FBI's Mental Illness Problems Hurt Anthrax Investigation - McClatchy

[Kathleen]

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Subject: [SpinLyme] FBI's Mental Illness Problems Hurt Anthrax
Investigation - McClatchy

Date: Oct 25, 2011 10:40 AM

ARTICLE BELOW
============================

This is very similar to the LYMEthrax
crimes.

Limited mentation and the inability
to hire real scientists who might
expose the FBI's inability to handle
a scientific problem - in an era
of "terrorism" hysteria and the
911 War Against Iraq's "Weapons
of Mass-Destruction" - is a classic
case of FBI's own criminal profiling
profile: Vanity.

The FBI is stupid, incompetent and they
won't admit it. And they won't hire
anyone with any brains to help them
with the very matters with which
they're charged to marshal.

http://www.actionlyme.org

It might be a civil-rights discrimination
crime to be calling the FBI lazy retards,
but, well,... bring it.


========================================

Secret reports: With security spotty, many had access to anthrax

* Story | FBI's case against anthrax suspect rife with questions
* On the Web | More coverage of the 'anthrax killer' case

By Greg Gordon and Stephen Engelberg | McClatchy Newspapers and
ProPublica
Greg Gordon and Stephen Engelberg McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Army laboratory identified by prosecutors as the
source of the anthrax that killed five people in the fall of 2001 was
rife with such security gaps that the deadly spores could have easily
been smuggled out of the facility, outside investigators found.

The existing security procedures _ described in two long-secret
reports _ were so lax they would have allowed any researcher, aide or
temporary worker to walk out of the Army bio-weapons lab at Fort
Detrick, Md, with a few drops of anthrax _ starter germs that could
grow the trillions of spores used to fill anthrax-laced letters sent
to Congress and the media.

The two reports, which have not been made public for more than nine
years, describe a haphazard system in which personnel lists included
dozens of former employees, where new hires were allowed to work with
deadly germs before background checks were done and where stocks of
anthrax and other pathogens weren’t adequately controlled.

Fort Detrick since has adopted new bio-security measures. But the
security reports by independent government specialists suggest that
deadly anthrax stocks may have been more accessible than investigators
assumed in declaring Army scientist Bruce Ivins the perpetrator.

The letters, mailed to two U.S. senators and at least three media
outlets, panicked the nation in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11
terrorist attacks. The Justice Department says the letter spores
derived from a flask controlled by Ivins at Fort Detrick.

Marked “for official use only,” the two reports were completed in
2002. One was conducted by a seven-member team from Sandia National
Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. The other was by auditors for the
Army’s inspector general’s office.

The teams evaluated security at the U.S. Army Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), then the lead federal lab
for developing vaccines and other medical defenses against biological
weapons.

McClatchy, the online investigative newsroom ProPublica and PBS’s
“Frontline,” which have collaborated in an examination of the Justice
Department’s case against Ivins, obtained copies of both reports.

The reports are expected to be made public later this week in a $50
million lawsuit filed in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., by
family members of Robert Stevens, a photo editor for American Media
Inc., who was the first person to die from the anthrax attacks.

“It’s about time,” said Richard Schuler, a lawyer for the family. “The
public should know about the way security for deadly pathogens was
being handled _ or mishandled _ by the Department of the Army and the
government in the period leading up to the 2001 anthrax attacks.”

A psychological report on Ivins, who committed suicide in July 2008,
said Ivins had “diagnosable mental illness” when he was hired in 1980,
and that his mental health should have disqualified him from obtaining
a “secret-level” security clearance.

Ivins died of an overdose soon after learning that prosecutors were
seeking approval to charge him with five counts of murder. The FBI
case was largely circumstantial, although prosecutors say their most
direct evidence was the genetic link between anthrax in the letter
powder and spores in Ivins’ flask of liquid anthrax.

Before posthumously declaring Ivins the killer, the Justice Department
said, the FBI eliminated as suspects as many as 419 people. Those
individuals would have had access to Ivins’ flask, which was stored in
an airtight “hot suite” at Fort Detrick, or to spores he’d shared with
colleagues or outside researchers, including scientists at the
Battelle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio.

