The Anthrax Mystery (updated 8/5/08)

"On the night of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House Medical Office dispensed Cipro to staff accompanying Vice President Dick Cheney as he was secreted off to the safety of Camp David, and told them it was "a precaution," according to one person directly involved."

The story literally disappears until Newsweek mentions it in passing in a profile of Cheney from 2006. The article claims that "knowledgeable former officials" had recently revealed that a "mysterious letter" had turned up at the vice president's mansion three weeks after 9/11. Except, as Judicial Watch notes in its suit against the White House it had been widely reported that Cheney and his staff had received their doses immediately after the attacks.

Now with a new administration looming we learn that "one of the nation's top biodefense researchers has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailing"

"Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the past 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md., had been informed of the impending prosecution, people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and with the FBI investigation said.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after having ingested a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague who declined to be identified out of concern, he said, that he would be harassed by the FBI."

The death -- without any mention of suicide -- was announced to Ivins' colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, through a staffwide e-mail.

Suddenly a string of baffling murders that seemed impossible to solve is put to rest with barely a question.

This is how the AP reports the response of the victims:

"Closure for families of anthrax attack victims"

But is that assertion even close to the truth? Let's see what a few local papers are reporting about the victims' reactions: "There is no closure " Burrus said. "It's still an open issue. If the government decides to go forward with a complete review of the evidence and a final decision as to who was responsible, we'll weigh that as it's presented."

Survivor Patrick O'Donnell: "It seems like it just never ends," he said. "This is the last thing I wanted to hear. I do not want to say anything bad. This [Ivins] family is going through enough."

For reasons that appear more and more disturbing ever since November of 2000, the Associated Press, like the Washington Post and the NYTimes, feels free to concoct a story that is fundamentally backwards.

How does Ivins committing suicide square with the rest of his story.

Anthrax slip-ups raise fears about planned biolabs

"Bruce Ivins was troubled by the dust, dirt and clutter on his officemate's desk, and not just because it looked messy. He suspected the dust was laced with anthrax.

In 2001, a scientist opens a letter addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy that contained anthrax.
And he was in a position to know. Ivins, a biodefense expert, and his officemate were deeply involved in Operation Noble Eagle — the government's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans and the anthrax attacks that killed five more less than a month later.

It was December 2001. Ivins, an authority on anthrax, was one of the handful of researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., who prepared spores of the deadly bacteria to test anthrax vaccines in animals. He knew enough to grow alarmed when his officemate complained, as she had frequently of late, about sloppy handling of samples coming into the lab that could be tainted with anthrax.

"I swabbed approximately 20 areas of (her) desk, including the telephone computer and desktop," Ivins later reported to Army investigators. Half of the samples, he found, "were suspicious for anthrax," betraying the clumpy brown appearance of anthrax colonies under a microscope."

"If he in fact was the correct person, he was actually put in charge of analyzing the evidence of his own crime," said ABC News consultant Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who worked on the anthrax case until his retirement from the bureau last year.

"All of the scientists there who worked with us were supposed to have been investigated and given polygraph tests," Garrett said....

Friends there say he [Ivins]was well known to be susceptible to deep depression and was concerned he would be falsely linked to the anthrax attacks.

"They took an innocent man, a distinguished scientist, and smeared his reputation, dishonored him, questioned his children and drove him to take his life," said one outraged colleague, who asked that his named not be used for fear "the FBI will come after me."

Why the Cover-Up?

If the FBI was truly interested in a criminal investigation it would have had to ask the primary question -- cui bono?

September 1998-- A small government lab in Michigan developing an anthrax vaccine is bought for $24.8 million by a secretive group calling themselves BioPort. These investors include George Bush Sr, James Baker III, and Frank Carlucci under the name of the Carlyle Group. It also includes Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Reagan who also served as US ambassador to Britain under President Clinton. According to Maj. Glenn MacDonald USAR, Crowe abetted the sale of anthrax to Saddam Hussein in the hopes Iraq would use the deadly disease against Iran.

A major stockholder is Fuad El-Hibri, a man known to be close with the wealthy bin Ladens. El-Hibri became BioPort's CEO. El-Hibri ran a vaccine manufacturing company called Porton Products International of Porton Down in the 1990's, located in the UK. One of the anthrax strains originating from Ft. Detrick and related to the isolates used in the anthrax attacks is called the Porton strain for the Porton lab. Timothy Read, provides evidence that a potential route for the anthrax that ended up in the 2001 attacks was via Porton Down.

Later that Sept-- BioPort wins a contract from the Dept. of Defense worth $45 million to produce an anthrax vaccine. The DOD agrees to pay three times the cost of the original contract, upping payment for vaccine from $3.50 a dose to $10 a dose.

