Your questions are very closely related. First, as to the function of a lyophilizer, all it does is to remove the water from the material placed into it. In other words, if you put a mixture of spores, vegetative cells and culture medium into it, you will get dried spores, vegetative cells and culture medium. If you put a water suspension of very highly purified spores into it, you will wind up with dry very highly purified spores.

The articles I keep going back to (and linked in the post at my signature) present the two ideas driving my current thinking. The first is that very reputable scientists have seen electron micrographs of the attack material and they report that there appears to be nothing besides spores in the material.

The second is the speculation by Ed Lake that suggests that the surface chemistry of the spores themselves, when they are very pure and dry, will prevent clumping and even allow some aerosolization of them. Note that the spores themselves are only one micron long. If they don't clump, then they already are of a size that physically will allow them to stay in the air a long time if lifted by a microcurrent of air. That takes away any need for milling: if the spores are cleaned of all the other material that would have been present at the end of the culture process, they will "look" milled because they are so small. Note also that the postal workers were infected because it is estimated that the pores in the paper of the envelope were on the order of 50 microns, so even though the seams were sealed with tape, as the envelopes were compressed by the sorting equipment, some spores easily were "squeezed" out through those relatively larger pores.

I previously was of the opinion that the attack material had to have been produced at Dugway, but the concepts described above make me less sure of that. Now, I am beginning to believe the assertion that someone moderately skilled in microbiology could have produced the material. Working in their favor is the fact that bacterial endospores in general are extremely tough. They will withstand treatments that would completely disrupt and render into solution all of the materials that would have been present at the end of the culture process. Cleaning the spores really wouldn't take that much expertise. If Ed Lake is correct about the surface chemistry, then getting to very clean spores in water suspension only leaves the step of drying them. I'm not even convinced a lyophilizer is essential for that final step.

As for the NY Post sample, I've seen reports that it clumped due to getting wet, but I've also seen one report (I don't remember where) that said that particular sample was only 10% spores where the Daschle and Leahy samples were virtually 100% spores. That would be consistent with the Post sample being dried from a preparation that had not yet been cleaned completely. The Robert Stevens sample was not recovered, but he died of inhalation anthrax, so it's not clear that all of the material in the first set of mailings was impure.

Finally, in the previous thread I did address the issue from the NYTimes article about the attack material matching a particular sample in Ivins' control that is 85% Dugway strain and 15% Fort Detrick strain. As is also pointed out by Dr. Meryl Nass, that does not finger Ivins, it merely narrows down where the attack material came from. Anyone with access to that sample could have used a small portion of it as a starter culture.

Finally, I second the commenters who have noted that although Ivins' vaccine work challenged animals with aerolsolized spores, it appears that they used liquid suspensions of spores to make those aerosols. That can be found in the methods sections of their publications.

Duley was in a group therapy with Ivins. Both Duley & Ivins had long time alcohol abuse problems. The psychiatrist is a separate issue. No one sees a psychiatrist unless they have mental health issues. To blame sucicide on pressure from FBI is ridiculous. Many times friends cannot detect mental illness in their freinds.

Often families are in denial.

Sept 18th: Five attacks were sent - the Brokaw-NBC and New York Post letters were recovered, but CBS, ABC and American Media were not.

Oct 5th: Death of Robert Stevens in Florida.

Oct 9th: After this minimal public response, two more anthrax letters were sent - these ones clearly labeled with "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX" - to Daschle and Leahy. ( www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/detect/antdetect_letters_a.htm - see bottom of page)

Oct 15th: Daschle's office opened the letter, saw the note, and called the FBI.

