(From The 9/11 Article Series – Article #8)
THE ANTHRAX CASES: FBI Drunk With Blood Lust And Blinded By Animus?
In the wake of 9/11 a number of lethal anthrax cases emerged in the form of letters containing dry powder spores of the bacteria which were sent through the public mail. Letters postmarked September 18 were addressed to Tom Brokaw of NBC News, others to the New York Post. On October 9 two more anthrax-laced letters addressed to Senators Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in Washington, D.C.
In total, 22 persons developed anthrax symptoms, five of whom died.
FBI Director Mueller was constantly badgered during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of Osama Bin Laden.
According to The Daily News, “On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, ‘There may be some possible link to Bin Laden’, adding, ‘I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Vice President Cheney chimed in claiming that Bin Laden’s lackeys were trained “to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”
https://www.nydailynews.com/2008/08/02/fbi-was-told-to-blame-anthrax-scare-on-al-qaeda-by-white-house-officials/
By early 2002, both the al Qaeda and the Iraq hypothesis were discarded and replaced with the theory of a domestic attack perpetrated by someone associated with a U.S. military facility. After working through several lone wolf suspects the FBI eventually centered on Dr. Bruce Ivins, a long-time microbiologist who worked for the Army at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) headquartered at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. Dr. Ivins specialized in anthrax vaccine development.
On July 29, 2008, Ivins died from what appeared to be suicide. Two years later in 2010 the FBI formally closed its investigation. But was Ivins really the culprit?
Serious questions about the caliber of the FBI’s investigation surfaced in 2011 when an FBI-commissioned report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) sharply concluded that:
“It is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the B. anthracis [anthrax] in the mailings based on the available scientific evidence alone.”
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/0001-Lawyers-Committee-Final-as-filed-version-Anthrax-Attacks-Petition-to-Congress-Oct-15-2020-with-signatures-page-corr.pd Page 10
In fingering Ivins as the sole suspect that is exactly what the FBI did. Eventually FBI’s ersatz investigation was the subject of several critical investigative journalism reports including articles in Salon, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as two critical documentaries one by PBS, and another by Pro Publica.
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/0001-Lawyers-Committee-Final-as-filed-version-Anthrax-Attacks-Petition-to-Congress-Oct-15-2020-with-signatures-page-corr.pd Page 13
As of 2025 – fourteen years later- that independent commission still had not been established even though on September 16 and 17, 2008 the House and Senate Judiciary Committees respectively held hearings.
Surprisingly, it was Congressman Jerrod Nadler (D-NY) who pointed out how certain military facilities that (unlike Ft. Detrick) actually have the equipment and personnel to prepare dry, silica-coated anthrax in large quantities. And what are these military facilities? They include the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground and the Battelle Corporation, a private CIA contractor. After pointing this out Nadler asked Mueller how the FBI had eliminated Dugway and Battelle as the culprits behind the anthrax attacks.
After dancing around the question Muller responded, “I’ll have to get back to you at some point.” Nadler requested that Mueller respond quickly to which Mueller responded, “Oh, absolutely Congressman.”
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Exhibit-61-Attorney-Barry-Kissin-Memo.pdf Page 2
In fact Dugway was the FBI’s initial focus of attention. A December 21, 2001 article from the Miami Herald titled, Anthrax investigators focusing on strain from military facility, which states, “The anthrax at Dugway is the only known sample they intend to check right now. The investigation is clearly focused on the Dugway anthrax.”
https://freerepublic.com/focus/fr/595214/posts
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Exhibit-61-Attorney-Barry-Kissin-Memo.pdf Page 8 (Emphasis added.)
A follow-up article from the Los Angeles Times dated August 4, 2008 states: “Dugway Proving Ground in Utah [is] a facility operated by the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio, a private contractor that performs top-secret work for the CIA and other agencies.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-04-na-anthrax4-story.html
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Exhibit-61-Attorney-Barry-Kissin-Memo.pdf Page 3
SEVEN long months later Mueller finally responded to Nadler with a written reply that not only failed to address the issue of culpability but did so in a conniving, underhanded way. Mueller’s farcical reply reads:
“Using records associated with the flask [i.e. the flask of anthrax cultures which Ivins was working with at Ft. Detrick], the FBI was able to track the transfer of sub samples from the flask located at USAMRIID to two other facilities [Dugway and the Battelle Memorial Institute].”
So far so good. Mueller admits that the FBI tracked samples sent from Ivins’ Fort Detrick lab to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio. Now comes the punchline:
“Using various methods, the FBI investigated the two facilities that received samples from the parent flask [i.e. Ivins’ flask at Ft. Detrick] and eliminated individuals from those facilities as suspects because, even if a laboratory facility had the equipment and personnel to make anthrax powder, this powder would not match the spores in the mailed envelopes if that lab had never received a transfer of anthrax from the parent flask.”
FULL STOP!! This lame response borders on sputtering psychobabble. Let’s examine what Muller wrote:
The FBI response literally says that after identifying “two facilities” [Dugway and the Battelle Memorial Institute] that received samples of anthrax from the parent flask [i.e. the Ft. Detrick, Ivins’ anthrax culture flask], these facilities were excluded as possible sources of the anthrax attack because they “never received” anthrax from the parent flask.
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Exhibit-61-Attorney-Barry-Kissin-Memo.pdf Page 2
Wow! At the beginning of the sentence Mueller says that after identifying two facilities that received anthrax samples from the parent flask but then ends the sentence claiming that the facilities never received anthrax from the parent flask! You cannot make this stuff up.
The Muller response is nothing less than a scorching display of warped depravity. Even though Nadler’s question was legitimate Mueller had no intention of answering it. So he did what so many lying government officials do: Draw the “I’ll have to get back to you, card” from the bottom of the deck.
When Nadler asked Mueller to respond right away Mueller responds,“Oh, absolutely Congressman!” (YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND CONGRESSMAN!) If Nadler was really serious there is no way he would have allowed seven months to slip by without a response. In fact there was no reaction from Congressman Nadler or any other member of Congress to the ultra-strange FBI response.
But the media was not the only entity to criticize the FBI. In fact some of the most caustic criticism leveled at the FBI’s phony-riddled “investigation” came from the very agent who led the anthrax investigations!
Former FBI Agent Richard Lambert filed a lawsuit against the DOJ and the FBI naming former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a defendant. Ex-FBI agent Lambert makes note of, “FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.”
In his lawsuit Lambert described the defendants, which included Mueller, as: “Seemingly drunk with blood lust and blinded by animus.…”
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1714250/former-fbi-special-agent-in-charge-richard.pdf Page 27 (Emphasis added.)
The anthrax attacks are another conundrum of 9/11. The one thing we can be reassured of is that Dr. Ivins is not the culprit.
But if Ivins is not the culprit, then who is? All indications are that the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio are the only facilities with specialized fermenter tanks needed to grow anthrax spores in large quantity. The specialized fermenter tanks are not installed at Ft. Detrick.
– National Security Commentator Mark Adams