FBI Director Robert Mueller has to testify before Congress Sept.16; I have a question that should be put to him: How did Dr. Ivins weaponize his anthrax?

[I, Enemy Combatant]

It was scientifically impossible for Dr. Ivins to convert his anthrax
into *weaponized* anthrax. He did not have access to the necessary
equipment.

The genetic strain of the mailed anthrax is irrelevant. It was the
*weaponization* that made the mailed anthrax unique. Dr. Ivins did
not have *weaponized* anthrax, and could not make any even if he
wanted to.

The above can be easily proven, along with the fact: the seven-year
long "Amerithrax" investigation has not produced one shred of
scientific evidence indicating Dr. Ivins had anything to do with
mailing anthrax.

Since it was impossible for Dr. Ivins to mail weaponized anthrax: Dr.
Ivins did not mail weaponized anthrax. His innocence is just that
simple; his guilt is much more complicated.

The FBI have amassed an immense amount of circumstantial evidence
against Dr. Ivins; however, as I have demonstrated in an earlier post
- circumstantially speaking - Robert Mueller is more likely the
anthrax terrorist than is Dr. Ivins.

Reasons to believe Robert Mueller is the anthrax terrorist:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.thebird/browse_thread/thread/fb11a9cf9bdcc923

Mailed anthrax killed the Bill of Rights and birthed the patriot act
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.thebird/browse_thread/thread/3ca59ade53781924

Secret Anthrax Weaponization Program
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/bruce-ivins-fall-guy-to-cover-secret-anthrax-weaponization-program/

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

Seeking Details, Lawmakers Cite Anthrax Doubts
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/washington/07anthrax.html?em
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: September 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist
was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more
information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not
think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House
Judiciary Committee said that “important and lingering questions
remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there
will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case.”

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr.
Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the
anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary
Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

“My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter,”
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the
Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins,
a microbiologist at the Army’s biodefense laboratory who worked on
anthrax vaccines. “There are some very serious questions that have yet
to be answered and need to be made public.”

Bureau officials say they are certain they have solved the nation’s
first major bioterrorism attack, in which anthrax-laced letters killed
five people, after a long and troubled investigation that by several
measures was the most complex in the bureau’s history.

But in interviews last week, two dozen bioterrorism experts, veteran
investigators and members of Congress expressed doubts about the
bureau’s conclusions. Some called for an independent review of the
case to reassure the public and assess policies on the handling of
dangerous pathogens like anthrax.

Meanwhile, new details of the investigation, revealed in recent
interviews, raised questions about when the bureau focused on Dr.
Ivins as the likely perpetrator and how solid its evidence was.

In April 2007, after the mailed anthrax was genetically linked to Dr.
Ivins’s laboratory and after he was questioned about late-night work
in the laboratory before the letters were mailed, prosecutors sent Dr.
Ivins a formal letter saying he was “not a target” of the
investigation. And only a week before Dr. Ivins died did agents first
take a mouth swab to collect a DNA sample, officials said.

Justice Department officials, who said in early August that the
investigation was likely to be closed formally within days or weeks,
now say it is likely to remain open for three to six more months. In
the meantime, agents are continuing to conduct interviews with
acquaintances of Dr. Ivins and are examining computers he used,
seeking information that could strengthen the case.

But bureau and Justice Department officials insist that the delay,
which they say is necessary to tie up loose ends in a complex
investigation, reflects no doubts about their ultimate verdict.
“People feel just as strongly as they did a month ago that this was
the guy,” said a department official who spoke on the condition of
anonymity.

Even the strongest skeptics acknowledged that the bureau had raised
troubling questions about Dr. Ivins’s mental health and had made a
strong scientific case linking the mailed anthrax to a supply in his
laboratory.

But they said the bureau’s piecemeal release of information, in search
warrant affidavits and in briefings for reporters and Congress, had
left significant gaps in the trail that led to Dr. Ivins and had
failed to explain how investigators ruled out at least 100 other
people who the bureau acknowledged had access to the same flasks of
anthrax.

In interviews, F.B.I. officials said they knew their findings would
face intense scrutiny after the bureau admitted that for years it had
pursued the wrong man, Steven J. Hatfill, whom the government paid
$4.6 million in June to settle a lawsuit that accused the government
of leaking information about him to the news media.

Officials also acknowledged that they did not have a single,
definitive piece of evidence indisputably proving that Dr. Ivins
mailed the letters — no confession, no trace of his DNA on the
letters, no security camera recording the mailings in Princeton, N.J.

But they said the case consisted of a powerfully persuasive
accumulation of incriminating details. Dr. Vahid Majidi, head of the
F.B.I.’s weapons of mass destruction directorate, said the
accumulation of evidence against Dr. Ivins was overwhelming: his
oversight of the anthrax supply, his night hours, his mental problems
and his habit of driving to far-off locations at night to mail
anonymous packages.

