’s executive management, apathy and error from the FBI Laboratory, politically motivated communication embargos from FBI Headquarters, and yet another preceding and equally erroneous legal opinion from Defendant Kelley – all of which greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation.

On July 6, 2006, Plaintiff provided a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303. Reports of mismanagement conveyed in writing and orally included: (a) WFO’s persistent understaffing of the AMERITHRAX investigation; (b) the threat of WFO’s Agent in charge to retaliate if Plaintiff disclosed the understaffing to FBI Headquarters; (c) WFO’s insistence on staffing the AMERITHRAX investigation principally with new Agents recently graduated from the FBI Academy resulting in an average investigative tenure of 18 months with 12 of 20 Agents assigned to the case having no prior investigative experience at all; (d) WFO’s eviction of the AMERITHRAX Task Force from the WFO building in downtown Washington and its relegation to Tysons Corner, Virginia to free up space for Attorney General Ashcroft’s new pornography squads; (e) FBI Director’s Mueller’s mandate to Plaintiff to “compartmentalize” the AMERITHRAX investigation by stove piping the flow of case information and walling off task force members from those aspects of the case not specifically assigned to them – a move intended to stem the tide of anonymous media leaks by government officials regarding details of the investigation. [Lambert complained about compartmentalizing and stovepiping of the investigation in a 2006 declaration. See this, this and this]

This sequestration edict decimated morale and proved unnecessary in light of subsequent civil litigation which established that the media leaks were attributable to the United States Attorney for the District of the District of Columbia and to a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s National Press Office, not to investigators on the AMERITHRAX Task Force; (f) WFO’s diversion and transfer of two Ph.D. Microbiologist Special Agents from their key roles in the investigation to fill billets for an 18 month Arabic language training program in Israel; (g) the FBI Laboratory’s deliberate concealment from the Task Force of its discovery of human DNA on the anthrax-laden envelope addressed to Senator Leahy and the Lab’s initial refusal to perform comparison testing; (h) the FBI Laboratory’s refusal to provide timely and adequate scientific analyses and forensic examinations in support of the investigation; (i) Defendant Kelley’s erroneous and subsequently quashed legal opinion that regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) precluded the Task Force’s collection of evidence in overseas venues; (j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.

Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions. Plaintiff further objected to the FBI’s ordering of Plaintiff not to speak with the staff of the CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes or investigative journalist David Willman, after both requested authorization to interview Plaintiff.

In April 2008, some of Plaintiff’s foregoing whistleblower reports were profiled on the CBS television show 60 Minutes. This 60 Minutes segment was critical of FBI executive management’s handling of the AMERITHRAX investigation, resulting in the agency’s embarrassment and the introduction of legislative bills calling for the establishment of congressional inquiries and special commissions to examine these issues – a level of scrutiny the FBI’s Ivins attribution could not withstand.

After leaving the AMERITHRAX investigation in 2006, Plaintiff continued to publicly opine that the quantum of circumstantial evidence against Bruce Ivins was not adequate to satisfy the proof-beyond-a-reasonable doubt threshold required to secure a criminal conviction in federal court. Plaintiff continued to advocate that while Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues to conceal from Congress and the American people.

Exonerating Evidence for Ivins

Agent Lambert won’t publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence against Ivins. As the New York Times reports:

[Lambert] declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.

But there is already plenty of exculpatory evidence in the public record.

For example:

Handwriting analysis failed to link the anthrax letters to known writing samples from Ivins
No textile fibers were found in Ivins’ office, residence or vehicles matching fibers found on the scotch tape used to seal the envelopes
No pens were found matching the ink used to address the envelopes
Samples of his hair failed to match hair follicles found inside the Princeton, N.J., mailbox used to mail the letters
No souvenirs of the crime, such as newspaper clippings, were found in his possession as commonly seen in serial murder cases
The FBI could not place Ivins at the crime scene with evidence, such as gas station or other receipts, at the time the letters were mailed in September and October 2001
Lab records show the number of late nights Ivins put in at the lab first spiked in August 2001, weeks before the 9/11 attacks
As noted above, the FBI didn’t want to test the DNA sample found on the anthrax letter to Senator Leahy. In addition, McClatchy points out:

After locking in on Ivins in 2007, the bureau stopped searching for a match to a unique genetic bacterial strain scientists had found in the anthrax that was mailed to the Post and to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, although a senior bureau official had characterized it as the hottest clue to date.

