There’s more today at the NYT on Bruce Ivins, as relayed by Jean Duley, a social worker who counseled him. Apparently, he was a very sick man.
Bruce E. Ivins arrived last month for a group counseling session at a psychiatric center here in his hometown with a startling announcement: Facing the prospect of murder charges, he had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun as he contemplated killing his co-workers at the nearby Army research laboratory.
“He was going to go out in a blaze of glory, that he was going to take everybody out with him,” said a social worker in a transcript of a hearing at which she sought a restraining order against Dr. Ivins after his threats.
Scroll down the NYT page and look for the mp3 link to hear Duley’s spoken statement to the court as she requested a restraining order. Ivins was forcibly committted after making the above statement on July 9th. In fact, they took him while he was at work. He was not allowed back to the USAMRIID lab or Ft. Detrick after this incident. I’m pretty sure a threat to kill all your coworkers would be enough to permanently pull your clearance.
Duley said he’d attempted to kill other people by poisoning, and described him as a revenge killer.
I don’t understand if there are, as she says, numerous other (I assume older?) records from psychiatrists and psychologists describing him as homicidal and sociopathic, how was he able to work at USAMRIID? How old were those earlier medical records? Is this something doctors were concerned about for years, or just in the final weeks? Was Ivins still working after doctors came to those conclusions?
Another weird thing is that the only statements that have come from his own coworkers so far describe him as a fairly decent guy at work. Makes you wonder about which fairly decent guy with a top secret security clearance in your own office might decide to go out in a blaze of glory and take everybody out with him. Creepy.
UPDATE: Too many biodefense labs? We now have about 14,000 people at about 400 labs allowed to work with select agents. See a discussion of the problem here, also at NYT. My opinion, as you probably know, is we’re on the wrong track. But the only way to rein this in is to rein in the funding.
UPDATE: One more update here, New Scientist blogger Debora MacKenzie wonders just like I do,
The papers describe “a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats and actions”. That would be 30 or 40 years ago. Was there really someone with a psychiatric history like that at the main US biodefense lab, USAMRIID, and he wasn’t investigated before?
That part I just really don’t get.
Filed under: biological weapons, homeland security, infectious disease, medicine, military, terrorism, WMD
There is a very simple explanation. This social worker was scared and most people in that position know that to get a restraining order you need to present a “history”. I have no doubt she was afraid with good reason but the rest stinks of exagerration for the restraining order. She is a social worker, not a psychiatric or psychologist yet her statement is full of clinical diagnoses. I’m not buying it.
BGG, I think your concern about too many biodefense labs is spot-on.
It really doesn’t matter whether Ivins was the culprit or not. Security at Fort Detrick has never been all that tight. The way it has grown into the civilian bioresearch community since Nixon killed off the offensive biowar program has made this inevitable.
C.J. Peters’ autobiography made the root cause flaw achingly plain. You have a virologist who gets interested, say, in Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, a.k.a Machupo. He does research at NIH for a while. The team or the money or whatever dries up, and he’ll move somewhere that research has some legs. Detrick, say. When that dries up, he’ll move on, perhaps to the CDC.
All the while, he has the mindset of a civilian academic research scientist. These people’s professional lifeblood is public discourse and the sharing of research results. For them, security is wrong from a completely pragmatic standpoint: it screws up the whole process of scientific hypothesis testing at the root. They are going to react to draconian security constraints the way sodium reacts to water.
This was a persistent problem at Los Alamos, too.
What this means is that we are NEVER going to adequately secure facilities like Fort Detrick.
So the more of them that we have, the more ways there are for some psychopath to purloin something he can kill people with. And the more chances there are of deadly accidents.
As you are almost certainly aware, the largest casualty toll from a biowarfare-related incident seems to have been in 1979, at Sverdlovsk. Some knucklehead failed both to replace a failed outlet filter at an weaponized anthrax production facility, and to adequately status his superiors as to this state of affairs. So they started up production one morning as if nothing were wrong … The result was a prompt release of weaponized anthrax into the surrounding community. This stacked up uncounted thousands of dead livestock, and at least 68 human fatalities by the time the butcher’s bill was paid.
In other words, accident and screwup are at least as much to be feared as conscious deliberate malicious intent.
Every additional facility that we put into service is another roll of the dice.
Don’t even get me started about the intimate connection between the War Against Terror and pork. If I get rolling on that one for very long, I’ll start using obscenities.
Accidents happen, and are obviously the biggest concern with proliferating biodefense labs. More labs, more workers, more handling of pathogens, more opportunity for a mistake. More homeland defense funding = more of all of the above. I think we have enough lab capacity in this area and further funding should go to other public health issues.
I’ve been to some of these facilities including USAMRIID and I don’t have any issue with their security…their security offices appeared to apply all the rules properly. Security can only do so much. An insider at ANY secure facility, with the intent to break rules, can always do so.
Re: his security clearance – well, he wasn’t gay and he didn’t have financial problems, and as long as he had no ties to overseas agencies or frequent travel to Europe or Asia, what could stop him from getting a clearance?
Some tongue in cheek there. Good coverage, BGG.
Oy. Once I was overseas and met a male transvestite analyst with TS clearance, wearing a dress and a wig. I wonder if the IC here would allow that — they don’t actually ask if you’re gay or a cross-dresser! A bit off topic…
Oh and I’m not saying gays or cross-dressers are crazy homicidal maniacs. Just to be clear.
“Accidents happen, and are obviously the biggest concern with proliferating biodefense labs. More labs, more workers, more handling of pathogens, more opportunity for a mistake.”
The incidence rate of schizophrenia is 1/4000. About 20% show last onsef schizophrenia >35. Not all mental illness with security risk implications is going to manifest itself in early adulthood, before someone has went through the initial process of getting a clearance.
” More homeland defense funding = more of all of the above. I think we have enough lab capacity in this area and further funding should go to other public health issues.”
Agreed, BGG, but the problem is that where would you cut it back to? If you asked me a month ago, I’d have said “pull back the R&D on select agents to CDC, USAMRIID, and some of the national labs and beltway bandit contract R&D shops, but (given Texas A&M’s screw-ups) limit work at Universities to more basic science, because only a few universities can grok creating a secure environment.
But if USAMRIID f**ks it up, who isn’t going to f**k it up? Which institutions can we limit this work to?
You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this matter to be actually
something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complex and extremely broad for me.
I am looking forward for your next post, I will try to get the hang
of it!