“Who had the means, motive and opportunity?” said John Miller,
assistant F.B.I. director for public affairs. “Some potential suspects
may have had one, some had two, but on the cumulative scale, Dr. Ivins
had many more of these elements than any other potential suspect.”

Mr. Miller said the bureau ultimately planned to release much more
information from its investigative files, including notes of F.B.I.
interviews with Dr. Ivins and other suspects and witnesses and
surveillance logs detailing his movements and actions. But those
disclosures, requiring a detailed review to remove private and
classified information, are likely to be months away.

Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, is likely to face tough questions at
next week’s scheduled oversight hearings, not just about the case
against Dr. Ivins but about the prolonged pursuit of Dr. Hatfill.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and frequent critic of
the bureau, said he was frustrated by the delay in closing the case
and answering questions.

“If the case is solved, why isn’t it solved?” Mr. Grassley asked.
“It’s all very suspicious, and you wonder whether or not the F.B.I.
doesn’t have something to cover up and that they don’t want to come
clean.”

Investigators have not reviewed three boxes of papers left by Dr.
Ivins marked for the attention of his lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, because
the records must first be reviewed to see whether they should be kept
confidential under attorney-client privilege, Mr. Kemp said. A
government lawyer not involved in the investigation will soon review
the papers with Mr. Kemp, who said some might be given to
investigators or made public.

What is clear is that the disclosures have not closed the matter.

“They took their shot,” said Representative Rush D. Holt, a Democrat
who holds a doctorate in physics and has followed the case closely
because the letters were mailed in his New Jersey district. “They
hoped and maybe believed that the case they laid out would persuade
everyone. I think they’re probably surprised by the level of
skepticism.”

Many scientists who have tracked the case, too, have found the
evidence less than decisive.

“For a lot of the scientific community, the word would be agnostic,”
said Dr. Thomas V. Inglesby, an expert on bioterrorism at the Center
for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “They
still don’t feel they have enough information to judge whether the
case has been solved.”

Mr. Holt and Dr. Inglesby were among a number of outsiders who said
that only an independent review of the investigation and the evidence
against Dr. Ivins — either by Congress or a commission like the one
that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks — could give the public
confidence that the case was over.

Dr. Ralph R. Frerichs, an epidemiologist at the University of
California, Los Angeles who has created a Web site detailing the
anthrax case, said that such a review was critical to establishing how
the lethal powder was made.

“There’s no clarity on the simplest aspect: is this hard to do or easy
to do?” Dr. Frerichs said. If the powder could be made with basic
laboratory equipment and no sophisticated additives, as the bureau
maintains, laboratory security and background checks for workers may
have to be tightened, he said.

Skepticism toward the bureau’s case remains especially pronounced
among Dr. Ivins’s former colleagues at the Army laboratory at Fort
Detrick, Md.

“Despite the F.B.I.’s scientific and circumstantial evidence, I and
many of Dr. Ivins’s former colleagues don’t believe he did it and
don’t believe the spore preparations were made at Detrick,” said Dr.
Gerry Andrews, a microbiologist who worked at the Army laboratory for
nine years and was Dr. Ivins’s boss for part of that time.

Laboratory records obtained by The New York Times show that the
anthrax supply labeled RMR-1029, which the F.B.I. linked to the
attacks, was stored in 1997 not in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, in Building
1425, but in the adjacent Building 1412. Former colleagues said that
its storage in both buildings at different times from 1997 to 2001
might mean that the bureau’s estimate of 100 people with physical
access to it was two or three times too low.

Some microbiologists question the time records documenting Dr. Ivins’s
night hours, pointing out that one F.B.I. affidavit said he was in the
secure part of the laboratory for exactly 2 hours and 15 minutes three
nights in a row — an unlikely coincidence that they said raised
questions about the accuracy of the records.

Confusion remains about silicon found in the mailed powder. Some
F.B.I. critics say it shows that there was a sophisticated additive
that might point away from Fort Detrick as a source, but the bureau
concluded that it was merely an accident of the way the anthrax was
grown.

Dr. Majidi said that many technical details would be cleared up by the
papers published by bureau scientists and consultants over the next
year or more. “It’s the collective body of evidence that’s really
strong,” Dr. Majidi said.

Without witnesses or forensic experts linking the killings directly to
Dr. Ivins, the Justice Department’s public case against him relies
largely on “opportunity evidence,” said Robert J. Cleary, the lead
prosecutor a decade ago in the Unabomber attacks.

“What prosecutors have to do to persuade the public that this was the
guy is to show the uniqueness of the strain of anthrax and to
eliminate everyone else who had opportunity and access to it.” That,
Mr. Cleary said, “is a challenge.”