The FBI is one of the leading investigative agencies in America. It trains investigators from police departments all over the country.
So when it messes up, it's not a small deal.
Immediately after 911, someone took advantage of the heightened feeling that we were subject to further attack by mailing out a deadly poison, the spore anthrax, to various prominent people. He, she, or they, also mailed other samples to less prominent people and in that fashion murdered five of them. Serial killer, mass murder, death penalty cases, this received a lot of media attention and the pressure was on the investigating authorities to produce results. Since a congressman had been sent one of the poisoned letters and they seemed to be turning up in federal office buildings, US Postal Inspectors and FBI were leading investigative agencies.
The FBI focused on Stephen Hatfill, a virus researcher at the USAMRIID in Ft. Detrick, Maryland. This is the place run by the army that researches weaponized little critters such as anthrax, germs, etc. If cholera breaks out among, or near, where U.S. troops are stationed, these folks get on the case. They're scientists, and you know how strange those folks can become. Probably as strange as the rest of us, only more extreme, because, they're, like, smart.
At any rate, the Bureau hounded Hatfill for years, only he maintained that he was innocent. Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say, must've been the Bureau's attitude, because they made his life miserable and someone in government leaked to reporters that this was our guy. So he sued. Recently he won close to six million bucks from Uncle Sam for making his life miserable when he was in fact, innocent.
Today the Justice Department sent the guy a sorry, oops letter, although I'm not sure about the sorry part. The article appears below.
But the Bureau never sleeps, and meanwhile they lit on another guy who worked for the same outfit and now they tell us that he was good for this series of crimes even more than the first guy. So they hounded him. Only he didn't sue, he killed himself.
Now his lawyer says his late cllient may have been disturbed and in treatment, but there's lots of people who meet that description, even some at USAMRIID, so this doesn't make him guilty.
The Times had an editorial today stating that the Bureau is known for coming out with circumstantial cases that in the beginning seem plausible but on further inspection turn out to have holes.
The problem with the Ivins case, that being the name of the man who killed himself recently, is that while the Bureau has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the man may have been good for the crime, as cops like to say, they haven't proved BRD that he in fact mailed the poison that killed the people. Maybe he did. It certainly wouldn't surprise any of us after the ground has been so well prepared. But they're missing the link that makes Ivins the killer. Oh, they're looking for it, all right. That's why they looked for a suicide note and are checking his library readings. They're still looking because they know they're missing the conclusive link, and without the chain of circumstances remains detached.
This is the problem with circumstantial evidence; there's often a missing link that we're supposed to supply in our mind by wishful thinking. If you want to believe Ivins is the murderer, then it's easy to supply the connection by dreaming up inferences, stories, theories, whatever will satisfy your mind. If you're one of the investigators, you want to do this. But if you're the man's attorney, or, as in Hatfill's case, the man himself, you don't want to do this. You resist. And are called "in denial." Or told, "Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say."
Maybe the Bureau should hire Colin Powell to tell the world that he's seen the evidence and it is good. It worked when the president wanted to believe that Saddam possessed WMD, therefore we needed to strike ASAP. It turns out that the good evidence the administration, and Powell, was relying on, was obtained by torturing an alleged terrorist who told his tormenters, that is, us, whatever it seemed we wanted to know. Does Saddam have WMD? No. Buzz. There go the electrodes to his scrotum. Does Saddam have WMD? Of course he has WMD, loads and loads of them. That's a nice fellow, you can go back to your cell now.
We need to study more about accusations, don't you think?
Yes, I think.