Posted by
The Dave Perkins Brothers on Wednesday, August 06, 2008 8:25:08 AM
Subsunk over at
Blackfive, my favorite milblog, has put together an unimpeachable case in support of the late Dr. Ivins.
That is to say, he has proven to my satisfaction, if his facts are right (
and they are), that
the anthrax attacks of a few years back could not have been committed by Dr. Ivins.
The anthrax spores were simply too sophisticated. They were created in a government laboratory, Soviet or Chinese. That's the bottom line. America's bio weapons programs have been shut down for more than thirty years, and ours were unable to produce a product like this even at their peak.
These spores had a coating designed to improve the likelihood of inhaling, a weak electric charge to make them float away from each other in air, and were not 'milled', were not reduced in size by machining. They were MADE small to begin with.
Ivins did not have the equipment at his lab to make this. He was analyzing spores, not manufacturing them. If he had even tried something like this, many other people would have known he was doing it. And in any case, the equipment to do such a thing was not available to him, or anyone else in America.
Now that they're closing the case, we probably will never know publicly who actually did this. And the sad case of Dr. Ivins, a man who apparently had some real psychological problems, will never satisfactorily conclude. He died before he was charged, and the trial won't happen.
As Subsunk says, the FBI owes it to the public to provide a real explanation of how Ivins could have done this. Right now, it looks impossible.
And of course one must consider that if somebody had a desire to put an end to this inquiry, nothing could have suited them better than a plausible suspect committing suicide. Dr. Ivins' psych problems, his stalker tendency, his desire for revenge killings of women who have dismissed him, were a part of his psychotherapy record and would have been known by the FBI. These things have become public at a convenient time, and Dr. Ivins is also conveniently DEAD.
But he could not have accomplished the anthrax attacks; the weaponized anthrax was far more sophisticated, in a host of ways, than he could have managed as a 'lone renegade scientist' in a government lab, where the equipment was not available and where every step is recorded and assessed for proper procedure and protocol.
Someone would have known of his 'extracurricular' activities.