FBI’s genetic tests didn’t nail anthrax killer, GAO says

[Ichingcarpenter]

WASHINGTON — For a second time in three years, an inquiry cast doubt Friday on the FBI’s assertion that genetic testing had cinched its conclusion that a now-dead Army bioweapons researcher mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized the East Coast in 2001.

The long-awaited report from the Government Accountability Office found that the FBI’s exhaustive, cutting-edge attempt to trace the killer with matches of genetic mutations of anthrax samples at times lacked precision, consistency and adequate standards.

The 77-page report, perhaps the final official word on the FBI’s seven-year investigation known as Amerithrax, lent credence to a National Academy of Sciences panel’s finding in 2011 that the bureau’s scientific evidence did not definitely show that the anthrax came from the Maryland bioweapons laboratory of Bruce Ivins.

The report’s findings also mirrored some of the conclusions of a joint investigation by McClatchy, ProPublica and PBS’ “Frontline” that was published and aired in the fall of 2011.

Shortly after Ivins took a suicidal drug overdose on July 29, 2008, federal prosecutors said they’d been drafting criminal charges against him, and they declared the scientist at Fort Detrick, Md., the culprit. In 2010, they laid out an extensive circumstantial case against him, presenting as a smoking gun the findings of genetic testing by outside laboratories that matched four distinct mutations in the anthrax spores in the letters with those in a flask full of anthrax in Ivins’ laboratory.


Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/12/19/250715_fbis-genetic-tests-didnt-nail.html?sp=%2F99%2F200%2F&rh=1#storylink=cpy



Inquiry in Anthrax Mailings Had Gaps, Report Says


On Friday, Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat and physicist who requested the study, said the report “confirms what I have often said — that the F.B.I.’s definitive conclusions about the accuracy of their scientific findings in the Amerithrax case are not, in fact, definitive. The United States needs a comprehensive, independent review of the Amerithrax investigation to ensure we have learned the lessons from this bio attack.”

Mr. Holt has repeatedly called for a national commission on the anthrax mailings that would serve as a kind of scaled-down version of the panel that studied the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The anthrax letters were sent from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., which is in his district.

The deadly wisps of anthrax, coming just after the September attacks, set off new waves of panic. Over the years, a growing number of outside experts have asked whether federal investigators got the right man and whether the F.B.I.’s long inquiry brushed aside important clues.

To the regret of independent scientists, the report made no mention of an issue beyond genetics: whether the spores displayed signs of advanced manufacturing. They have pointed to distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores that they say contradict F.B.I. claims that the germs were unsophisticated


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/science/inquiry-in-anthrax-mailings-had-gaps-report-says.html?_r=1