Word: anthrax
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...deep midwinter of 2002, FBI divers cut holes in the ice and then searched several ponds near a Fort Detrick, Md., biodefense lab for evidence in the anthrax investigation. It was an expensive, cinematic strategy that would ultimately lead nowhere, but no one knew that then. Except perhaps for the older man who stood off to the side handing out coffee and sandwiches. In addition to being a respected scientist, Bruce Ivins was a Red Cross volunteer, manning the canteen. He was known as reliable and cheerful, and he had been asked by the Frederick County, Md., chapter to take...
...nearly seven years after anonymous letters containing anthrax spores killed five people and sickened 17 others, the FBI and Department of Justice presented their case against Ivins. It was as much a trial of the FBI as it was of Ivins himself. The anthrax murder case has become an epic embarrassment for the bureau, and the suicide of Ivins on July 29 forced the government to go public with its case against him before it was ready. The evidence the government released was compelling. But the science behind much of the narrative remains a mystery. If the goal...
...Most of all, the affidavits and other documents revealed a mentally unstable man who struggled mightily to keep his pain under control. A year before the anthrax attacks, Ivins confided to a friend: "I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind," he wrote in an e-mail. "When I'm being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don't spread the pestilence." Ivins apparently managed to conceal his torment from his colleagues. "He was a rock," says Dr. W. Russell Byrne, who ran Ivins...
...mental health began to deteriorate, he also faced a spike in pressure at work. The Army's anthrax vaccine was plagued by production problems, and Ivins and his colleagues were charged with figuring out why. In an e-mail to a friend, Ivins wrote that he sometimes felt as if he were watching himself work at his desk from a few feet away, a classic symptom of what psychologists call dissociative behavior. After 9/11, Ivins wrote his friend that he was saddened and extremely angry about the terrorist attacks. He was in group counseling at the time...
Given that the government already had to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement for linking an innocent government scientist, Steven Hatfill, to the attacks, FBI officials are clearly worried about their reputation for bumbling the anthrax case and are eager to share what they know. But they are waiting to proceed publicly until a judge unseals the evidence in the Ivins case and all the victims and their families have been briefed on the details. More information may become public in the next couple of days. Amid all the leaks and whispers over this grim episode in a grim case, some...