ProPublica put out a report this morning showing that -- for nine years! -- the government has kept secret the knowledge that anthrax could easily have been taken out of the lab at Fort Detrick.
The Army laboratory identified by prosecutors as the source of the anthrax that killed five people in the fall of 2001 was rife with such security gaps that the deadly spores could have easily been smuggled out of the facility, outside investigators found.
The existing security procedures -- described in two long-secret reports -- were so lax they would have allowed any researcher, aide or temporary worker to walk out of the Army bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick, Md., with a few drops of anthrax -- starter germs that could grow the trillions of spores used to fill anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress and the media.
And what about the accused scientist, Bruce Ivins? He was never prosecuted. He committed suicide over three years ago. The FBI's case was largely circumstantial.
... The security reports by independent government specialists suggest that deadly anthrax stocks may have been more accessible than investigators assumed in declaring Army scientist Bruce Ivins the perpetrator.
That seems overly polite on the part of ProPublica reporters. After all, people have been knocking on the FBI's door for years, trying to get at the truth of the anthrax attacks. Now the lawyers of one of the victims appeared to have opened the door.
McClatchy, the online investigative newsroom ProPublica and PBS's "Frontline," which have collaborated in an examination of the Justice Department's case against Ivins, obtained copies of both reports.
The reports are expected to be made public later this week in a $50 million lawsuit filed in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., by family members of Robert Stevens, a photo editor for American Media Inc., who was the first person to die from the anthrax attacks.