November of '98-- Crowe and Bush, Sr. travel to Saudi Arabia where they meet with members of the bin Laden family.

Between 1997 and Oct of 2001-- BioPort repeatedly fails to pass FDA inspections. These inspections were termed by experts to be "an unmitigated disaster," expose contamination, sloppy record-keeping and careless procedures.

March 1999-- testimony presented to Congress reveals the company's sordid history, an Army cover-up of negative responses elicits questions about the anthrax vaccine. Over 50 adverse symptoms are substantially linked to the subjects of the vaccine regimen. The report also reveals that the ONLY veterans of the first Gulf War not displaying symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome were the French -the LONE population among Gulf War soldiers who did not receive the vaccine.

Gulf War vets appeal to Congress
February 17, 2000-- Congressional report recommends terminating anthrax vaccine program due to BioPort's mismanagement and injury reports.

July, 2000-- Congressional hearings are held on BioPort which reveal that the company has engaged in Enron-style accounting, manipulating earnings projections and drawing secret funds directly from the Pentagon violating official recommendations.

November, 2000-- The Hartford Courant reports that BioPort has failed to track deadly reactions in people receiving its anthrax vaccine, including deaths. Approximately 1,200 servicemen and women have had severe reactions, with some deaths traceable to the vaccine. US Rep. Chris Shays of Ct. accuses BioPort of indifference

July 2001-- FDA gives BioPort the go-ahead to use quarantined lots of anthrax vaccine on the public in the event of an attack -giving the company carte blanche to dump questionable, perhaps dangerous vaccines onto the public.

August 2001-- News leaks that the White House has started passing out Cipro to staff. Recipients include both George Bush and Dick Cheney.

September 2001-- the Associated Press suggests that Battelle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio is engaged in a secret project in which "a new and highly lethal strain of anthrax" was being developed at its labs. Meanwhile Battelle hires anthrax expert, William C. Patrick III, to test the possibility of mailing powdered anthrax through the post. Battelle is said to have a "working relationship" with BioPort.

September 20, 2001-- The first anthrax attack kills photographer Robert Stevens in Florida.

October 2001-- BioPort fails another FDA inspection.

October 2001-- Bush sends the national guard to "protect" BioPort 24/7. No such protection is provided for nuclear power plants or other facilities engaged in biological warfare research.

October 2001-- Donald Rumsfeld presses to get BioPort approved despite FDA objections

November 2001-- Manuals from BioPort are discovered in an Al Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan -the report promptly disappears from the mainstream news within hours.

January 2002-- Bush administration gives BioPort go-ahead to begin shipping anthrax vaccine.

Given these facts lets ask the hard questions:

1) why was Ivins, presumably a prime suspect, put in charge of the anthrax investigation?

2) Why did ABC consistently report the White House's false claim that the anthrax strain had conclusively come from Saddam Hussein?

3) Why of all his targets would Ivins' first victim be the very Florida photographer who just happened to have snapped embarrassing pictures of Bush's daughters?

4) And how did a homicidal psychopath under psychiatric treatment manage to retain his top security clearance in a bio-weapons lab?

5) And just how does a first-year social worker with an associate's degree learn the details of a terrorism case before it even makes it to a grand jury-- and why is she in hiding?

Interestingly, it would not be first time an insider ended up committing "suicide" after running foul of Rumsfeld and Cheney. The circumstances surrounding Olsen's death are eerily similar.

For twenty-two years, the only information the Olsons had was that, a week prior to Frank Olson’s death, he had returned home in a depressed mood from a meeting at a mountain retreat with Camp Detrick colleagues. He said that “something bad’ had happened at the meeting, but he would tell his wife, Alice, only that ’I made a terrible mistake.” Olson left for the office on Monday morning expressing doubts about his work and planning to resign. The next thing Alice Olson knew, her husband had been sent to New York, ostensibly to see a psychiatrist.

Four days later, his mood had improved and he was eager to come home the following day. But six hours later he plunged to his death from a window on the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania), across Seventh Avenue from Pennsylvania Station.

In 1975, as this information was exposed, the government paid $750,000 restitution to Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson's family, after admitting the CIA slipped Dr. Olson LSD days before his 1953 fall from a New York City building. When the Ford administration finally came clean, they promised they'd revealed everything. Yet key officials, including White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, pushed to continue to conceal information. "The family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family," the Baltimore Sun reported in 2002. "Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library."

Perhaps one day when we've finally exposed a few of the disinformation specialists infecting our news media we will learn the truth.*

*Latest: Bruce Ivins Wasn't the Anthrax Culprit