Senators skeptical about FBI's anthrax attacks conclusions

FBI director Robert Mueller testified before a congressional panel the other day on issues in which the FBI has been involved recently - and came under sharp criticism for the agency’s handling of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a target of the anthrax letters of 2001, said Wednesday that he did not believe the FBI’s contention that an Army scientist conducted the attacks alone. At a hearing of his committee, Leahy told Muller that even if the bureau was right about the involvement of the scientist, Bruce Ivins, who killed himself in July before ever being charged, he thought there were accomplices. “If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people,” said Leahy. “I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact,” he added. “I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.”

The New York Times’s Scott Shane writes that Leahy was one of several senators at the hearing who raised questions about the bureau’s case. Mueller said he stood by the conclusion that Ivins, who worked at the Army biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was solely responsible for the attacks. Even after the anthrax case is formally closed, a step that officials say is likely in three to six months, “if we receive additional evidence indicating the participation of any additional person, we certainly would pursue that,” Mueller said.

On Tuesday Mueller said he had asked the National Academy of Sciences to convene an expert panel to review the bureau’s scientific work on the case. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said Wednesday that he did not think that was adequate. Grassley said the academy “would only be reviewing the science and not the detective work,” and added, “I believe we need an independent review of both.”

Leahy pressed Mueller to say what laboratories in the United States were capable of producing dry powder anthrax like that used in the attacks, specifically asking about the Dugway Proving Ground, an Army center in Utah, and the Battelle Memorial Institute, a government contractor in Ohio, both of which have made such powder in small quantities in the past. Mueller said he could answer the question only in a closed session because the matter involved classified information. The secrecy appeared likely to fuel rumors, circulating on the Internet and denied by the FBI, that the attacks had some link to a secret government bioweapons program.