Posts

USAMRID Lost Vials in 2003 AND 2009

Back in 2009, I noted that a report that USAMRID had lost track of its vials of anthrax sort of undermined the entire FBI case against Bruce Ivins.

One key to the FBI case against Ivins, after all, is that he had complete control over the sole flask that contained the strain of anthrax used in the attack. But now we come to find out that, more than six months after his death, they still don’t have a sound inventory of what they have where?

Well, as this important long Wired article on the FBI’s growing doubts about their case reveals, 2009 was not the first time USAMRID realized they didn’t have an adequate inventory of their anthrax. Discovering they had missed some samples is actually how they discovered the Ivins strain they claimed had been the source of the attack anthrax.

In December 2003, while conducting an inventory of one of USAMRIIDs biocontainment suites, investigators discovered 22 undocumented Ames anthrax samples. They began to fear that the repository they had spent nearly two years assembling might have gaping holes in it. So for the first time, the FBI decided to scour USAMRIID for any vials they had missed.

The institute staff fumed at the search—ongoing experiments would be disrupted, they shouted. Heine, Ivins’ coworker, decided to exact a bit of revenge on his FBI handler. While the agent was collecting samples in his lab—dressed in full protective gear—Heine handed her a vial and told her it was a deadly plague strain. The vial started shaking in the agent’s gloved hand. Heine cracked up. “They were entirely dependent on me to identify everything in every box,” he says. “I could’ve held up a critical piece of evidence, said it was something else, and put it aside. There’s no way they would’ve known.”

During the search, investigators took Ivins’ primary RMR-1029 store—not just a sample of the stuff, all of it. They skimmed a small amount into a vial, labeled it with an identification number, and sent it to Pat Worsham down the hall for analysis.

Now, it appears that investigators decided to focus on Ivins because 1) he had withheld the RMR-1029 in the past, and 2) he had concerning tendencies.

(And, probably, 3) their case against Hatfill was falling apart.)

But what Shachtman doesn’t explain is what happened to the other 22 vials they had missed … at USAMRID. Plus the ones (such as, at Dugway, which would be a more likely laboratory to have produced this anthrax) not declared elsewhere?

In other words, no matter how good the science was analyzing the specimens of anthrax they got, there’s abundant evidence that they didn’t do a comprehensive inventory in the early days of the investigation (at which point, legally, it was probably too late to apply this kind of analysis), and they can’t guarantee that the labs have an accurate inventory of their anthrax, much less that that anthrax all stayed in the official labs.

Read more

We Get to See the Hatfill Warrant

Judge Lamberth has just ruled that the government has to unseal the materials it submitted to get search warrants related to Stephen Hatfill (h/t scribe).

This should be fun.

After all, it’s telling enough that the government doesn’t want us to see the search warrant application. And one of the reasons the government didn’t want to release the materials is because it wants to keep the identity of a confidential informant secret; I do hope we’ll be able to tell whether they had something more than people who had analyzed the writing on the envelopes to point to Hatfill. 

But given how flimsy the government’s case against Ivins remains, I look forward to seeing what they were thinking back earlier in this process.