Scientia Press

These are 102 pages of emails to and from accused Mailer Bruce Ivins, released by FBI on court order (Dillon v. U.S. Department of Justice) on March 20, 2019. FOIA request #1327397 sought Ivins’s emails and other documents for September and October, 2001. FOIA request #1329530 sought the Table of Contents and the 16 pages on Ivins from the 2000-page Interim Major Case Summary of 2006.  After repeated failures to find emails, FBI experts located them as 1A attachments in the Amerithrax file.

See the analysis of these emails by Ross Getman.  For an explanation of the anthrax mailings case, see Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer?

Destruction of Evidence?

There are reasons to suspect that someone has destroyed evidence potentially exculpatory of Bruce Ivins.

In the First Declaration of David Hardy, chief of FBI’s Records Dissemination Information Section [RIDS], he describes on p. 14 how he found a copy of the IMCS:

In response to FOIA Number 1329350, the FBI conducted a CRS [Central Records System] search using the term “Interim Major Case Summary” and located no records. The FBI then conducted an index search using the term “Amerithrax” which resulted in one investigative file. The FBI electronically reviewed the investigative file and was unable to locate the IMCS. Next, the FBI contacted the subject matter experts at the Washington Field Office and requested their assistance. The Washington Field Office reviewed the physical investigative file and was unable to locate the IMCS. The Washington Field Office reached out to the FBI’s Laboratory Services in Quantico, Virginia, who located the IMCS and sent it to RMD [Records Management Division] for processing.

In other words, the first three most logical places to look for the IMCS–the index, the digital investigative file, and the physical investigative file–proved fruitless, and a copy of the IMCS needed to be found at another location.  According to IMCS author Richard Lambert, he uploaded digital copies of the IMCS and its distribution list to the Amerithrax investigative file in 2006.  So FBI’s search failed to find a copy that should have been there.  A person intent on destroying evidence might have focused solely on the IMCS because its chapter on Ivins concentrated the exculpatory evidence and arguments.  Trying to destroy all the individual pieces of evidence would have been a very difficult task and could have aroused suspicion.  Besides, no isolated piece of evidence would have much weight.

Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer? suggests that someone would have had a compelling reason to destroy evidence potentially exculpatory of Bruce Ivins.

Sekhmet (“The Mighty One”), the lion-headed goddess of ancient Egypt, was dreaded for her bloody rampages.  Yet she became the protector of kings and a favorite personal goddess of millions of Egyptians.

Why did Egyptians have a goddess who required such assiduous and even obsessive propitiation?  Why did other Egyptian goddesses play roles similar to Sekhmet’s?  What explains Sekhmet’s dual nature as destroyer and protector?  Why was she called the Eye of Ra?  Why was she originally depicted with an oval disk on her head?

We now have good answers to these questions.  But in order to understand them, we need to see why we should think that Sekhmet was Planet Venus.  And that requires us to investigate a major case of scientific rejectionism. Continue reading »

Students have long struggled, often in vain, with the rules of Latin grammar. The structure of sentences in Latin seems strange to the mind of an Indo-European native speaker. Also, Latin’s heavy use of gerundive and absolute constructions: all those verbal nouns entail a very different pattern of thinking than goes on in modern Indo-European languages. Continue reading »

There are two sides to every story. Judges rightly admonish juries to check out both sides before coming to a conclusion. Our entire system of adversarial justice is built on this principle. But under surveillance by FBI in the 2001 anthrax mailings case, U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide. So only one side got to tell its version of the story.

Upon closing the case on February 19, 2010, FBI issued an Amerithrax Investigative Summary that concludes that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. The Summary contains serious errors as well as minor ones. It also omits crucial information. So, to ensure a fair outcome, we need to look at it through the eyes of a defense attorney, to make sure that the American people can check out both sides of the story before coming to a conclusion. Continue reading »

On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered on the canal towpath in Georgetown1. A divorced artist from a prominent family, Meyer was known by insiders to have been President John F. Kennedy’s senior female consort during his White House years, though the story never leaked to the public.

Her murder and the ensuing trial of Raymond Crump, Jr., a black laborer found by the police in the vicinity of the murder, drew a good deal of attention at the time. Crump had been identified by a gas station attendant helping start a car on a road overlooking the canal. Hearing cries of “Somebody help me. Somebody help me” and two shots, the attendant ran to look. Continue reading »

There’s no shortage of candidates for the cause of the mass extinctions of prehistory. But experts have found flaws in every one.

The famous Snake Goddess of ancient Crete has long attracted students of history and art. Elegant, risquée, enigmatic, she embodies the mystery and allure of Minoan civilization. Continue reading »