"Nothing in the academy report directly refutes the conclusion of what was by most estimates the most expensive and manpower-intensive criminal investigation in American history."
The panel did not totally disagree with any FBI findings, they just stated that the findings could not be scientifically conclusive because there was too much random chance involved. There was a possibility that the four mutations could have spontaneously appeared somewhere else, somewhere that the FBI knew nothing about. And they would not speculate on what the odds of such a happening were.
The panel didn't dispute that flask RMR-1029 was the parent of the attack spores, they said the FBI "overstated" their finding that flask RMR-1029 was the parent of the attack anthrax spores. The panel just said it couldn't be 100% scientifically proven.
They didn't look at any of the police work which determined Bruce Ivins to be the killer. They could only say that the science couldn't conclusively state anything.
It's scientists being scientists. If something cannot be conclusively proven, then it cannot be conclusively proven, even though the odds might be a quadrillion to one.
Several people in the audience asked the panel to make their findings clear to the public by using statistics or by giving the odds of some alternative explanation being correct, but the scientists just said they weren't statisticians, so that wasn't their job.
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: February 15, 2011
WASHINGTON — A review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s scientific work on the investigation of the anthrax letters of 2001 concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins, the Army microbiologist whom the investigators blamed for the attacks...
They IGNORED MY CLUE.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't pay me the REWARD MONEY.
I'm waiting for them to contact me ~ but apparently they are not at all confident of their final decision.