Bruce Ivins still didn't do it

Five years ago scientist Bruce Ivins, who worked at facilities at Fort Detrick, committed suicide. The FBI, after blaming a former colleague of his, blamed Ivins for sending out those anthrax letters in the weeks after 9/11. Because he was dead there was no need for a trial. Unfortunately for the FBI, the facts of the case show that he was innocent.

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.”

The NRC’s report was not intended to prove Ivins’ guilt or innocence in the attacks. The FBI requested its help in September 2008. The report said that while genetic evidence linked the attack spores to Ivins’ RMR-1029 flask at USAMRIID, an additional growth step between the flask and the spores used in the attack was necessary.

At USAMRIID, Gerard Andrews, Jeffrey Adamovicz and Henry Heine all worked with Ivins. USAMRIID did not have the equipment necessary to dry the amount of spores contained in the letters, said Heine, who was a friend of Ivins. Heine estimated it would have taken Ivins months to grow the volume that was sent.

The quantity used in the mailings would have translated to about 30 gallons of anthrax culture, Heine said. USAMRIID didn’t have a fermenter that could have handled that amount, and the one the lab did have was broken, he said.

“The only thing Bruce had available was shake flasks of which he could do a couple liters at a time,” Heine said.

Andrews and Adamovicz, who both served as Ivins’ supervisors, said the FBI failed to address silicone and tin found in the FBI’s samples but not in those provided to the bureau by Ivins. The anthrax may have been genetically similar, but it was not so chemically.

Another bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, was not found in Ivins’ flask of anthrax spores, though it was found in letters sent to the media outlets, Andrews said.

“Additionally, it is a genetically unique strain that was not worked with at USAMRIID, let alone Ivins’ lab,” Andrews said.

That forensic marker “is critical to exonerating USAMRIID and Bruce Ivins,” Andrews said.

Several lawmakers have pushed for a deeper investigation over the years, including Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey physicist who represents the area from which the anthrax letters were postmarked, and former U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, whose district included USAMRIID.

Patrick Eddington, a senior policy adviser to Holt, said the office is expecting a Government Accountability Office report about the FBI’s investigation, possibly sometime next year.

“There needs to be an exhaustive explanation of how the FBI handles cases like this generally,” Eddington said.

Eddington pointed to other blunders by the FBI: The government’s focus on former USAMRIID scientist Steven Hatfill as a suspect in the anthrax case, and a more recent example in which the FBI initially charged Paul Kevin Curtis as the person responsible for April’s ricin letter case before arresting James Everett Dutschke. Charges against Curtis were dismissed.

The bureau is “still out of their depth when it comes to dealing with cases with this kind of science,” Eddington said.

The FBI has said it relied on the totality of its investigation — not science alone — to lead it to Ivins.

FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd said she had no comment “beyond what’s already available in the public domain.”

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