WASHINGTON — Calling it "a most urgent public health and national security issue," two ranking lawmakers said Friday that they were expanding their congressional investigation into the risks associated with the nation's biodefense labs to focus on how someone as mentally unstable as accused anthrax killer Bruce E. Ivins could have worked unsupervised with deadly biological agents for so long.
Reps. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), head of the panel's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said they would investigate personnel security at Ft. Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked with anthrax cultures for at least seven years after he began showing signs of paranoia and mental instability.
Ivins, who was 62 when he died July 29, remained with the lab long after the FBI determined that he was probably the culprit in the 2001 attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 who had handled tainted mail. He ingested a lethal dose of acetaminophen as authorities were preparing to charge him with murder.
On Friday the government cleared Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, another researcher, of any complicity in the attacks -- something it did not do in June when it paid him a $5.8-million settlement or this week when authorities said publicly they believed Ivins was the sole culprit.
Hatfill didn't get the apology that he was looking for. But the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeffrey A. Taylor, sent a letter to one of Hatfill's lawyers saying the existing evidence "excluded your client as a subject or target of the investigation."
Taylor said that scientific techniques ultimately used to trace the specific batch of spores to Ivins did not exist in 2002, when the FBI was focusing mostly on Hatfill.
Hatfill had no comment. His lawyers said that Taylor's letter was appreciated but that it did not go far enough in explaining why their client was not ruled out as a suspect years ago, once the new technologies apparently cleared him.
Dingell and Stupak said recent disclosures about Ivins' mental state heightened their security concerns. The Justice Department and the FBI released reams of investigative material in the Ivins case this week to make public their case for his guilt.
The documents, including e-mail messages from Ivins, portrayed the microbiologist as increasingly troubled and potentially homicidal at least as far back as 2000 and most likely earlier.
