Four articles, all from today: Talking out of both sides of your mouth, FBI-style

[mhatrw]

WaPo:

Government scientists also acknowledged yesterday that they could not figure out how to reproduce silicon that appeared inside the dry spores, making an exact match elusive.

AP:

FBI officials and scientists also played down any significance of the element silicon in the killer anthrax strain, saying it seemed more of a natural occurrence than deliberate weaponizing as once theorized early in the investigation.

NY Times:

They also countered a principal scientific criticism of the investigation: that the spores had been weaponized with a special coating and therefore could not have been made by Dr. Ivins because he did not have the necessary equipment. This criticism is based on the presence of silica in the anthrax-laced attack letters. However, the F.B.I. scientists said that the silica had been imported naturally by the anthrax spores from their environment and that there was no evidence of weaponization. ...

The F.B.I. had been unable to reproduce one feature of the attack spores — their high level of silica — but attributed that to natural variability.

BUT

Science Now:

Other scientific work done by materials researcher Joseph Michael at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, convinced the FBI that silicon had not been added to the anthrax in the letters. Although preliminary analysis done at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology had indicated the presence of silicon, transmission electron microscopy by Michael and his colleagues revealed that the silicon was contained inside the spores--a natural occurrence documented in previous research--rather than a coating intended to make the anthrax more easily dispersible.

So what is it, again? Silicon? No silicon? "Natural" silicon eating anthrax that somehow only Ivins can produce? Was silicon in the anthrax samples traced to the RMR-1029 flask? If so, why couldn't the FBI reproduce anthrax with silicon in it using these samples? If not, how did Ivins "naturally" get silicon in the anthrax he prepared?

[AntiFascist]

1. Excellent point...

If the silicon existed naturally within the anthrax spores, then it should be present within the spores found in the flask.

[TexasObserver]

2. The FBI under Bush has become an embarrassment to America.

How do these guys go home and look their families in the eye? How do they stand idly by as, beginning in 2001, the Bush administration refuses to even hear from the FBI's terror watch people?

How do they engage in the massive cover ups surrounding the anthrax attacks?

How do they hide the Sibel Edmonds information and prevent the public from being informed?

How do they abandon any sense of devotion to the constitution they each swore to defend?

I hope Obama cleans house over there, and purges all the hacks who have gone along with these fascists moves.

[Supersedeas]

13. will Mueller use the Mukasey Doctrine to avoid accountability?

[TexasObserver]

14. Probably. They don't even try to pretend they're doing their jobs any more.

Throw out some excuse, like "prosecutorial discretion," and keep going.

[LiberalHeart]

3. These questions were posed to one of those reporting on recent FBI remarks

Did the FBI say how Ivins violated the protocol? I'd like to know just how serious the violation was and whether it would have altered the sample's integrity in a meaningful way.

Did the FBI mean, when they said Ivins "helped" create the protocol, that Ivins actually knew what the end product (i.e. the exact wording of the protocol) would be? Or did he merely provide input, and did he follow that input when making his submission -- or did he violate his own suggestions?

If he followed his own suggestions, doesn't submitting the sample prior to an official request work in his favor rather than serving to incriminate him?

About the static electricity theory: I've read that the anthrax floated, suspended in air. Doesn't material with a static charge seek to cling to something rather than float aimlessly in the air?

Do we know if the FBI actually tested its theory that mailing equipment could have crushed the anthrax into a finer form? Did they obtain some of that equipment and run anthrax-laden envelopes through it? Or are they just guessing?

Also, I've heard on NPR that the anthrax was finely milled in a uniform manner. How uniform would it be after being crush by mailing equipment? Wouldn't the anthrax have to be evenly distributed in the envelope for it to get equal crushing across the board?

[mhatrw]

4. Good questions. As for the electrostatic static theory, it can work both ways

depending on how the charge was applied. But the FBI abandoned this theory and now says that any microbiologist can make anthrax deadly through inhalation in a couple of days.

If so, what are we doing about it? Why are we still spending billions handing out anthrax spores like candy to thousands of researchers worldwide?

[AntiFascist]

17. I don't trust the high-level scientists advising the FBI...

This article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 3, 2001 may contain some outright lies made by Bill Patrick who, at this point in the investigation, disagreed with Barbara Hatch Rosenberg:

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/electrostaticchargeanthrax.html

However, the spores would be less likely to float. "Electrostatically charged materials are very hard to disseminate," explained Bill Patrick, a scientist who helped develop anthrax-loaded weapons for the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. While Mr. Patrick said he hasn't personally seen samples of anthrax sent in a letter to another senator, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a scientist working on the investigation, he said, has described it to him.

