03.23.11

Creepy Bruce Ivins was the anthrax mailer say psychiatrists

Posted in Bioterrorism at 11:39 pm by George Smith

News broke Tuesday of a psychiatric report commissioned to evaluate Bruce Ivins’ mental health and medical records.

The report confirms Ivins was a creepy, mentally unbalanced man fond of harassing a national girls’ sorority. These qualities fit the circumstantial case the FBI built against him as the perpetrator of the most famous bioterror attack in this country’s history.

Noted by the FBI here, a redacted form of the executive summary of the “Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel” is here.

Curiously, while the mainstream media broke the story — the Los Angeles Times had it first — every major news article dealing with it obscured where it could be found.

This only underlined the media’s eternally grasping need to be the only official purveyors of all information.

Moving along, Ivins — the panel concluded, should not have been hired by USAMRIID/Fort Detrick. He had a history of criminal and psychotic behavior dating back to his days as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina.

While there he continued an obsession with a women’s sorority and one member of it. The obsession arose when Ivins was rejected by a girl from Kappa Kappa Gamma while at the University of Cincinnati, a rejection that seemed to have curdled his entire life.

In the case of one sorority girl, which the report refers to as KKG#2, Ivins went so far as to steal her lab research notebook, an act of sabotage aimed at screwing up her work toward a Ph.D.

The panel concluded Ivins compartmentalized his life, showing himself only to be a benign eccentric, an antic clown juggler at parties and keyboard player at church, to his professional associates at Fort Detrick.

Hidden was his dark side, obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority to the point of engaging in criminal break-ins of sorority houses so that he could steal papers from the women. And a campaign of harassment through the mail which included forging a letter to the editor from one of the women he was fixated on, subsequently published in the newspaper, in order to publicly embarrass her.

This event “demonstrated Dr. Ivins’ deviousness and willingness to use others, as well as the United States Postal Service, to accomplish his stealthy retribution.”

So enraged with the KKG sorority was Ivins, reads the report, he chose to mail anthrax letters from a mailbox 175 feet from its office at Princeton in New Jersey as a symbolic gesture.

The psychiatric panel also concluded Ivins had “a specific plan” to shoot people in order to go out in a “blaze of glory” as the FBI investigation closed in. At this time, just prior to his suicide, his involuntary commitment to a mental ward “likely prevented a mass shooting.”

If you read the summary you’re left with the conclusion Ivins was indeed a vile and very troubled man, totally capable of being the nation’s, ahem, finest bioterrorist.

And, directly, it’s another indictment of the culture of complacency at USAMRIID/Fort Detrick. It also calls out the obvious — whether any personal reliability programs the US bioterrorism research industry, massively built up since the anthrax mailings, actually work at all.

Again, the executive summary of the psychiatric analysis, is here.

Much of the material in the executive summary is derived from the details in a large FBI file on Ivins here.

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