The more we learn the more we find out that the U.S. investigators are behaving more like the Gestapo or KGB rather than law enforcement officers sworn to uphold the Constitution.
When Perry Mikesell, a microbiologist in Ohio, came under suspicion as the anthrax attacker, he began drinking heavily, family members say, and soon died. After a doctor in New York drew the interest of the F.B.I., his marriage fell apart and his practice suffered, his lawyer says. And after two Pakistani brothers in Pennsylvania were briefly under scrutiny, they eventually had to leave the country to find work.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s path to Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who committed suicide late last month as federal officials moved closer to indicting him for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, was long and tortuous. Before the investigators settled on Dr. Ivins — and his defenders still say the F.B.I. hounded an innocent man to death — they had focused on Steven J. Hatfill, another Army researcher, for several years.
But along the way, scores of others — terrorists, foreigners, academic researchers, biowarfare specialists and an elite group of Army scientists working behind high fences and barbed wire — drew the interest of the investigators. For some of them the cost was high: lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships.
At the Army biodefense laboratory in Frederick, Md., where Dr. Ivins worked, the inquiry became a murder mystery, the cast composed of top scientists eyeing one another warily over vials of lethal pathogens.
“It was not pleasant,” recalled Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, a former official there. “There was a general sense of paranoia that they were going to get somebody no matter what.”
Some critics fault the F.B.I.’s investigation as ignorant, incompetent and worse. Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who was a Princeton University physicist, said that the disclosures linking Dr. Ivins to the crime notwithstanding, the inquiry was “poorly handled” and “resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy.”
[...]Early on, with more zeal than solid information, agents turned on three Pakistani-born city officials in Chester, Pa. One, Dr. Irshad Shaikh, was the health commissioner; his brother, Dr. Masood Shaikh, ran the lead-abatement program. The third, Asif Kazi, was then an accountant in the finance department.
Mr. Kazi was sitting in his City Hall office one day in November 2001 when F.B.I. agents burst in and began a barrage of questions.
“It was really scary,” Mr. Kazi recalled in an interview last week. “It was: ‘What do you think of 9/11? What do know about anthrax?’ ”
Across town, an agent pointed a gun through an open window at Mr. Kazi’s home while others knocked down the front door as his wife was cooking in the kitchen. At the Shaikh brothers’ house, agents in bioprotection suits began hunting for germ-making equipment and carted away computers.
None of the three men had ever worked with anthrax. But for days, they were on national television as footage of the searches ran on a video loop and news announcers wondered aloud if they were the killers.
The men were cleared after it turned out that a disgruntled employee had sought revenge by calling in a bogus tip. But for all three, trouble followed. The Shaikhs’ path to citizenship was disrupted, their visas ran out and both had to find work abroad, Mr. Kazi said.
- Related Posts:
- FBI Case Against Anthrax Scientist Ivins: Where's the Evidence?
- FBI Tried Coercing Ivins' Children into Accusing Their Father in Anthrax Attacks
- Bruce Ivins was a Scapegoat in the FBI Anthrax Investigation
- Another Victim of the Government Anthrax Witch Hunt?
- Scientist Is Paid Millions by U.S. in Anthrax Suit
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