* a plea to President Obama … make the FBI come clean about its failed anthrax investigation

WHY did the FBI fail to solve the 2001 anthrax case?

WHO had the power to divert the FBI from the truth?

CASE CLOSED offers a fictional scenario that answers those questions

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon

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a plea to President Obama

… make the FBI come clean about its failed anthrax investigation

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This post is a carryover from my CASE CLOSED blog (www.caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com) where DXer, in his latest comment, raises serious and pertinent questions concerning the integrity of anthrax samples which are critical to the FBI’s conclusion that Dr. Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the attacks. DXer asks …

• Was there adequate security?
• Did unauthorized personnel have access to the samples?
• Was there adequate accountability (i.e., chain-of-custody, evidence storage, evidence in-processing).
• Who tested the sample that is claimed to have been a false sample submitted by Dr. Ivins?
• Who chose to destroy the sample submitted using a different protocol.

DXer adds that FBI Counterterrorism Chief Ben Furman wrote to him to say that Amerithrax was a mess but that he thought most information should be kept from the public.

DXer disagrees … so do I.

LMW COMMENT …

DXer’s questions, which are related to a recent interchange on the CASE CLOSED blog between Bugmaster and Ed Lake, go to the core of what appears to be the FBI’s clumsy cover-up of its failed anthrax investigation.

• The FBI’s case against Dr. Ivins is, on its face, inadequate.
• Senator Arlen Specter, among many others, has given his opinion as a former prosecutor that the FBI could never get a conviction on the basis of the evidence they have so far made public.

There must be something that makes the FBI delay and hide and continue to make itself look foolish …

• The FBI is not incompetent; they must know that the case they have presented makes no sense.
• It is not unreasonable to conclude that the FBI purposely accused a dead man in a press conference in order to avoid the necessity of a trial where evidence would be presented under oath and judged by a jury.
• It is obvious that the FBI is refusing to tell the Congress and the American people what it knows about this case of mass murder and terrorism.
• This may be the reason why it has still not “closed the case,” which would make its evidence (or lack thereof) subject to FOIA requests.

In my opinion, the FBI’s behavior, which is the core of the problem, is not rational UNLESS they are under orders to keep Congress and the public from knowing what really happened.

Which comes back to the two questions I raise in my novel CASE CLOSED …

Who benefitted from keeping the anthrax case unsolved?

Who had the power to divert the FBI from the truth?

In CASE CLOSED, I develop a fictional scenario to answer those questions, and the corruption of the FBI investigation in my story goes to the highest levels of the American government.

• Do I think the story I portrayed in CASE CLOSED is what really happened?
• I don’t make that claim. I have no way to know. I made up the story presented in CASE CLOSED, with no access to secret witnesses or documents.
• But I do believe that something like what I portrayed did happen. It’s the only reason I can think of to explain the FBI’s otherwise bizarre behavior.
• And many of the readers of CASE CLOSED find my story disturbingly plausible.

It seems to me, and to many others, that the FBI is hiding some terrible dark secrets.

We need Rush Holt’s Anthrax Investigation Commission to get out of the House Judiciary Committee and into action.

But I think we need more.

Who has the power to make the FBI tell the truth?

• We need our new President, who I worked hard for and continue to support, and who I believe to be intelligent, thoughtful, courageous and well motivated, to step away from his reluctance to hold the Bush administration accountable for its many heinous misdeeds.
• So I call upon President Obama, among his many daunting challenges, to demand that the FBI come clean about its anthrax investigation.
• The integrity of the American government has been challenged by the FBI’s failed investigation and cover-up of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Mr. President, please do what is needed to restore the integrity and pride in America which has been so wrongly debased by your predecessor.

Our country needs to know.

* Obama’s path of compromise … there’s no other way

THE ECONOMIST reports (7/4/09) …

• Having campaigned in poetry, Barack Obama doubtless expected to govern in prose. But it is arithmetic that threatens to cramp his ambitions.
• Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its long-term budget outlook. If current policies are continued, federal debt held by the public will rise from 41% of GDP at the end of 2008 to 87% by 2020, and (theoretically) to a staggering 716% by 2080.
• A president who refused to put off unpleasant decisions, as Mr Obama promised during his inauguration, would be honest about all this.
• Instead of straight talk, however, Mr Obama has mostly been offering happy talk.
• … rather than shaping public opinion, he is running scared of it. And so, even more, is Congress.
• The House’s climate bill is a masterpiece of obfuscation.
• Mr Obama wanted the (carbon emission) permits to be auctioned, which would raise large sums (which were meant to help finance health-care reform) and allocate the permits to the firms that value them most. Instead, the House decided to give away 85% of them free to politically-favoured entities.
• Some say this was necessary—the bill only passed by a whisker, 219 votes to 212, and would probably have failed without the giveaways.
• Mr Obama needs to find at least $1 trillion to overhaul health care, and those plans now face an uphill battle of their own in the Senate, which looks set for a long hard summer.
• Mr Obama promised, on the campaign trail, not to tax private health benefits. He also promised to cut taxes for all but the rich. Arithmetic suggests he will have to break his word on something.

Read the entire article at … http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13952934

LMW COMMENT …

The Economist has framed Obama’s dilemma well, although I would not be so critical. It’s one thing to sit on the side and compare what is actually accomplished with some theoretical possible achievement.

But where is the proper balance between sticking with what you wanted to do, indeed promised to do, and the necessary compromise to get anything done in the real political world? Is Barack Obama doing everything he could do, or is he giving up too much to accomplish what is possible?

How we answer those questions is likely to depend on which issues are important to us, and what is happening with those particular issues at the moment. But the President does not have the luxury of dealing with each issue in isolation. I am confident that Obama’s objectives have not changed. I also believe he is not surprised by the need to accommodate the wishes and needs of other powerful people.

Obama has a powerful team of his own, but I bet there are some days when Rahm Emanuel tells the President how much he can get on a particular issue while keeping alive progress on the full range of an ambitious agenda where many items are critical to the future of our country and the world.

I’m confident that Barack Obama is making the best decisions he can, and I believe his record at the end of the day will be superb. He’s not perfect, but in my view, no one else could do it better.

* Sarah Palin: nothing then, nothing now

Gail Collins writes in the NYT (7-4-09)

LMW: if you don’t read Gail Collins … you should

• Truly, Sarah Palin has come a long way. When she ran for vice president, she frequently became disjointed and garbled when she departed from her prepared remarks. Now the prepared remarks are incoherent, too.
• “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.”
• Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.
• People, what is going on with governors in this country? Are we doomed to see them go bonkers one by one, state by state?
• Palin was the subject of a devastating article in this month’s Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, who wrote that McCain campaign aides found it almost impossible to get Palin to prepare for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric.
• And there is no sign, Purdum reported, that Palin has made any attempt to bone up on the issues so that next time around, she could run as a candidate who actually had some grasp of the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy.

read the entire article on … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04collins.html

LMW COMMENT … How can any Republican, or any American, can take this ignornat and lying woman seriously. Yet some do. That is the truly frightening truth about Sara Palin.