The Sandia report emphasized that terrorists had obtained germs from
research labs before. It cited a February 2001 National Defense
University study that found 11 cases in which terrorists or other “non-
state operatives” had acquired biological agents from “legitimate
culture collections,” including three research or medical
laboratories.

Despite USAMRIID’s sobering mission, the Sandia report said, the
western Maryland lab had developed a work environment in which
employees failed to make the same “indisputable commitment to
security” as they did to research.

“The current biosecurity system at USAMRIID does not adequately
protect HCPTs (high-consequence pathogens and toxins) and related
information,” wrote the Sandia team, headed by security expert
Reynolds Salerno.

The report said no rules governed movement of germ specimens from one
building to another, for example, and that a test tube containing some
of Ivins’ spores was left for weeks in a refrigerator in a second
building.

Fort Detrick’s personnel database failed to list 213 of USAMRIID’s
employees but did include 80 who had left their jobs, the Sandia
report said. A separate human resources roster listed 56 people who
had left but not 12 who worked there.

Conflicting rosters didn’t necessarily signal a security weakness, the
Sandia team wrote, but they contributed to “perceived chaos in the
personnel system” at the facility.

Even if all those things had been perfect, the examiners said, there
was little way to detect diversions from flasks of germs, because a
“malevolent” worker could grow more of the pathogen or find other ways
to conceal the removal of a small amount.

Asked about the studies, a Justice Department spokesman said in a
prepared statement that the FBI looked at everyone who had card-key
access to the “hot suites,” including researchers with up-to-date
vaccinations, then thoroughly investigated “all individuals with
theoretical access” to Ivins’ spores in advance of the mailings.

The Army auditors, who studied security throughout Fort Detrick, not
just at USAMRIID, made clear that pathogens in the bio-weapons
facility were “not afforded a standard, minimum level of protection”
similar to that for nuclear and chemical weapons.

Although a 22-year-old Army regulation governing the management of
hazardous biological substances was in effect in 2001, the Army
auditors wrote, two of the three labs at Fort Detrick weren’t aware of
it and the other ignored it as outdated.

The Army report also said that contractor labs, such as Battelle, had
limited regulation and no screening of individuals working with
anthrax and other pathogens, creating “the potential for unauthorized
access to these materials.”

USAMRIID has long since committed to a major overhaul of its security
system and adopted a comprehensive Army “biosurety program” in 2003
that included closer tracking of inventories of various germs.

Employees with access to the “hot suites,” which are designed to
contain anthrax and other pathogens during experiments, must now
submit to regular medical, mental health and behavior screening,
including monitoring of their use of prescription drugs.

“The safety of the USAMRIID staff and the security of the biological
agents on which it works,” spokeswoman Caree Vander-Linden said, “have
always been top priority, even before the events of 2001.”

(McClatchy collaborated with the investigative newsroom ProPublica and
PBS's "Frontline" on its inquiry into the FBI’s case against the
anthrax killer. Gordon works for McClatchy. Engelberg works for
ProPublica.)

MORE FROM MCCLATCHY

The Anthrax Files _ a joint investigation by McClatchy, ProPublica and
PBS’ Frontline

New twist in anthrax case; Justice Department lawyers contradict FBI
findings

Justice Department retracts court filings that undercut FBI's anthrax
case

FBI lab reports on anthrax attacks suggest another miscue

Was FBI too quick to judge anthrax suspect the killer?

FBI's anthrax suspect is likely killer, panel concludes

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Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/24/128012/secret-reports-suggest-ivins-and.html#ixzz1bnu9MDd3


KMDickson


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[Dennis]

Kathleen wrote:

> Subject: [SpinLyme] FBI's Mental Illness Problems Hurt Anthrax
> Investigation - McClatchy

I know someone else whose mental illness is hurting their investigation -
won't mention any names! :-)

Dennis