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Agency says it remains committed to solving the 5-year-old mystery WASHINGTON - The top FBI official in charge of the investigation into the deadly anthrax attacks has left the case, NBC News has learned. Richard "Rick" Lambert had been the inspector of the so-called AMERITHRAX case since September 2002, and had run every aspect of the five-year-old investigation. Just last month, he was transferred to the Knoxville, Tenn., field office of the FBI as its special agent in charge, according to the FBI. Lambert was the public face of the case, and his transfer is sure to fuel speculation that...

WASHINGTON - Lawyers for a scientist investigated in the 2001 anthrax killings have questioned at least two journalists and are subpoenaeing other reporters, seeking the identities of their confidential government sources. Through a lawsuit, Steven Hatfill is trying to track down suspected leakers at the FBI and the Justice Department who made Hatfill the focus of news coverage regarding anthrax-laced letters mailed to members of the press and to two United States senators. Hatfill's lawsuit alleges violations of the Privacy Act and his constitutional rights to due process and free speech. Newsweek magazine reporter Michael Isikoff and ABC correspondent Brian...

<p>A drum maker who became infected with anthrax after inhaling spores from raw animal hides is in serious condition, with breathing trouble.</p> <p>But officials are reassuring the public that there's no broader health risk from the case.</p> <p>The outlook for 44-year-old Vado Diomande was a shift from earlier this week, when officials said he was breathing on his own and in relatively good shape for someone exposed to anthrax.</p>

By SARA KUGLER, Associated Press Writer 17 minutes ago NEW YORK - A New York City man has been hospitalized with a case of anthrax that a federal law enforcement official said may have been contracted from animal skins during a visit to Africa. ADVERTISEMENT The infection appeared to be accidental, and authorities did not believe it was related to terrorism, the official said. The man traveled recently to the west coast of Africa and became ill shortly after his return, said a federal law enforcement official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. It was not clear...

FBI officials said yesterday that investigators are still working diligently to find whoever was responsible for the anthrax-bacteria-laced mailings, which killed five people, sickened 17 others and led to the temporary shutdown of the House, Senate and Supreme Court buildings and numerous postal facilities. They said they are getting assistance from forensics experts and scientific researchers from law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, university laboratories and private corporations...... *** In the past year, the number of FBI agents on the case has dropped from 31 to 21, authorities said. During the same time, the number of postal inspectors has fallen...

'Missing from his (The Presidents Quantico) address, however, was any reference to the strikes on U.S. soil that occurred in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, from a biological agent called anthrax -- a grave, ongoing and unsolved threat.. A small amount of powder in five letters managed to kill five people in Washington, Florida and New York, and sickened... The U.S. postal system was brought to its knees in several cities... Congressional offices were evacuated. The cost of responding to the attacks on the U.S. Postal Service alone reached an estimated $1 billion, and that's not counting the additional...

The US Justice Department filed a motion Friday to quash testimony by wife of bioweaponeer William Patrick III in the lawsuit: Steven J. Hatfill, M.D. v. Attorney General John Ashcroft, The Department of Justice; The Federal Bureau of Investigation (et al). Headed by former federal prosecutor Tom Connelly, pro bono attorney's for Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former person of interest in the anthrax letters case, have been quietly doing battle behind the scenes with attorney's for the US Justice Department, in the United States District Court for The District of Columbia. Dr. Steven Hatfill's life was publically dismantled, rendering...

Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans WASHINGTON, May 20 -Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan began to assemble the equipment necessary to build a rudimentary biological weapons laboratory before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, letters released by the Defense Department show.... The letters are among the documents recovered in late 2001 after the invasion of Afghanistan that United States intelligence officials have frequently cited as evidence that Al Qaeda was working to develop biological weapons.The letters...detail a visit by an unnamed Qaeda scientist to a laboratory at an unspecified location where he was shown "a special confidential room"...

WASHINGTON -- Anthrax has been confirmed in samples collected from the two Pentagon mail facilities that were at first closed last week and then declared free of the pathogen, United Press International has learned. The head of the company that was accused of contaminating the samples sent from those facilities -- a detached building on the Pentagon grounds in Arlington, Va., and the other in Falls Church, Va. -- said the presence of anthrax was detected independently by two government laboratories. Robert B. Harris, president and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc. in Richmond, Va., also said the anthrax...

