Posner on anthrax investigation: Don't rush to convict a dead man
Don't jump to conclusions about recently deceased researcher Dr. Bruce Ivins based on leaked government evidence, investigative journalist and author Gerald Posner said on last night's Countdown.
"How wonderfully convenient," Keith Olbermann said of the government's handling of the reported suicide of scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins, who was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax mailings to media outlets and lawmakers shortly after the World Trade Center attack. "A flashed-out case characterized as circumstantial by a thorough journalistic assessment, and the lone mad scientist cannot answer any of it because he's dead. Case closed."
There would no doubt be people within the FBI that would cave to pressure from the White House, Posner said, to try and pin the mailing of the letters to al-Qaeda or "someone in the Middle East." Nobody within the FBI, including director Robert Mueller, had the guts to stand up to President Bush and investigate the attacks objectively, he charged.
"There's nobody easier to convict than a dead man," Olbermann said. "Are you sold on the idea that [Ivins] was involved?"
Posner has doubts that Dr. Ivins, being posthumously framed as a "lone mad scientist" and unstable personality in the media, was involved at all in the 2001 attacks, with the circumstantial evidence being offered by the government. "All we are hearing is one side of the evidence," he said. "We're getting it leaked out, as it always is by the government, bit by bit, about what happened. And...it's absolutely, at best, a circumstantial case."
"We can not allow...on a case this important on the anthrax investigation, for a rush to judgment in a matter in which the prime suspect is dead of an apparent suicide."
Posner also took issue with the July 24th restraining order filed by social worker Jean C. Duley, after it was noted that she misspelled her job title on the forms, and questions arise over the legitimacy of the claim. Ivins was committed to psychatric care on July 10, according to the paperwork, and then signed himself out on the 16th.
"How does a biological weapons expert with fantasies, supposedly, of mass murder, get to sign himself out of a psychiatric facility, and what's the deal with this woman?"
Duley, Posner noted, has an interesting past of her own, including drug charges, DUIs and a bankruptcy. She presented herself as a "therapist" on the restraining order, but is more specifically a group counselor whose help Ivins enlisted last month.
The following segment was aired on MSNBC's Countdown on August 4, 2008.
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