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• Friday, August 1, 2008 01:25 PM

  Ivins was engaged by the USG to investigate the anthrax attack

  We should not forget that in 2001 Bruce Ivins (according to a 2004 story in USA Today) was “deeply involved in Operation Noble Eagle -- the government's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans and the anthrax attacks that killed five more less than a month later.” The opening paras of that story follow:

  USA TODAY

  October 14, 2004, Thursday, FINAL EDITION

  Anthrax slip-ups raise fears about planned biolabs

  BYLINE: Dan Vergano and Steve Sternberg

  SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 11A

  LENGTH: 2401 words

  Bruce Ivins was troubled by the dust, dirt and clutter on his officemate's desk, and not just because it looked messy. He suspected the dust was laced with anthrax.

  And he was in a position to know. Ivins, a biodefense expert, and his officemate were deeply involved in Operation Noble Eagle -- the government's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans and the anthrax attacks that killed five more less than a month later.

  It was December 2001. Ivins, an authority on anthrax, was one of the handful of researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., who prepared spores of the deadly bacteria to test anthrax vaccines in animals. He knew enough to grow alarmed when his officemate complained, as she had frequently of late, about sloppy handling of samples coming into the lab that could be tainted with anthrax.

  "I swabbed approximately 20 areas of (her) desk, including the telephone computer and desktop," Ivins later reported to Army investigators. Half of the samples, he found, "were suspicious for anthrax," betraying the clumpy brown appearance of anthrax colonies under a microscope.

  Rather than reporting contamination to his superiors, Ivins said, he disinfected the desk. "I had no desire to cry wolf," he later told an Army investigator.

  Months later, Army investigators would see Ivins' desk cleanup as the first sign of an alarming anthrax contamination at the nation's most renowned biodefense laboratory. A 361-page U.S. Army report on the events of that winter and the following spring, recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, opens a rare window into the government's guarded biodefense establishment……

  —Peter Dale Scott Read Peter Dale Scott's other letters
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