Oct 16th: The USAMRIID, Detrick MD begins analysis of the anthrax powder that had been delivered by the FBI Hazmat team. The first concern was to rule out the presence of smallpox or other deadly viruses. The analysis was carried out by Tom Geisbert and Peter Jahrling:

An anthrax spore is five times larger than a smallpox particle. He was looking for bricks of pox, so he was looking for little objects, searing spore by spore.... he noticed some sort of goop clinging to the spores. It made the spores look like fried eggs - the spores were the yolks, and the goop was the white. It was a kind of splatty stuff...[silica]

General Parker and Peter Jahling went by the office of the USAMRIID commander, Colonel Ed Eitzen, and then the three menwent upstairs to the scope room, where Tom Geisbert was staring at the anthrax... Parker sat down at the scope and looked. Pure spores.

No way do you get pure spores by lyophilizing wet anthrax spore slurry as the FBI claims Ivins did.

Oct 17th:

At ten-thirty that morning, the House of Representatives was closed down... Major General John Parker went to the U.S. Senate, where he met with a caucus of the Senate leadership... He told them that he'd looked at the anthrax himself in the microscope and that it was essentially pure spores.

Pay attention, now - that same day:

While General Parker was telling the Senate that the anthrax was pure and the HHS people were asking for money for a smallpox vaccine stockpile, the FBI decided, sensibly, to get a second opinion on the Daschle anthrax... in West Jefferson, Ohio, near Columbus, at the Hazardous Materials Research Center of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit scientific research and consulting organization. Battelle scientists took the hatbox into a lab... Their tests showed that the anthrax was not nearly as refined or powerful as the Army people believed.

That is the very same Battelle who operated the Dugway Utah biowarfare center, and who had previously contracted with both the CIA and the DIA on anthrax projects known as Jefferson and Clear Vision...

Oct 18th: The National Security Council, led by Lisa Gordon-Haggerty, discusses the anthrax attacks.

Jahrling, who was sitting in the commander's office at USAMRIID with Colonel Ed Eitzen, spoke...he said that USAMRIID had found that the anthrax powder in the letter mailed to Senator Daschle was "professionally done" and "energetic."

Oct 19th: Continued analysis of the Daschle spores at Detrick:

...The particles wouldn't stick. Eighty percent of the Daschle particles flittered away in air currents up the hood. That was when he understood that the Hart Building was utterly contaminated.

He somehow managed to get some of the particles to stick to the tape. He hurried the sample into the scope room, put it under a scanning scope, and zoomed in. What he saw shocked him.

The spores were stuck together into chunks that looked like moon rocks...The skulls were falling apart. He could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched. This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions...

He called Jahrling. "Peter, I'm in the scope room. Can you come up here, like right now?" Jahrling ran upstairs, closed the door, and stared at the skull anthrax for a long time. He didn't say much. Geisbert's security clearance was rated secret, and the details of how this material could have been made might be more highly classified."

Oct 22nd

Death of Joseph P. Curseen, Jr. and Thomas L. Morris, Jr. - employees in the Brentwood mail-sorting facility.

Now, Battelle (in a panic?) steps in again:

On the same day that two Brentwood workers died, a meeting was held at FBI headquarters involving the Laboratory, scientists from the Battelle Memorial Insitute, and scientists from the Army... The Army scientists were telling the FBI that the powder was extremely rarified and dangerous, while a Battelle scientist named Michael Kuhlman was allegedly saying that the anthrax was ten to fifty times less potent than the Army was claiming. Allyson Simons, the head of the Laboratory, was having trouble sorting through the disagreement, and she was apparently not telling the CDC leadership much about the powder, while waiting for more data to come in.

One Army official is said to have blown up at Simons and Kuhlman at the meeting, saying to the Battelle man, "Goddamn it, you stuck your anthrax in an autoclave, and you turned it into hockey pucks."

There you are. Soon after, a massive FBI investigation leads them to Dugway Utah, as reported in multiple press outlets on Dec 21, 2001. Within weeks, the entire lead FBI team is sacked, and all attention is refocused on Hatfill and Detrick, and the press goes silent for a few years, while Battelle pulls in $1 billion in biowarfare contracts.

Quotes taken from Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer (2002).