Having worked in a lab, I am in complete agreement with you.
Ed, who has never set foot in the lab, relies solely on Internet publications as “proof” of Ivin’s guilt.
Notice he has not responded to my “hearsay” post above.
Sorry Ed, I know you’re busy on your Sunday morning posting.
I started with this journey in my life about 2 seconds after I heard that ISU had destroyed their entire collection of anthrax.
I use this example of why this was so wrong and so telling of something.
Let's say that a person in a lime green Buick robs a bank at the drive through window. There are some sketchy witnesses but the Buick scraped the posts that protect the side of the bank. So we have a chemical analysis and they tell us that this lime green paint was left by a 1960 Buick. Obviously, the vehicle will show damage that will correspond to the side of the bank.
The authorities can access registration records and determine that there are 100 lime green Buicks in existence. They begin to track them down and determine that only 12 were in the vicinity of the bank at the time of the robbery.
But one owner, one day after the robbery, has taken his lime green Buick to the crusher and had it destroyed. Well it didn't run right and people made fun of it and it was costly to repair because of its age, etc. etc.
How guilty does this one owner look?
Same with ISU. Some of these samples cannot be found anywhere else. And what about the records of what was there, and who had access. Was all that destroyed too?
This is so obvious to me. I don't think I am making any leaps of faith here. The people who destroyed it were anthrax researchers, folks who well knew that the DNA sequence for anthrax had been analyzed in 1999. This was their job, they knew that some authority would ask for their samples and be able to tell one vial from the next. No one else destroyed their collections.
And I wondered why didn't they just get rid of the stuff that was missing? Well the obvious answer is, they didn't know what was taken or how much or who took it. So they had to destroy it all to CYA.
I don't know what you mean by "Internet publications," but I don't relay on the media for ANYTHING regarding Ivins. I rely on FBI documents and discussions with scientists involved in the investigation - and on conversations with people who knew Ivins.
Before Ivins' suicide, I thought the anthrax mailer was a scientist in New Jersey. But, I always said (and I stated in my book) that the FBI might have a mountain of evidence pointing to someone else that I didn't know anything about. That turned out to be the case.
From the time I first heard of Ivins in August of 2008, I've been studying every document I can find about him and about the FBI's evidence. The media hasn't been of much help at all.
The statement by Ivins' therapist in the court document isn't "hearsay." It's not a rumor or something heard from some unknown person. It's a statement by a member of a group about what a leader of the group told her. I don't think that would qualify as "hearsay."
There appear to be a lot of documents from Ivins' psychiatrists that are still "under seal" due to doctor/patient confidentiality. They probably would have been used in court, since doctor/patient confidentiality doesn't apply when the patient threatens to kill people (as Ivins did). There are even indications from confidential sources I cannot identify that Ivins confessed to his psychiatrist that he was the anthrax mailer.
Yes, it took me a long time to respond to your post because I had to write a Sunday morning comment for my web site.
And now I've got to go back to other things before I'll find time to post here again.