Not A Peep From The Perp

Well, it’s been a few days since I challenged Le Rongeur (The Rodent), the person who leaked the LNDD documents, to speak out and tell us what he or she was trying to accomplish by doing so. As the headline says, I haven’t heard a peep from the perp.

Pretty much, that’s what I expected. If I ever do hear from him (or her), I’ll pass on the information about this person’s motivations. But I doubt it will happen. This person, whoever he or she is, may be in a bit of legal hot water. Regardless of whether it’s an insider or an outsider (we’ll come back to that in a bit), I suspect this person won’t risk contacting me or anyone else for fear of being caught.

In the meantime, I’ve had a message from someone who claims to have seen the documents Le Rongeur sent out to various organizations. While I haven’t seen the actual documents, this person tells me that his opinion of the Le Rongeur documents is the following:

• The letterhead appears to be forged. Not because the name Châtenay is misspelled in the address at the bottom of the letters (typographical errors can happen even when letterhead is professionally typeset, so that kind of misspelling really isn’t conclusive of anything other than it’s an error), but because the LNDD logo isn’t crisp and sharp. It looks like a crude scan, just as the director of LNDD stated.
• The information within the documents, however, may be a different story. Yes, as LNDD claims, the writing on the cover letter is not perfect French. But the material in the body of these letters isn’t terribly bad French, even if it’s not gramatically perfect. [I could show you a number of examples by well-educated native English-speakers that aren’t gramatically perfect, too, for that matter.] And the material itself appears to be accurate. Judging by LNDD’s reaction, which was to say the information was taken out of context, they aren’t denying the information contained within the letters.

So that raises the question of what would motivate Le Rongeur to leak the documents. Two thoughts come to mind.

First, Le Rongeur is a disgruntled employee of the lab, but wanted to cover his or her tracks by making the documents look like forgeries, while leaving accurate information within the content. This is a risky game, because the very fact that the documents appear to be forged would cast doubt on the credibility of the information, itself.

Remember a little episode Dan Rather had with allegedly forged documents about President Bush’s National Guard service? The claims that the documents were forged pretty much shot holes in the argument that the information was valid and true. Whether or not that information was correct, we’ll never know. My best guess on that one: It was a political trick that Rather’s producers should have sniffed out and avoided like the plague or hantavirus.

Second, Le Rongeur is none other than Professor Jacques de Ceaurizz, himself. Failing that, a person within the managerial ranks at LNDD. But why would someone at that level go to the bother of creating fake documents and sending them to various people, just like in some pulp fiction detective story?

Well, let’s try this on for size: At some point, high level staff at LNDD re-examined the findings in the Landis case, and in doing so discovered that their case is not so air-tight as was stated at the beginning of this debacle. At the beginning, they made a number of statements about how accurate and infallible the testing process is. In seeing some errors in data and interpretation (and it’s easy to misinterpret data, especially if you’re biased about what the results should be), they now realize the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

And they understand just how deeply embarrassing it will be to have the whole thing blow up in their faces during arbitration. So, by leaking these faked documents, they may be trying to find a way of saving face. Now, saving face by making yourself look like a bunch of bumbling idiots is more than a bit of a stretch, but given the perception of the lab and the numerous problems they’ve had in the past, it plays right into that perception. Perhaps their endgame is to fire some staff members, promise to improve their processes and move forward. And by doing so, they may hope to retain their WADA accreditation.

That’s pretty risky, too. After all, if they’re shown to be a bunch of bumbling buffoons there’s going to be a lot of pressure on WADA to yank LNDD’s accreditation. But, by striking before Floyd Landis’ defense team gets a whack at them, they may be able to salvage their accreditation through just this kind of subterfuge. If these documents hadn’t come out now as a kind of CYA, then the embarrassment that Howard Jacobs may heap on LNDD during arbitration could do even more damage (if that’s possible).

Is it possible that Floyd’s defense team has a few cards they’re not showing, and one of them has to do with LNDD’s analysis of the A and B samples? You bet. And one of those arguments may well follow along the lines of Duckstrap’s analysis, as reported over at TBV. While some of us have an understanding of cell physiology and can decipher some of the lab documentation pack, Duckstrap’s bona fides show he’s the real deal. That being the case, I’d say he has a great deal of credibility. According to TBV, Duckstrap is a:

PhD who is a senior scientist at a company in the pharmaceutical field, and an expert in statistical analysis related to drug testing and the decision making of the drug development process. He has been a research fellow at the NIH, and has 17 articles that turn up in a search on Google Scholar.

He prefers to remain anonymous in these discussions.

That’s a pretty solid set of credentials. I’d like to know who he is, but for the moment this at least gives an idea of his knowledge and expertise.

I’m not going to summarize David Brower’s distillation of Duckstrap’s arguments, as David has done an excellent job already, and to try and distill it even more risks watering down its meaning and importance. If you haven’t seen it already, go take a look, it will be most enlightening.

Circling back to Le Rongeur’s identity and motivations, it’s hard to say for certain. I think the two possibilities presented above are very likely. As I’ve said before, I tend to discount the idea that it’s an outsider, based on the fact that it would take a long time to search through LNDD’s documents and find embarrassing material. Someone on the inside, however, knows in which closets all the skeletons are hidden.

One last thought: How important are these documents to the Landis defense team? My own guess is that while they may bolster the argument that LNDD is sloppy in their processes, the more important argument for the defense runs along the line of Duckstrap’s interpretation of the data.

How will it play out? Time will tell. But as someone who believes Floyd is innocent, I find Duckstrap’s analysis very encouraging.