"It's purified like our material and it has a small particle size, just as we did, but it has an electrostatic charge," he said. The charge must be removed with a secret combination of chemicals, he said, to make effective biological weapons. Otherwise, "some of it can still get up in the air," he said, "but it's not predictable."

I don't know about the statement above, but the following is clearly false:

The U.S. biological-weapons program was disbanded by President Nixon in 1969, but it became an issue last month as investigators discovered that the Ames strain of anthrax -- the strain found in most of the recent cases -- later used by the U.S. in defensive military experiments, was held in a few government and university laboratories. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist who heads a biological-weapons working group for the Federation of American Scientists, asserted the anthrax used in the letters "was almost certainly derived from the U.S. weapons program." That, she said, would narrow the search down to a few individuals.

"She is flat wrong," Mr. Patrick said. David R. Franz, who headed the defense-related biological-research program for the Army at Fort Detrick, Md., between 1987 and 1998, said the defensive experiments the Army conducted with the Ames anthrax used the bacteria in a liquid slurry and not in the powdered form. During that period, he said, the U.S. obtained information from a British military research laboratory that did experiments with Ames anthrax in the powdered form.

Did they not know about Project Jefferson?

[mhatrw]

18. Patrick and Hatfill are two peas in the US bioweapons pod. n/t

[EFerrari]

5. Those are good questions.

I'd like to know how the two batches of anthrax differ and if anything was retrieved from Florida that can be tested.

I'd like to know how they're defining "weaponized" and when they changed their minds about that issue and why. (There is a paper from 2003, iirc, but the science was not replicated and I'd like to see what they say now.)

I'd like to know how someone could take that much anthrax out of Ft. Detrick and drive it two hundred miles and mail it and leave no trace of doing any of those things.

[LiberalHeart]

6. And what happened to the claim Ivins turned back his odometer?

[EFerrari]

8. I heard it mentioned but never found the source.

There's something else, too.

I read this morning that some of the hoax letters with the St. Petersburg postmark went out BEFORE there was anything in the press about an anthrax attack. Those letters were sent to 3 of 5 of the same targets.

Who mailed those letters? :shrug:

[EFerrari]

9. Okay. I found it in the press but no source was cited.

Is it in his email? I'll have to track that down in the pdf.

[Mabus]

11. The sources I've looked at mention his poems

I think the pdfs mention his poems but didn't publish them in their entirety.

[EFerrari]

12. I'll go back and look this evening. But

he liked jokes, even silly ones. I guess what I expect to find is an odometer joke just the same way that Doug used to tell the dumb joke about tearing off his wife's panties -- because they were too tight on him. :crazy:

[Mabus]

15. About page 14 of the affidavits

It mentions a e-mail with the hickory-dickory doc poem but doesn't print the odometer part.

I doubt that he rolled it back. Too hard and it is illegal in most places.

[LiberalHeart]

21. The report I heard was on the radio (NPR, I think) early on...

It went like this: Ivins supposedly told the FBI that he went out on long drives alone at night, then turned back his odometer in an effort to deceive his wife. Every wife checks the odometer when her husband's been gone a while, right? And where did he tell her he went?

Your joke theory works for me. I'm picturing him being asked about driving to Princeton and his saying "Oh, sure. I drove there in the middle of the night, then turned back my odometer so my wife wouldn't suspect."

It'd be interesting to know if there's an odometer problem messing up the FBI's theory -- something like maybe his car being taken in for service and the reading on the odometer being noted in the mechanic's records. Say there's two such service events, one before the window of opportunity and one afterward, but the odometer readings don't allow for such a long drive. That'd be a messy problem for the FBI. Ivins could have been challenged on that and tossed off a sarcastic remark in response.

Or not.

It could even be that the odometer report was made up, never happened, or came from Duley's beautiful mind. Maybe she claimed he said it in "therapy."

[mhatrw]

10. Update: My first response to this was inappropriate.

Now I see what you were getting at about the naturally static charged "theory" advocated by the FBI as reported in the LA Times. Naturally generated static charges generally result in an imbalance of charges which would cause clumping rather than dispersion among imbalanced particles.

[LiberalHeart]

20. Yes, that's it. I see that in my everyday life, but it may not apply to anthrax. Dunno.

[Celebration]

7. yeah, I noticed that

So, they could reproduce everything, just like Ivins, but oops there is that silicon. Oh, never mind. I doubt that they could even get an indictment on this evidence--a ham sandwich would be easier.

[guruoo]

16. Wonder who they're protecting?

[reprehensor]

19. "You spin me right round, baby..."

Geez.

[Supersedeas]

22. Where are the hearings--why isn't Mukasey and every Attorney working on this case UNDER OATH

and testifying IN PUBLIC in front of Congress.

Congressional DEMS need to show some backbone.