Anthrax vaccine expert Meryl Nass. M.D., notes:

The FBI’s alleged motive is bogus. In 2001, Bioport’s anthrax vaccine could not be (legally) relicensed due to potency failures, and its impending demise provided room for Ivins’ newer anthrax vaccines to fill the gap. Ivins had nothing to do with developing Bioport’s vaccine, although in addition to his duties working on newer vaccines, he was charged with assisting Bioport to get through licensure.

***

The FBI report claims the anthrax letters envelopes were sold in Frederick, Md. Later it admits that millions of indistinguishable envelopes were made, with sales in Maryland and Virginia.

***

FBI emphasizes Ivins’ access to a photocopy machine, but fails to mention it was not the machine from which the notes that accompanied the spores were printed.

FBI Fudged the Science

16 government labs had access to the same strain of anthrax as used in the anthrax letters.

The FBI admitted that up to 400 people had access to flask of anthrax in Dr. Ivins’ lab. In other words, even if the killer anthrax came from there, 399 other people might have done it.

Moreover, even the FBI’s claim that the killer anthrax came from Ivins’ flask has completely fallen apart. Specifically, both the National Academy of Science and the Government Accountability Office – both extremely prestigious, nonpartisan agencies – found that FBI’s methodology and procedures for purportedly linking the anthrax flask maintained by Dr. Ivins with the anthrax letters was sloppy, inconclusive and full of holes. They found that the alleged link wasn’t very strong … and that there was no firm link. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences found that the anthrax mailed to Congressmen and the media could have come from a different source altogether than the flask maintained by Ivins.

Additionally, the Ft. Detrick facility – where Ivins worked – only handled liquid anthrax. But the killer anthrax was a hard-to-make dry powder form of anthrax. Ft. Detrick doesn’t produce dry anthrax; but other government labs – for example Dugway (in Utah) and Batelle (in Ohio) – do.

The anthrax in the letters was also incredibly finely ground; and the FBI’s explanation for how the anthrax became so finely ground doesn’t even pass the smell test.

Further, the killer anthrax in the letters had a very high-tech anti-static coating so that the anthrax sample “floated off the glass slide and was lost” when scientists tried to examine it. Specifically, the killer anthrax was coated with polyglass and each anthrax spore given an electrostatic charge, so that it would repel other spores and “float”. This was very advanced bio-weapons technology to which even Ivins’ bosses said he didn’t have access.

Top anthrax experts like Richard Spertzel say that Ivins didn’t do it. Spertzel also says that only 4 or 5 people in the entire country knew how to make anthrax of the “quality” used in the letters, that Spertzel was one of them, and it would have taken him a year with a full lab and a staff of helpers to do it. As such, the FBI’s claim that Ivins did it alone working a few nights is ludicrous.

Moreover, the killer anthrax contained silicon … but the anthrax in Ivins’ flask did not. The FBI claimed the silicon present in the anthrax letters was absorbed from its surroundings … but Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories completely debunked that theory. In other words, silicon was intentionally added to the killer anthrax to make it more potent. Ivins and Ft. Detrick didn’t have that capability … but other government labs did.

Similarly, Sandia National Lab found the presence of iron and tin in the killer anthrax … but NOT in Ivins’ flask of anthrax.

Sandia also found that there was a strain of bacteria in one of the anthrax letters not present in Ivins’ flask. (The bacteria, iron, tin and silicon were all additives which made the anthrax in the letters more deadly.)

The Anthrax Frame Up

Ivins wasn’t the first person framed for the anthrax attacks …

Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

People don’t remember now, but the “war on terror” and Iraq war were largely based on the claim that Saddam and Muslim extremists were behind the anthrax attacks (and see this and this)

And the anthrax letters pushed a terrified Congress into approving the Patriot Act without even reading it. Coincidentally, the only Congressmen who received anthrax letters were the ones who were likely to oppose the Patriot Act.

And – between the bogus Al Qaeda/Iraq claims and the FBI’s fingering of Ivins as the killer – the FBI was convinced that another U.S. government scientist, Steven Hatfill, did it. The government had to pay Hatfill $4.6 million to settle his lawsuit for being falsely accused.

Ivins’ Convenient Death

It is convenient for the FBI that Ivins died.

The Wall Street Journal points out:

No autopsy was performed [on Ivins], and there was no suicide note.

