Rep. Holt Wants a Commission to Probe the Anthrax Attacks of 2001

by: Blue Girl

Mon Mar 16, 2009 at 10:22:28 AM CDT

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Because they failed miserably at solving the mystery of the tainted mailings that killed five people and infected several more in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they conveniently ignore that part of the history of their tenure, but what made those attacks so scary was the random nature.  What the hell connection is there between a quiet, suburban Asian-American woman in the northeast and the publisher of a tabloid publication in Florida?  

I was working in a public health clinic at that time.  A significant percentage of our patient load was immigration physicals, and there were a lot of Muslim refugees from east Africa.  Starting on September 12, I picked up the phone, on average about four times a day, just to hear a really, really sick threat.   Sometimes they were against the facility, sometimes they were against our patients, sometimes they were against us personally.  But they were always sick, twisted, graphic and deeply disturbing.  

I took to opening all the mail that wasn't instantly recognizable under the hood in micro.  We got a package wrapped in brown paper and addressed with a shaky hand, and we took it down the hall to have that box of cookies x-rayed before we opened them.  

There are a lot of us who have not forgotten that time, and one of the people who remembers is Representative Rush Holt, who represents the area of New Jersey where some of the poisoned parcels were mailed from.  He is dissatisfied with the bumbling federal response to the attacks and he wants a commission, along the lines of the 9/11 commission, empanelled to investigate the events and make recommendations for preventing and responding to bioterror attacks in the future.   "This is certainly not plowing over old ground or witch hunting," Holt said. "It's an unresolved case. And it really must be understood if we're going to guard against what many people say is the greatest large-scale threat facing the country, which is bio-attack and emerging biological pathogens."

The FBI blames Bruce E. Ivins, a microbiologist who worked at a U.S. military research institute at Fort Detrick, Md., for the anthrax attacks. But Ivins committed suicide last summer before federal law enforcement officials were able to charge him.

"Based upon the totality of the evidence we had gathered against him, we are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks," federal prosecutor Jeff Taylor said at a press conference on Aug. 6, 2008.

Before homing in on Ivins, investigators had focused on Stephen V. Hatfill, another former Fort Detrick scientist whom the federal government eventually exonerated and paid $5.8 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed.

In the case against Ivins, federal officials laid out a significant amount of circumstantial evidence, including the key allegation that the anthrax spores in the letters could be traced to a single flask belonging to Ivins. FBI spokeswoman Katherine Schweit said the case is still pending.

But Holt said the FBI fell down on the job.

"This was truly a major event in American law enforcement and national security, and the event raises questions about our preparedness," Holt said. "It raises questions about how we prevent such things from happening, because there were questions about why we didn't prevent this from happening . . . and whether we are prepared to prevent, to respond to and to bring to justice the culprits of any future attacks."

Holt said he hopes his legislation results in changes in the way the FBI conducts investigations. "I should hope so, because the FBI has not done a very good job here," he said.

This is the second time Holt has introduced legislation authorizing a commission with subpoena power to investigate the anthrax attacks.  The 110th Congress gaveled to a close before it could be considered, but Holt thinks that with stronger majorities and a Democratic President that it is "quite possible that this will receive a new and different look," but Holt quickly adds that he has not polled the leadership to get a measure of the support it might receive.  The bill would come out of the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by John Conyers, and a Conyers spokesman declined comment, but Holt said he thinks Conyers probably supports the legislation "in a general sense."

Holt also believes that his bill has a much better chance of passing this session, not just because he is getting started earlier in the session, but he makes a convincing argument that it dovetails nicely with the recent report from the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, which found that the most likely next attack would be biological in nature.  

I agree with investigating this and finding out not just what really happened, but what went wrong.  I have some serious doubts about just how strong their case is against Ivins, especially after they zeroed in on Steven Hatfill and hounded him out of his chosen field, harassing him to the point  a court awarded him a $4.6 million judgment against the Justice Department last summer and was officially exonerated in August.  

And while we are figuring out what happened, we must incorporate our findings into a coherent preventive strategy so such an event doesn't happen again.