Perhaps the CIA should amend the quotation located at its entrance to "the truth will set you free...if you really want to know the truth." Or maybe it should read "you can't handle the truth."
As we have learned in the investigation of the anthrax attacks, the only thing the Gov fears is the truth itself.
Why else had President Obama threatened to veto the entire intelligence authorization bill if it included a proposed bipartisan amendment (passed by the House) that would have mandated an independent inquiry into the FBI's anthrax investigation?
"The commencement of a fresh (read: competent) investigation would undermine public confidence in the criminal investigation and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions."
The truth is, beyond a reasonable doubt, the Gov''s case against Ivins lacked motive, means and opportunity.
Imagine the prosecution's closing statement to the jury:
“The government said it continues to believe that Ivins was ‘more likely than not’ the killer."
The truth is the Obama Justice Dept now admits Bruce Ivins, whom the FBI could never establish a plausible motive or evidence of opportunity to support the FBI's theory of Crazy Ivins' midnight ride to Princeton that would not get thrown out of court, did NOT have the means, the necessary lab equipment, to produce anthrax spores that shut US down.
"On July 15, Justice Department lawyers acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab—the so-called hot suite—did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001. The filing in a Florida court did not explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that the lab “did not have the specialized equipment’’ in Ivins' secure lab “that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.”
"The government’s statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI’s eight-year, $100 million investigation never proved he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder."
The court papers were uncovered by a reporter for the PBS program Frontline, which is working on a forthcoming documentary on the case with McClatchy Newspapers and ProPublica, the investigative newsroom. They were filed by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Division who are defending the government against a wrongful-death suit brought by the family of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun. Stevens was the first to die from a tainted letter, and his family has accused federal officials of lax procedures that allowed someone to make a germ weapon using anthrax from a government laboratory.
In asserting that Ivins was the culprit, the FBI investigators pointed to his access to the specialized equipment at the laboratory. Officials drew up elaborate charts showing that Ivins’ time in the hot suites spiked in the weeks before the letters were mailed. But Ivins’ colleagues have said in depositions for the Stevens case that the powder could not have been made in the lab without sickening lab technicians and others who had not been vaccinated against anthrax.
The Justice Department filed the papers in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., last week. The lawyers were attempting to counter allegations by the Stevens family of negligence at Fort Detrick, including inadequate controls over anthrax controls, by arguing that the anthrax in the letters wasn't produced there."
Channeling Monty Python's Dead Parrot pet shop owner, Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said Monday that the court filing did not contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. Rather, he said, (add laugh track here) the lawyers merely argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors’’ because he did not have equipment to dry the spores in his containment laboratory. Boyd said this meant the United States should not be held liable for his actions.
In excerpts from one of more than a dozen depositions made public in the case last week, the current chief of of the Bacteriology Division at the Army laboratory, Patricia Worsham, said it lacked the facilities in 2001 to make the kind of spores in the letters.
Two of the five letters, those sent to U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Thomas Daschle of South Dakota, were especially deadly, because they were so buoyant as to float with the slightest wisp of air.
Worsham said that the lab’s equipment for drying the spores, a machine the size of a refrigerator, was not in containment.
“If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and we had non-immunized personnel in that area, and I would have expected some of them to become ill,” she said.
In its statement of facts, the government lawyers also said that producing the volume of anthrax in the letters would have required 2.8 to 53 liters of the solution used to grow the spores or 463 to 1,250 Petri dishes. Colleagues of Ivins at the lab have asserted that he couldn’t have grown all that anthrax without their noticing it.
Paul Kemp, Ivins’ lead defense attorney, said Monday that the department’s concession that the equipment wasn’t available “is at direct variance to the assertions of the government on July 29, 2008,” the day Ivins died, thus “invalidating one of the chief theories of their prosecution case.”
Kemp said that government officials told him and a colleague, Tom DeGonia, that the FBI could “prove that Dr. Ivins manufactured the dried spores used in the anthrax attacks, and would prove this by the records of his presence in the hot suites in August and September." But Ivins' "suicide" saved the FBI from having to prove its "case" in court.
Coincidentally, in other News of the World, another "suicide" may make another investigation more difficult - a whistleblower in the News of the World hacking scandal. Rupert Murdock, who reportedly had top officials of Scotland Yard in his pocket, first claimed the hacking of voicemails was an isolated case by a rogue employee, but then pathetically had to channel Sgt. Shultz that he had no idea what was going on in his company and he wasn't responsible. (The buck doesn't stop here?)
In a rational, non-corrupt environment, that would be a reason to insist upon -- not take extraordinary steps to block -- an independent investigation into one of the most consequential crimes ever committed on U.S. soil. Yet the gov continues to stonewall any efforts to let the American public know the truth.
Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, whose New Jersey district was the site where the letters were allegedly mailed and one of the bill's sponsors, said at the time he was appalled that "an Administration that has pledged to be transparent and accountable would seek to block any review of the investigation in this matter."
The truth is Ivins' "suicide" allowed the FBI to close the case and cut off any productive investigation by blaming it all on a "rogue" employee. The unanswered question is:
Are they really Famous But Incompetent or is the truth the anthrax "terrorism" was an incredible fuck-up that the gov is desperately trying to coverup? If the boobs of the Tea Party can bamboozle Barack, what chance does he have against the real pros?
The truth has a nasty habit of surfacing eventually even if you're RICH. Just ask Rupert.
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