Letters to the Editor
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thelastnamechosen/ondelette
I agree that the bentonite claim is almost certainly false, but the question of silica has not been resolved in my mind. While silica has no bearing on the ABC report, using unnamed sources to knock it down certainly does.
The Bush administraiton itself says that there was no bentonite every found in the anthrax. Beecher says it. Lake says it. Have you read Lake's analysis as to why? As I made clear, he was arguing that long BEFORE Beecher's article was published.
Let's be clear that there are two separate issues: (1) whether there was a bentonite additive in the anthrax; (2) whether there was some form of silica present.
There is no real dispute on (1) Every credible source that I know (including even the Bush administration, however you want to characterize them) says there was no bentonite. That is what the ABC report is about, and that -- regardless of (2) -- makes those reports false. Even Ross said on ABC, on November 1:
There are chemical additives in that anthrax including one called silica. That's not a trademark of any one country's weapons program, but it is known to be used by Iraq, Russia and the US in making a military style anthrax."
The presence of silica (as opposed to bentonite) no more points to Iraq than it points to Russia or a domestic source. So that's the issue I'm interested in for this post.
On issue (2), there are people -- led by Gary Matsumoto -- who claim that it was weaponized, with silica, etc. I find those sources to be lacking in credibility and agenda-driven. I find Lake's analysis (and he has a lengthy analysis tearing apart Matsumoto's November, 2003 article in Science) much better-documented and more persusaive (i.e., that there were no additives).
But since that's not relevant to the ABC report, I'm not going to go through all the reports and (as you requested) provide you with links (you can do that yourself - start here: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/Update-History2006.html#060125).
But clearly, Lake's analysis does NOT depend on Beecher's article AT ALL, since Lake argued in his book that "the attack anthrax did not contain any visible additives" in his book, published BEFORE Beecher's article was published.
Beecher is ONE source of many. He's relevant, not dispositive. But as I said, I find the voluminous evidence compiled and analyzed by Ed Lake, which I spent all weekend reading and which long pre-dates Beecher, to be persuasive on the question of whether there were additives and absolutely definitive on whether there was bentonite.