Another heckuva job from the Bush administration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/us/04anthrax.html?hp=&pagewanted=allPortrait Emerges of Anthrax Suspect’s Troubled Life
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: January 3, 2009
FREDERICK, Md. — Inside the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, the government’s brain for biological defense, Bruce Edwards Ivins paused to memorialize his moment in the spotlight as the anthrax panic of 2001 reached its peak.
Dr. Ivins titled his e-mail message “In the lab” and attached photographs: the gaunt microbiologist bending over Petri dishes of anthrax, and colonies of the deadly bacteria, white commas against blood-red nutrient.
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Nearly seven years and many millions of dollars later, after an investigation that included both path-breaking science and costly bungling, the F.B.I. concluded that Dr. Haigwood had been right: the anthrax killer had been at the investigators’ side all along. Prosecutors said they believed they had the evidence to prove that Dr. Ivins alone carried out the attacks, but their assertions immediately met with skepticism among some scientists, lawmakers and co-workers of Dr. Ivins.
With the F.B.I. preparing to close the case, The New York Times has taken the deepest look so far at the investigation, speaking to dozens of Dr. Ivins’s colleagues and friends, reading hundreds of his e-mail messages, interviewing former bureau investigators and anthrax experts, reviewing court records, and obtaining, for the first time, police reports on his suicide in July, including a lengthy recorded interview with his wife.
That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.
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Still, doubts persist. The case will be reviewed this year by the National Academy of Sciences and by Congress. If the F.B.I. is wrong, then a troubled man was hounded to death and the anthrax perpetrator is still at large, as many of Dr. Ivins’s colleagues at Fort Detrick believe. When institute scientists began their own review of the evidence, nervous Army officials ordered the inquiry dropped.
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much more at link
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