Legal Commentary

The FBI Should Release Its File on Bruce Ivins

By TChris

For seven years, the identity of the person who mailed letters contaminated with anthrax has been a mystery. The FBI, once quite certain that Steven Hatfill was the culprit, eventually expressed regret at ruining an innocent man's life with its false accusations. Now the FBI has decided that Army scientist Bruce Ivins was the guilty party. Ivins' apparent suicide conveniently allows the FBI to close its investigation without being bothered to prove that he was any more guilty than Hatfill.

The FBI views the suicide as a confession. In the absence of a suicide note that actually admits the crime, that assertion is speculative. Ivins' lawyer points out that people who are dogged with life-ruining accusations, true or false, might lose the will to live.

Tom Daschle correctly argues that the public deserves to know whether the evidence against Ivins was compelling. If not, the true criminal may still be at large. [more ...]

"I think the FBI owes us a complete accounting of their investigation and ought to be able to tell us at some point, how we're going to bring this to closure," said former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, whose office received a letter containing the deadly white powder in 2001. "It's been seven years, there's a lot of unanswered questions and I think the American people deserve to know more than they do today."

Ivins supposedly has "a long history of homicidal threats," but it's one thing to threaten specific people and another to kill anyone who happened to open a letter. There are conflicting reports regarding Ivins' emotional stability. He apparently threatened the lives of therapists, but others saw him as "a churchgoing, family-oriented germ researcher known for his jolly disposition."

Ivins also failed to report an anthrax spill, which sounds more like butt-covering than evidence of homicidal intent. Ivins did have access to anthrax and didn't always follow research protocols, but his motive to kill the people to whom anthrax-laced letters were addressed is unclear.

Authorities were investigating whether Ivins, who had complained about the limits of testing anthrax drugs on animals, had released the toxin to test the treatment on humans.

Maybe, but that speclative reasoning seems a bit far-fetched. Perhaps he merely wanted to give his career a boost, or to call attention to the risk of an anthrax attack. Conjecture is easy. Surely the FBI had better evidence than this if it intended to indict Ivins for murder and to seek the death penalty. If so, it's time to make that evidence public.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 02, 2008 (boomark / email).