Dr. Nass points out:

FBI fails to provide any discussion of why no autopsy was performed, nor why, with Ivins under 24/7 surveillance from the house next door, with even his garbage being combed through, the FBI failed to notice that he overdosed and went into a coma. Nor is there any discussion of why the FBI didn’t immediately identify tylenol as the overdose substance, and notify the hospital, so that a well-known antidote for tylenol toxicity could be given (N-acetyl cysteine, or alternatively glutathione). These omissions support the suggestion that Ivins’ suicide was a convenience for the FBI. It enabled them to conclude the anthrax case, in the absence of evidence that would satisfy the courts.

Indeed, one of Ivins’ colleagues at Ft. Deitrich thinks he was murdered.

Whether murder or suicide, Ivins’ death was very convenient for the FBI, as dead men can’t easily defend themselves.

Posted on April 17, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

Find this story at 17 April 2015

© 2007 – 2015 Washington’s Blog

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

WASHINGTON — When Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case.

Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Energy Department’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.

Photo

The late Bruce Ivins in 2003, when he was a microbiologist at Fort Detrick, Md. Credit Sam Yu/Frederick News Post, via Assocaited Press
The anthrax letters were mailed to United States senators and news organizations in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, causing a huge and costly disruption in the postal system and the federal government. Members of Congress and Supreme Court justices were forced from their offices while technicians in biohazard suits cleaned up the lethal anthrax powder. Decontamination costs nationwide exceeded $1 billion. At least 17 people were sickened, in addition to the five who died.

The bureau’s investigation, one of the longest-running and most technically complex inquiries in its history, has long been seen as troubled. Investigators initially lacked the forensic skills to analyze bioterrorist attacks. For several years, agents focused on a former Army scientist and physician, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who was subsequently cleared and given a $4.6 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit. Reviews by the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office faulted aspects of the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the case.

Mr. Lambert, who was himself criticized for pursuing Dr. Hatfill for so long, has now offered, in his lawsuit and in an interview, an insider’s view of what hampered the investigation.

“This case was hailed at the time as the most important case in the history of the F.B.I.,” Mr. Lambert said. “But it was difficult for me to get experienced investigators assigned to it.”

He said that the effort was understaffed and plagued by turnover, and that 12 of 20 agents assigned to the case had no prior investigative experience. Senior bureau microbiologists were not made available, and two Ph.D. microbiologists who were put on the case were then removed for an 18-month Arabic language program in Israel. Fear of leaks led top officials to order the extreme compartmentalization of information, with investigators often unable to compare notes and share findings with colleagues, he said.

Mr. Lambert said he outlined the problems in a formal complaint in 2006 to the F.B.I.’s deputy director. Some of his accusations were later included in a report on the anthrax case by the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” infuriating bureau leaders.

Photo

The police in Frederick, Md., spoke with a woman they identified as Diane Ivins, the wife of Bruce E. Ivins, 62, at the couple’s home in Frederick, Md., in 2008. Credit Rob Carr/Associated Press
The F.B.I., which rarely comments on pending litigation, did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Lambert’s claims.

Although the lethal letters contained notes expressing jihadist views, investigators came to believe the mailer was an insider in the government’s biodefense labs. They eventually matched the anthrax powder to a flask in Dr. Ivins’s lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland and began intense scrutiny of his life and work.

They discovered electronic records that showed he had spent an unusual amount of time at night in his high-security lab in the periods before the two mailings of the anthrax letters. They found that he had a pattern of sending letters and packages from remote locations under assumed names. They uncovered emails in which he described serious mental problems.

The investigators documented Dr. Ivins’s obsession with a national sorority that had an office near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox where the letters were mailed. They detected what they believed to be coded messages directed at colleagues, hidden in the notes in the letters.

As prosecutors prepared to charge him with the five murders in July 2008, Dr. Ivins, 62, took his own life at home in Frederick, Md. Days later, at a news conference, Jeffrey A. Taylor, then the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

But Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, he said, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.

After retiring from the F.B.I. in 2012, Mr. Lambert joined the Energy Department. But an F.B.I. ethics lawyer ruled that because Mr. Lambert had to work with F.B.I. agents in his new job, he was violating a conflict-of-interest law that forbade former federal employees from contacting previous colleagues for a year after they had left their government jobs.

That ruling led to his dismissal, Mr. Lambert said, and he has not been able to find work despite applying for more than 70 jobs. His lawsuit asserts that several other former F.B.I. agents were able to take identical intelligence jobs with the Energy Department and that he was singled out for mistreatment.

