Investigators can't place Ivins in Princeton but say the evidence will show he had disturbing attitudes toward women.

I had just read and copied that non sequitur from the AP when I saw your post. "Journalists" have two major tools in their "profession"; words and facts, and they seem absolutely unable to reach a basic level of competence with them let alone skill and proficiency.

Since you and I are no longer engaging in dialogue, I won't poke holes in your theory here in public. It is an interesting theory and not one I would just discount out of hand (although it does have some problems) and certainly a more refined one than most. I'll commend you for your self-awareness about your own biases and for admitting them. In the grand scheme of things the origin and identity of the pilots really doesn't matter in my view. It was only four, possibly 8 men. I'd send in at least 2 capable of entering coordinates into the auto-pilot, and a little more, on each team, in case one was incapacitated in the takeover. I'm certain most had that training so actual trained pilots from some hypothetical country's military or commercial air (Pakis or Saudis), there would likely only be 4.

We're not the only people that are skeptical about the FBI's handling of the is.

Richard Schuler, attorney for anthrax victim Robert Stevens' widow, Maureen Stevens, said his client will attend Wednesday's FBI briefing with a list of questions.

"No. 1 is, 'Did Bruce Ivins mail the anthrax that killed Robert Stevens?'" Schuler said, adding, "I've got healthy skepticism."

The article also points out that Ivins would sit at his desk and weep.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080806/ap_on_go_ot/anthrax_investigation;_ylt=Ap7Hyq9iXMP64yGGwvxQ8eGWwvIE

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=168759

http://www.debunking911.com/links.htm

Just as an aside, in the course of my work as an investigator in one of my previous lives I've seen a few FBI agents perjure themselves in court so accusations from dimwits here claiming that I'm some government stooge just make me laugh. In one case, an agent, a woman, claimed she personally served me with a subpena me at my home in CA, and testified to that fact in open court. I happened to be in Oregon at the time, interviewing people (investigating or instigating, depending on your point of view) and had the rental car, gas and motel receipts to prove it. Did it matter to the judge? Not really, but you should have seen the look on her face. Anyway, carry on. I return control of your computer monitors to you.

Holly: Is there (that you know of) any standard for what this term means in this context? Does "highly engineered" mean "of super-uniform size, shape and/or toughness"? The term must have some very specific meanings if it's actually used by anthrax researchers, and that meaning may be revealed by what similar terms convey in related fields of study.

That's a really good point. In issues like this it is very important for us to be precise about our terms, lest we slide into "words mean what I want them to mean" territory. I'm not sure about a general standard, but what I mean when I talk about highly engineered material is spores that have been treated with materials ranging from bentonite to silica to the few reports I've seen of something called "polyglass". Many advances have been made in the field of nanotechnology in recent years and particles can be made to have just the size and surface chemistry one wants. If that technology were to be applied to something like anthrax spores, something quite dangerous could result.

ondelette: I am remembering this, so it may need massaging in details, but if I remember correctly, the use of substances like bentonite or kaolin in biological weapons is to facilitate the particles sliding by each other so they won't clump -- during the explosion of a bomb device. Pollen is plenty rough on its edges (required by most bee legs), and aerosolizes just fine in air currents, as do lycopodium spores, which are also rough, and frequently used in science classes to form colloidal suspensions in air which are then exploded to demonstrate [take your pick, mining disasters, grain elevator explosions, etc.].

Since my link to this technology is from my time in the field of biopesticides, I know that another early use of bentonite was to prevent clumping and to allow free flowing of conventional pesticides, so it would make sense that they would borrow bentonite or kaolin for that purpose. However, I have been interpreting "weaponized", in the anthrax case, to mean material that is of the appropriate size and with the appropriate other physical and chemical characteristics to be easily put into the air and taken deeply into the lungs to the smallest passages where infection takes place.

As I mentioned last night, I am starting to believe that it may be possible that sufficiently clean preparations of anthrax spores are naturally "weaponized". If that is not the case, and if clean spores instead would tend to clump, then I would have to think that the material only could have come from Dugway or West Jefferson.

Working with some of those materials that naturally are very small particles and disperse readily in air can be extremely dangerous. I had a co-worker destroy his lungs when he didn't take adequate precautions with material of that sort. He was a formulations specialist helping us to put our biological product (an insect parasitic nematode that wasn't quite microscopic at half a millimeter long, which we had put into partial suspended animation through removing much of its water), into a form that would readily disperse when placed into water. He made it work really well, but the small particles he worked with sensitized his lungs to antigens in the workplace nobody else had problems with and he had to stop coming into the building.

I relate that anecdote to support my thinking that growing and purifying spores wouldn't be such a challenge for a loner, but coming up with an engineered version of weaponizing would be beyond a loner's capability.

While waiting for the FBI's potential release of information this morning I'm going to check on another of my assumptions. In thinking about the loner theory, I've assumed that culture of anthrax is reasonably well understood and that the cultures can be induced to sporulate efficiently. If that information is not readily available, then the theory for a loner working outside one of the established anthrax labs would have to be at least modified to include inside information of the techniques in these labs. I know from personal experience and from a technology package I evaluated as a potential new product, that discovering conditions for culturing the vegetative phase of a bacterium is a completely different issue from inducing that culture to sporulate with high efficiency, and that creative and dedicated scientists can spend years trying to get sporulation at high concentration.