Colleague Disputes Case Against Anthrax Suspect

[Truth2Tell]

Source: The New York Times

By SCOTT SHANE
April 22, 2010

WASHINGTON — A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/us/23anthrax.html

[EFerrari]

1. Go, Dr. Heine!

No scientist that doesn't work for the FBI believes this story, afaik.

[Nihil]

2. K & R (n/t)

:thumbsup:

[bleever]

3. K&R.

[PufPuf23]

4. IMO the anthrax was from a military source

obtained and dispersed by rogue individuals with an agenda (Patriot Act etc.)

Cheney probably knows more.

[mistertrickster]

5. Remember when the FBI was "sure" it was some guy named Hatfill

These guys are the Keystone Kops.

There's only 50 people in the US that could have done this. They should hire some big city detectives to actually do . . . uh . . . police work on this.

[Wilms]

6. k&r n/t

[Festivito]

7. I suspect there are many FBI agents we need to frog-march to court and then jail. /nt

[buckrogers1965]

8. You don't think

that some rogue group attacked their own country do you? And the FBI is just white washing things for them?

Particularly since the timing of the attacks were right when the Patriot act was being voted on.