Dr. Martin E. Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, said the F.B.I. needed to publish more about the anthrax in the flask in Dr. Ivins’s lab, including the percentage of bacteria carrying each of the four genetic markers. The flask contained a mixture of dozens of spore production runs made at Fort Detrick and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

snip/order of quotes reversed

Eventually, 8 of the 1,000 strains were found to carry the four mutations, and 100 scientists had access to, or were associated with, the strains. All of these scientists were investigated.The “body of evidence,” officials said, pointed to Dr. Ivins.

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I am now wondering if Ivins' explanation of the "wrong sample" event -- now considered as close to a "smoking gun" as they have -- was completely accepted at the time and only BECAME significant in hindsight years later as they were desperately trying to build a case against Ivins ala the same process as built the WMD case against Saddam Hussein.

I was suprised by the chronology of the "wrong sample" event (particularly after a month earlier handing over the allegedly incriminating anthrax) ... but that both events were in February and March of 2002 ... a long time ago, and long before Ivins was a glint in a G-man's eye.

Does the FBI have evidence that Ivins was able to mail the envelopes that came from St. Petersburg, FL on Sept. 20, for example? (a date and place that was mentioned by a previous commenter)

And then we have the Monday's briefing by the FBI:

"A private event for journalists and editors."

Did anyone record this event? Did anyone there ask the FBI to detail their claims, to produce the complete forensics reports, to lift the gag order on all the Fort Detrick scientists?

And the press, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to NPR, loyally repeated the talking points without question.

The FBI's claim that they replicated the powder is a blatant lie. The FBI's claim that someone could have made the powder in a few days is also a lie. Take a look at Richard Preston's direct reporting from USAMRIID, from Oct 16th, when the Daschle letter was being anayzed:

Geisbert turned a knob and zoomed in. 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. The task of finding a few particles of smallpox mixed into a million anthrax spores was like walking over a mile of stony gravel looking for a few diamonds in the rough. He saw no bricks of pox. But 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.

The immediate concern at USAMRIID was making sure that it was just anthrax, not anthrax and smallpox (a large scale release of an anthrax-smallpox combination could easily kill 10 million people in the U.S. by the time it was contained). Further analysis a few days later showed this:

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 had a national security clearance, and he knew something about anthrax, but he could not imagine how this weapon had been made. It looked extremely sinister.

Well, there's really only one way to make spores like that, and that is to take a tiny droplet with a spore and some chemical additives in it, evaporate off the liquid, and then you get a dry spore with the additives stuck to it. There's only one piece of equipment that can make such perfectly sized, small droplets of anthrax slurry - an electrospray nebulizer. It appears to be the biowarfare equivalent of the uranium ultracentrifuge, and no, they are not very common pieces of equipment.

In fact, if you tracked them all down, it would make an interesting list. They are most used by manufacturers of inhaled drugs. This then gets us into all the people who prepare inhalant drugs using this device, which is a fairly long list:

BattellePharma has partnerships with numerous pharmaceutical corporations, including Abbott Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer Inc, Viasys Healthcare, and ViroPharma Inc, and is a subsidiary of Battelle Memorial Institute, the world's largest independent and private research and development organization.

No wonder the FBI doesn't want to investigate Battelle. And the press coverage? Even when there are blatant errors, the press (WaPo, see link) politely ignores them: "case closed!"

The FBI said it gathered 1,070 samples of anthrax bacteria from labs all over the world and only eight tested positive for the genetic markers. Those samples came from two institutions: USAMRIID and another they declined to identify.

Right - what other site? The FBI also can't account for the silica coating on the spores (not inside the spores, as the WaPo parrots claimed). Why would the press sit still and parrot this nonsense? Why would their editors do so? Why would their executives do so?

Even worse is this quote:

"I don't think we're ever going to be able to put the suspicions to bed. There's always going to be a spore on the grassy knoll," said Vahid Majidi of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate."

Vahid Majidi is a past head of the Chemistry Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), with experience in "nuclear weapons-related research, non/counter-proliferation, homeland security, isotope science, applied energy, and nanoscale science and engineering."

That's a DOE National Laboratory. Who manages five other DOE National Laboratories? Battelle Memorial Insitute. That could explain Majidi's conspiracy comment, couldn't it? Where do you think their other positive matches came from, anyway?

[No doubt somebody has already mentioned this. Sorry if it is duplicative. Haven't been able to catch up yet.]

It's summertime. August. And by long tradition, what you get from the MegaMedia in the summertime is "Chandra Levy" or stories like that, intricately and infinitely examined and hyped, the Classic Missing White Woman Who Was Murdered Most Foully By Agent or Agents Unknown; or you get Shark Attacks. Or, if you're lucky, you get both. Ta da!

It's summer. That's what the news is. Been like this for generations. Cokie goes to Nantucket. Everybody is off.

But.

Given what the Chandra Summer led to in September of 2001, the WaPo's late obsession with resurrecting the case, their obsessive coverage of it, the atmospherics surrounding it, don't you all think it might be wise to recognize that Washington's Palace Court Circular might be giving us a heads up? A somewhat jaded suggestion that come September, things are gonna change, big time, surprises in store, ones we may not like so much?

And is the FBI stringing out the Ivins/Anthrax Matter to fill time before whatever is coming down the road gets here?

Don't think they wouldn't. Of course they would. Sometimes they'll do it without even thinking.

If there is something in the pipeline that Chandra and the FBI Follies are softening us up for, there's nothing we can to to stop it -- at least nothing we've done or tried so far. The forces that perpetrate these things are immune to the public interest/will of the people, that sort of thing. They don't care. Steamroller.

Recall: Once Britain and the European Powers set their course for Empire, it was impossible to stop. No, they had to essentially self-destruct, and even then, they didn't really give up their pretensions.

So it is now.

Just sayin...