WSJ 08/05/108

Pressure Grows to Release
Evidence in Anthrax Case
By EVAN PEREZ, ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON and SARAH LUECK
August 5, 2008; Page A3

WASHINGTON -- Federal law-enforcement officials continued to deliberate the release of evidence they say implicates a U.S. military researcher in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Closed-door discussions between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department come amid rising pressure from Congress to unseal evidence against Bruce Ivins, the Fort Detrick, Md., researcher. Dr. Ivins committed suicide last week after being told he would be charged with five deaths and 17 injuries that resulted from anthrax-laced letters sent through the mail.


Associated Press
Fort Detrick's scientists were required to work on the case while simultaneously being targeted as suspects.
Law-enforcement officials say that in addition to tracking the anthrax strain used in the attacks to Fort Detrick, they have emails sent by Dr. Ivins that implicate him in the attacks. They didn't provide details.

The Justice Department's caution stems in part from mistakes that caused investigators to focus on another Fort Detrick scientist, Steven Hatfill. Mr. Hatfill sued the government for wrongly targeting him in the case, and last month the Justice Department agreed to pay him $5.8 million to settle the case.

At meetings in recent days, some Justice Department officials urged a slow approach, to avoid a repeat of mistakes, and that prompted clashes with some FBI officials who believe their case is secure enough, according to officials close to the situation. An FBI official played down any friction, saying, "We had very good talks across all camps, came up with a plan, emailed it around on the weekend and got agreement. Everything is on track."

An attorney for Dr. Ivins has said his late client was innocent and had been prepared to prove it in court.

Dr. Ivins's failure to report a release of anthrax spores in his office in 2001 has emerged as critical evidence in the FBI case against him. Some at Fort Detrick say the intense scrutiny of the facility and its staff may partly explain why their colleague took his life.

Separately, the Associated Press reported Monday that investigators were focusing on emails or other documents from Dr. Ivins that portray a fixation with a sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. The report quoted a sorority adviser in Princeton, N.J., who said she was interviewed by FBI agents.

The anthrax mailings were sent from a mailbox in Princeton. A law-enforcement official confirmed the sorority link but declined to say whether there was any evidence Dr. Ivins was in Princeton during the period the letters were sent.

The seven-year investigation has put Fort Detrick under increased scrutiny. Contamination incidents at the Army's Frederick, Md., infectious-disease facility have been re-examined since a new team of FBI agents took over the investigation in 2006, leading agents to Dr. Ivins, law-enforcement officials say.


Containment and safety were already an issue at the lab in 2001 when Dr. Ivins cleaned up anthrax contamination in his office without immediately informing his superiors, says Col. Arthur Anderson, a pathologist who also is an ethics officer at the lab. Col. Anderson says Dr. Ivins told him about the lapse in safety shortly after it occurred, contradicting Army findings in 2002 that Dr. Ivins had told no one. Dr. Ivins's failure to immediately report the incident to his superiors is now seen by law-enforcement authorities as key evidence against him.

"He didn't tell the safety office, he didn't tell the commander, but he told me," said Col. Anderson, director of the office of human use and ethics.

The investigators' focus on the 2001 contamination incident, along with Dr. Ivins's shifting explanations in a May 2002 interview, have prompted a new examination of safety at the facility, whose work was secret until the 1970s. Soon after Fort Detrick came under greater public scrutiny, reports and evidence of violations began to emerge. In the early 1990s, an internal Army report documented instances of misplaced research specimens, including some for anthrax.

The Army has for several years been cleaning up 10 hazardous waste sites on the Fort Detrick campus, the biggest and most expensive cleanup in the facility's history. The effort is costing more than $50 million.

One of those sites contained more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste, including samples of live bacteria, nonvirulent anthrax, drums of chemicals and laboratory rats floating in jars of preservative. At the time the debris was discovered, the Army said it hadn't known it was there.

Families in the area who draw their drinking water from wells on their property are being provided bottled water while the Army tests groundwater for contamination.

Pollution in the groundwater near the Fort Detrick campus first surfaced in the early 1990s. In June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed that Fort Detrick be designated a Superfund site, potentially giving the EPA oversight of Army efforts to clean up a mile-long plume of groundwater contamination near the facility.