Reply #4: FBI Lethargy Lets the Anthrax Killer Go Free [View All]

Published on Wedn esday, July 3, 2002 in the International Herald Tribune

FBI Lethargy Lets the Anthrax Killer Go Free

by Nicholas D. Kristof

 
NEW YORK -- The FBI's bumbling before Sept. 11 is water under the bridge. But the bureau's lackadaisical ineptitude in pursuing the anthrax killer continues to threaten America's national security by permitting him to strike again or, more likely, to flee to Iran or North Korea.

Almost everyone who has encountered the FBI anthrax investigation is aghast at the bureau's lethargy. Some in the biodefense community think they know a likely culprit, whom I'll call Mr. Z. Although the bureau has carried out lie-detector tests on Mr. Z, searched his home twice and interviewed him four times, it has not placed him under surveillance or asked its outside handwriting expert to compare his writing with that on the anthrax letters.

This is part of a larger pattern. Astonishingly, the FBI allowed the destruction of anthrax stocks at Iowa State University, losing what might have been valuable genetic clues. Then it waited until December to open the intact anthrax envelope it found. The FBI didn't obtain anthrax strains from various labs for comparison until March, and the testing is still not complete. The bureau did not systematically polygraph scientists at two suspect labs, Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, until a month ago.

Perhaps it's a cheap shot for an armchair detective to whine about the caution of dedicated and exceptionally hard-working investigators. Yet months pass and the bureau continues to act like, well, a bureaucracy, plodding along in slow motion. People in the biodefense field first gave Mr. Z's name to the bureau as a suspect in October.

He denies any wrongdoing, and his friends are heartsick at suspicions directed against a man they regard as a patriot. Some of his lie-detector tests show evasion, I hear, although that may be because of his temperament.

If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been jailed long ago. But he is a true-blue American with close ties to the Defense Department, the CIA and the U.S. biodefense program. On the other hand, he was once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard "hot suite" at Fort Detrick, surrounded only by blushing germs.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0703-06.htm