The AnthraX Chronicles Part 7 - Burying Truth & Dead(ly) Agents

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Banking On A Memory Hole

Bruce Ivins may be dead, but the mystery behind the anthrax letters is not. It was memory-holed; and then in February 2010, the FBI shut down its investigation. But many contend Ivins was railroaded by a flimsy web of lies.

A year after later, in February 2011, a separate panel from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that prosecutors had overstated the certainty of their findings. It had been a decade since the anthrax letters. Committee members said newly available testing methods could prove the FBI’s case much more definitively or lead to other potential suspects. And that the scientific picture remained incomplete.

“Taken on its own, the science doesn’t prove Ivins did it,” the panel stated. The new report also prefaced that it was limited to an evaluation of the scientific evidence and did not assess the guilt or innocence of anyone connected to the case.

“We have to decide … how important this case is to us as a society, and I’m not presupposing it is,” said David A. Relman, vice chairman of NAS and a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Sadly, the truth behind this case didn’t seem to be that important.

With that said, a re-examination of the anthrax case by PBS Frontline, McClatchy, and ProPublica also raised new questions about some of the evidence against Ivins.