By SCOTT SHANEAPRIL 8, 2015

Find this story at 8 April 2015

© 2015 The New York Times Company

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The Pentagon wouldn’t say which labs received the live anthrax by mistake or who might have been exposed. The shipments went to facilities in nine states.

Military officials said Thursday that the Pentagon was in close contact with officials at research labs in California, Texas and seven other states that received potentially live anthrax spores, but they refused to identify the labs or to disclose how many people were being treated with antibiotics to stave off the disease.

A Defense Department spokesman, Army Col. Steven Warren, said 22 personnel at Osan Air Base in South Korea were taking the antibiotic Cipro as a precaution against anthrax exposure. But he declined to talk about whether workers at labs or other facilities in the United States were also taking Cipro.

The lack of information was criticized by members of Congress, who demanded answers on how the mistaken shipments happened and who had been affected.

“This incident represents a serious breach of trust in the United States Army’s obligation to keep our citizens and service members safe,” Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a letter to Army Secretary John McHugh. “Moreover, the shipments to a South Korea air base weaken the United States’ credibility as a global leader in chemical weapons control.”

In a separate letter, a bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives told Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the inadvertent shipments of live anthrax “raise serious safety concerns” about the way the military handles “dangerous pathogens.”

The letter was signed by Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the panel’s senior Democrat, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, as well as two committee members, Republican Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania and Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado.

In comments to reporters Thursday, Warren acknowledged that he did not “have a whole lot of details on the exact purpose” of the anthrax shipments to Osan Air Base. In an earlier statement, Warren had said the anthrax shipments were part of a pilot program to develop a field test to identify biological threats in the environment.

In addition to Osan, the Defense Department said it suspected that labs in nine states had received live anthrax because they had been recipients of the same “cluster” of shipments.

In addition to facilities in California and Texas, those labs included military, university or commercial enterprises in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland and Wisconsin. The anthrax was shipped from a Defense Department lab in Dugway, Utah.

Warren said the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was working to determine who might have handled the anthrax shipments before they reached the nine destinations.

He declined to describe what kind of packaging was used to ship the anthrax or to confirm news reports that FedEx had transported at least some of the shipments.

Live anthrax requires strict handling protocols, and anthrax samples are supposed to be rendered inactive before being shipped for research uses. All military, government and civilian labs that might have received such samples are now reviewing their anthrax inventories.

“Out of an abundance of caution, DOD has stopped the shipment of this material from its labs pending completion of the investigation,” Warren said.

“The ongoing investigation includes determining if the labs also received other live samples, epidemiological consultation, worker safety review, laboratory analysis and handling of laboratory waste,” said Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the CDC.

Anthrax burst into the American psyche one week after the 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington, when over the course of several weeks five people died and 17 survived infection after anthrax-laced letters were sent to several news organization and to the offices of two U.S. senators.

Two of the dead in 2001 were postal workers who’d come in contact with anthrax when the letters containing the spores passed through the Brentwood mail facility in Washington, D.C. Another was an employee of a Florida media company that had received one of the letters. How the other two victims were exposed has never been determined.

Over the next seven years, the FBI and other prosecutors named two men as having possible ties to those anthrax attacks, Steven Hatfill and Bruce Ivins, but the government never brought charges against either of them.

In the current case, four Defense Department employees in the United States who’d handled the samples have been placed in post-exposure treatment in addition to the 22 in South Korea, CNN reported.

Warren defended the speed with which the Pentagon made public the information that live anthrax had inadvertently been shipped. That notification came five days after a research lab in Maryland told the Pentagon that it had received live anthrax in a package that was supposed to contain only inactive spores.

“We got the information out as rapidly as we could,” he said. “It’s important to have as much accurate information as possible. Once we understood that there was no threat to the public, we understood that we had additional time to gather more information and present a more complete picture.”

Osan Air Base in South Korea said in a statement that “all personnel were provided appropriate medical precautionary measures to include examinations, antibiotics and in some instances, vaccinations. None of the personnel have shown any signs of possible exposure.”

The base added: “Hazardous material teams immediately cordoned off the facility, decontaminated it under Centers for Disease Control protocol, and destroyed the agent.”

