It would be tempting to view the recent stories about the suicide of Army biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins — who was about to be indicted by the FBI for the 2001 anthrax attacks — as long-overdue “closure” to the situation. It would be tempting, but it would be premature.

In a way, of course, Ivins’ death could bring some much-needed resolution for the survivors of the attacks and the families of the five people killed by the anthrax-laced letters that Ivins allegedly sent — although the Washington Post is finding that reaction is “mixed.”

The failure of the FBI to identify the perpetrator of the post-9/11 attacks that sent the country into panic about the threat from biological weapons — still unresolved nearly seven years later — had been a lingering concern. But the revelation that Ivins, a senior microbiologist at a top biodefense lab in Ft. Detrick, Maryland, took his own life after learning that the FBI was closing in on him, having linked the anthrax used in 2001 to Ivins using sophisticated DNA testing, seemed initially to have the potential to put those fears to rest.

But several important questions remain. First, there is the question of whether Ivins was actually the culprit. True, Ivins was described by a therapist who had treated him as a “socipathic, homicidal killer.” But the New York Times reported today that according to an anonymous source close to the investigation, the evidence against Ivins — expected to be detailed more fully by the FBI as early as this week — was, while “damning,” also “largely circumstantial.”

Many of Ivins’s colleagues and fellow scientists at the Ft. Detrick lab have said they doubt Ivins could have been responsible for the attacks. At least 10 people had access to the anthrax spores in question at the lab where Ivins worked. NPR is also reporting the the FBI was still weeks away from an indictment.

As Tom Daschle — the former Democratic Senate Majority Leader whose office was among the targets of anthrax-laced letters in 2001 — wisely warned today, it’s “premature” to jump to the conclusion that this development closes the case.

Saying he was “very skeptical” about the government’s investigation, Daschle recalled the bungled government handling of suspicions of researcher Stephen Hatfill in 2002. After mistakenly naming Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the case, Hatfill was never charged and later sued the Justice Department for damages. This June the government agreed to pay Hatfill a $5.8 million settlement.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial today echoes Daschle’s sentiments (and that’s not a sentence you see too often):

[...]Justice should make its evidence about Ivins public for anthrax experts and the media to inspect. Congress should also hold hearings that explore how the FBI pursued the case from the beginning and why it went awry. The FBI cannot be allowed to close the case and declare victory.

Public accountability is crucial because it relates to how we should respond to future biological or chemical attacks. Much of the Beltway political class believes that the current criminal justice system is adequate to handling such terror attacks, but the anthrax episode doesn’t inspire confidence. Whether the sources of mass terror are foreign or domestic, these cases cannot take seven years to solve. Whether or not the FBI has finally cracked the case, the public needs to know why it has taken so long.

But perhaps the most alarming question that remains unanswered is that of whether such an attack could happen again. The Associated Press reports that biodefense labs across the country still lack adequate security measures:

WASHINGTON (AP) - There could be another Bruce Ivins lurking in a biodefense laboratory anywhere in the United States. These research facilities have expanded so quickly since the anthrax attacks in 2001 that the U.S. government cannot keep close tabs on the sites or their thousands of scientists. At most labs, security procedures are designed to prevent accidents, not weed out people such as Ivins who work with deadly toxins while privately battling dark psychological problems.

Military laboratories have policies intended to spot mentally troubled scientists. But those policies apparently weren’t enough to flag Ivins, with his reported history of homicidal and sociopathic behavior. He killed himself Tuesday, knowing prosecutors were about to charge him with murder.

At private and academic labs, the policies are even more lax.

The article details how Ivins’ was able to easily avoid being identified by all of the government and FBI policies designed to identify scientists with “mental health” risks.

A related article from the Dallas Morning News in October 2007 details the “boom” in biodefense labs since 2001. It also mentions growing concerns about lack of security and oversight of biodefense labs:

But a lack of supervision over the hundreds of labs and thousands of scientists now handling deadly germs – as demonstrated by recent problems at Texas A&M University [me: more on that disturbing incident here] – has put the country at higher risk for dangerous disease outbreaks than before 2001, federal investigators say.

“The labs are pretty much overseeing themselves at this point,” Keith Rhodes, an investigator with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, said this month. “I would have to say we are at greater risk today” of an infectious disease epidemic.

Concern about the spread of biodefense labs certainly predated the recent Ivins incident — or even the Texas A&M incident (see this Christian Science Monitor article from 2003, for example).

Congress also held hearings about the oversight of biodefense labs in 2007 after the CDC released it’s report about the problems at the Texas A&M lab. Hugh Auchincloss, M.D., deputy director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), testified that the government had taken proper steps to secure these research facilities (see pages 6-10 of the above-linked PDF).

None of that, of course, even scratches the surface of the other, more insidious face of this threat — the use of biological weapons by al-Qaeda or other global terrorist organizations. While counterterrorism experts remain divided over the “imminence” of terror groups’ acquisition of such capabilities, the debate seems to be more a question of “when” rather than “if.”

An excellent and thorough analysis of the biological terror threat can be found in this 2006 article by Australian international security and bioweapons expert Christian Enemark, published in the Intelligence and National Security journal. Enemark concludes:

Overall, the threat of biological attacks perpetrated by non-state actors is presently not great and should not be exaggerated[...]An attack resulting in mass casualties requires that the perpetrator has a precise configuration of motivation and capability. On the basis of conceptual and empirical analysis, the characteristics of the most likely perpetrators are: a religious motivation; an apocalyptic worldview envisaging disease as a heavenly punishment; a high degree of relevant scientific expertise; and large financial resources. At present, no known non-state organization possesses a matching configuration of attributes. [me: according to Enemark's article, the emphasis is on lack of capability -- not motivation.]

[...]The notion of inadvertent state sponsorship, however, is one that requires further exploration. After almost five years, the case of the anthrax attacks of 2001 in the United States remains unsolved, although the available evidence suggests strongly that both the perpetrator and the B anthracis bacteria he or she used came from within the US defence establishment[...]But regardless of whether these attacks were in fact carried out by a US scientist, the possibility remains that scientific skills and knowledge might be applied in a manner hostile or recklessly indifferent to human life. When contemplating the prospect of biological attacks, the notion of ‘non-state actors’ should also encompass scientists engaged in research on pathogenic micro-organisms. These individuals hold a powerful position as regards access to biological agents and knowledge of what makes them dangerous, and as such their conduct warrants careful monitoring.

Indeed.