Monday's false alarm anthrax scare at three Pentagon letter-processing centers served as a reminder of the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five persons and remain unsolved. Investigators have made no arrests and have named no suspects in the 31/2-year-old probe into who sent the anthrax letters to senate offices on Capitol Hill and media outlets in Florida and New York. But authorities, who say they are still devoting more than 1,000 man-hours per week to the investigation, said there's no statute of limitations on murder so it's unlikely the probe will end because of a lack of leads. "We...

The latest anthrax reports in military mailrooms -- off-again, on-again, first positive, then negative -- raise an important observation, which is to observe, in retrospect, the MSM's absolutely, totally incurious attitude toward the 9/11 related anthrax attacks during the election cycle.There were no anthrax-related questions at the debates, no anthrax investigations by the media, no retrospective stories.Likewise with the so-called 9/11 commission.It was as if -- it never happened.Why?? It was, like Ann Coulter said, as if the MSM had their hands over their ears and humming aloud at the thought that someone might bring the subject up.And there's a...

By John D. Banusiewicz American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, March 14, 2005 - Defense Department officials confirmed that a positive test for the presence of anthrax bacteria during routine mail operations today led to the evacuation of a Pentagon outbuilding. However, officials stressed, subsequent tests have been negative.

WASHINGTON - A hazardous materials team on Monday investigated an alarm triggered by sensors that detected the presence of chemical or biological agents at the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s mail delivery building, a military spokesman said. Officials shut down the facility, which is in a separate structure on the northwest side of the Pentagon grounds, shortly after the sensors were triggered around 10:30 a.m. EST, spokesman Glenn Flood said. It was expected to remain closed until at least Tuesday while the investigation continued.

A federal judge ruled yesterday that U.S. Postal Service officials had no special responsibility to alert workers at the Brentwood postal facility to deadly anthrax contamination in the building and cannot be sued by the employees. --------------------- U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said she found ample reason to believe that the officials showed deliberate indifference to worker safety by keeping the plant operating for four days after they privately confirmed the toxic spores had spread through the facility. ---------------------- Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said, "We can't imagine that in the end that courts will sanction government supervisors...

FREDERICK, Md. - The nation's only maker of a licensed anthrax vaccine cut the ribbon Tuesday for a new plant capable of producing 100 million doses annually for sale to federal, state, local and foreign governments. Emergent BioSolutions Inc., the newly formed parent of anthrax vaccine maker BioPort Corp., is buying a building for the $95 million plant in an industrial park south of Frederick. The federal government has agreed to include a minimum of 5 million doses of Emergent's vaccine in a developing national stockpile of antidotes to biological and chemical weapons. The company will continue operating its plant...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- The New York Times asked a federal judge Friday to dismiss a libel lawsuit against the paper filed by a bioterrorism expert named by the FBI as a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Times attorney David Schulz told the judge that no reasonable reader would walk away from the columns in question with the impression that the newspaper was accusing Steven J. Hatfill of any crimes.

Judge admonishes government lawyers in anthrax lawsuit case

For more than two years, Steven Hatfill has lived life in legal limbo. Publicly branded a 'person of interest" in the anthrax case, he's never been charged with any crime. Now Hatfill is striking back, in a libel lawsuit against one of his many armchair accusers. Court documents show that Hatfill has filed suit against Donald Foster, an English professor at Vassar College who wrote about Hatfill in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair. Hatfill claims Foster and other defendants defamed him by leaving 'no doubt in the minds of reasonable readers that he was imputing guilt for the...

/table> Some Fort Detrick Labs Closed 10:25 AM Jul 20, 2004 10:25 am US/Eastern Frederick, MD (WJZ)Federal agents are combing a number of laboratory suites at Fort Detrick in Frederick for evidence of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Fort Detrick spokesman Charles Dasey says the labs have been closed since Friday at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, home to the Army's biological warfare defense program. A law enforcement source tells The Associated Press that the activity is related to the anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17 in October of 2001. FBI agents have frequently...

NEW YORK -- Authorities believe a U.S. postal employee in custody here helped draft a letter of introduction that may have been used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate a leading opposition figure in Afghanistan last fall, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.Click here for full Washington Post article