Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government’s case against the late
Bruce E. Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice
Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.
In the face of the questions, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials have decided to make
their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science used to trace the anthrax
used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort
Detrick, in Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the
F.B.I. has failed to make a conclusive case.
“That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to
make a scientific judgment one way or the other,” Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the
Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The information that
has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there.”
F.B.I officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins, who
killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will
withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But
the scrutiny may only raise fresh questions.
The bureau presented forensics information to Congressional and government officials this week in
a closed-door briefing, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinc
Naba Barkakati, an engineer who is the chief technologist for the Government Accountability Office and who also attended this
week’s briefing, said of the F.B.I.’s forensics case against Dr. Ivins:
“It’s very hard to get the sense of whether this was scientifically good or bad. We
didn’t really get the question settled, other than taking their word for it.”
The bureau’s lab work has come under sharp criticism in recent years for problems over DNA
analysis, bullet tracing and other important forensic technology. In 2004, the laboratory mismatched
a fingerprint taken from the Madrid terror bombings to a lawyer in Portland, Ore., Brandon Mayfield,
who was then arrested. He won a $2.8 million settlement.
With the main suspect in the anthrax killings now dead, F.B.I. officials say they realize they
will again face tough scrutiny over the strength of their scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins.
Indeed, conspiracy theories are already flourishing on many Web sites, with skeptical observers
asking whether the Maryland scientist was set up to take the fall for the attacks or, worse yet, was
a murder victim. The fact that the bureau pursued another scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, for years
before agreeing to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed and then later exonerating him
has only fueled the skepticism.
“Do you believe Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks?” The Frederick
News-Post, the hometown newspaper in Fort Detrick, asked its readers this week. (Of those who
responded, 34 percent said no, compared with 26 percent who said yesed that the F.B.I. had the right
man, and they said some of the government’s public statements appeared incomplete or
misleading.
For instance, the Justice Department said earlier this month in unsealing court records against
Dr. Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that
did not appear to have come from his laboratory.
But F.B.I. officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were
there, that the sample Dr. Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the
attacks, but, because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Dr. Ivins’s
failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the F.B.I. did not realize that it was a
correct match until three years later.
In addition, people who were briefed by the F.B.I. said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in
the anthrax attacks — another piece of evidence used to link Dr. Ivins to the attacks —
could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to
believe.
Representative Ru
sh Holt, the New Jersey Democrat who has followed the anthrax case closely and requested this
week’s briefing from the F.B.I., said in an interview that he was not ready to draw any firm
conclusions about the investigation. But he said: ‘The case is built from a number of pieces
of circumstantial evidence, and for a case this important, it’s troubling to have so many
loose ends. The briefing pointed out even more loose ends than I thought there were
before.”