BY JAMES ROSEN – MCCLATCHY WASHINGTON BUREAU
28 May 2015

Find this story at 28 May 2015

Copyright mcclatchydc.com

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

For a second time in three years, an independent inquiry cast doubt Friday on the FBI’s assertion that genetic testing had cinched its conclusion that a now-dead Army bioweapons researcher mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized the East Coast in 2001.

The long-awaited report from the Government Accountability Office found that the FBI’s exhaustive, cutting-edge attempt to trace the killer with matches of genetic mutations of anthrax samples at times lacked precision, consistency and adequate standards.

The 77-page report, perhaps the final official word on the FBI’s seven-year investigation known as Amerithrax, lent credence to a National Academy of Sciences panel’s finding in 2011 that the bureau’s scientific evidence did not definitely show that the anthrax came from the Maryland bioweapons laboratory of Bruce Ivins.

The report’s findings also mirrored some of the conclusions of a joint investigation by FRONTLINE, McClatchy and ProPublica that was published and aired in the fall of 2011.

Shortly after Ivins took a suicidal drug overdose on July 29, 2008, federal prosecutors said they’d been drafting criminal charges against him, and they declared the scientist at Fort Detrick, Md., the culprit. In 2010, they laid out an extensive circumstantial case against him, presenting as a smoking gun the findings of genetic testing by outside laboratories that matched four distinct mutations in the anthrax spores in the letters with those in a flask full of anthrax in Ivins’ laboratory.

“The significance of using such mutations as genetic markers for analyzing evidentiary samples to determine their origins is not clear,” the auditors wrote. “This gap affects both the development of genetic tests targeting such mutations and statistical analyses of the results of their use.”

The auditors pointed out that an FBI team recommended in 2007 that the bureau conduct experiments to determine whether the mutations the FBI was seeking to match might not have been unique to Ivins’ flask, known as RMR-1029. However, those tests were never done.

That omission also drew concern from the National Academy of Sciences panel, which noted that it was possible that four identical “morphs” could have grown in another laboratory in what it termed “parallel evolution.”

The auditors also focused on contradictory test results from samples collected from a colleague of Ivins who’d used anthrax from RMR-1029. That colleague – Henry Heine, though he wasn’t named in the report – submitted one sample that tested positive in all five genetic tests, but a duplicate sample from his vial tested negative for all five markers, the report said.

The report said that Heine, in the presence of an FBI investigator, didn’t follow instructions for collecting one sample as laid out in a grand jury subpoena. The disclosure raises the possibility that inconsistent collection methods undercut the massive testing effort.

While praising the FBI for turning to four outside laboratories for genetic tests on more than 1,000 anthrax samples it had gathered, the report said the bureau’s laboratory had failed to ensure that all the samples were collected in the same fashion, gave “minimal” instruction to the outside labs and set insufficient standards for validating the results. It also failed to measure the uncertainty in its results, leaving it unclear how much weight they deserve, the report said.

Also unstudied was whether the anthrax spores grew differently in varying conditions, the report said.

The FBI said Friday that it stood by its conclusion, saying it “has complete confidence in the scientific results that provided investigators with leads” to the anthrax used in the attacks.

“As noted in the National Academy of Sciences Report, the genetic tests used by the FBI were well validated,” the bureau said, adding that after a review of all scientific analysis it “is satisfied that the analysis was conducted in a quality manner.”

“It is important to note that the scientific results alone were not the sole basis for concluding that Bruce Ivins committed the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks,” the bureau said.

However, Democratic Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, who was among three members of the House of Representatives who requested the audit from Congress’ investigative arm, said “the GAO report confirms what I have often said: that the FBI’s definitive conclusions about the accuracy of their scientific findings in the Amerithrax case are not, in fact, definitive.”

Holt, a scientist who’s retiring from Congress at month’s end, also said “the United States needs a comprehensive, independent review of the Amerithrax investigation to ensure we have learned the lessons from this bio attack.”

Paul Kemp, an attorney for Ivins, echoed Holt’s call for a fuller investigation.

“I only wish we could have had a trial,” he said. “They never had any evidence he prepared the anthrax . . . only that he worked some unexplained overtime. Many scientists in and out of Fort Detrick asserted that there wouldn’t have been enough time for one person to do this – especially in a building and a lab that was open all day every day – without somebody seeing something.”

December 19, 2014, 7:38 pm ET by Greg Gordon McClatchy Washington Bureau and Mike Wiser, FRONTLINE

Find this story at 19 December 2014

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