Eight years into their probe of the 2001 anthrax letter killings, the Justice Department is poised to announce that it is closing the long, embarrassing case. Officials say the move could have come last week, but lawyers are still trying to decide how much information can be made public.
The convoluted investigation included a massive lawsuit by initial suspect Steven Hatfill, who successfully sued the Justice Department for $5.8 million after officials identified him in the media as a “person of interest” in the investigation.
Officials seem to have settled on the late Bruce Ivins as the culprit. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, has been publicly condemned, and prosecutors insist that they are confident his acted alone. Much skepticism remains, however, over the lack of concrete evidence. Plenty of questions are yet unanswered, and will likely remain so with the investigation coming to a halt.
The investigation has shown the US to be most inept. This strain of Anthrax was early on determined to come from a US laboratory. With the billions of tax dollars spent annually on intelligence and investigating in this nation, how can the US fail so decisively? There were a comparatively small number of people with access to this lab. How much money would it have cost to investigate 200 people? Perhaps some of the tax dollars the Congress appropriates for "terorism" should be allocated to find out who committed this terrorism against Americans. Could it be possible that the US government knows more about who actually did this but for political reasons has decided to tell the public that the perpetrator(s) cannot be found? Are there foreign links to this terrorism or was it strictly domestic? Has this investigation been purposely inept?