I can't find a transcript and the audio is not yet ready on NPR's site, but All Things Considered just ran a story in their second hour highlighting two critical "proofs" in support of the FBI's case against Ivins that apparently were given during a briefing held for journalists today.

The only problem is, by my reading, both these "proofs" are false.

Proof #1: Ivins provided false samples to the FBI in an effort to mislead them, early on in the investigation.

Proof #2: The anthrax used in the letters was easy to make, in fact the FBI duplicated it, and the equipment in the USAMRIID labs contained everything necessary.

As for #1, NPR's own site has the transcript of an interview with Paul Kemp that dispels the myth of Ivins' attempt to mislead investigators. Yet Scott Simon, the NPR interviewer, doesn't question the obvious contradictions.

As for #2, the last I heard was the FBI had totally failed to reverse-engineer the "weaponized" anthrax found in the Daschle/Leahy letters, so they are now saying they have? Then, several scientists at USAMRIID stated unequivocally that they'd never seen a product like it, and added that nobody there had the knowledge or equipment to make it in any case. Other sources spoke of the purity, fineness, and coating of this anthrax as well --

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/government/84/8449gov1.html

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

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907EEDB173EF934A25753C1A9679C8B63

among others.

Link to the skeleton of the NPR on-air report here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93710969

The main reason is the quality of the spore preparation.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1490

Last week, US Senator Bill Frist announced that the powder in the Daschle letter was in particles 1.5 to 3.0 microns wide, a very narrow size range. The results of the physical analysis of the New York Post letter are not yet known.

For comparison, a human hair is about 90 microns in diameter, and the limit of unaided human vision is around half that - so you couldn't even see the particles in the air, unless they were scattering light. For comparison, cloud water particles are less then 20 microns in diameter, but we see clouds because the particles scatter light, so we see fog, etc. Science is fun!

So, what size is the bacillus anthracis organism itself?

Bacillus Anthracis: 1.0 to 1.5 micron diameter, 3.0 to 5.0 micron length

That means that the preparation was pure spores - and not just pure, capable of aerosolizing into individual spores. Thanks to the Oct 9 anthrax letters, everyone around the world now has a good idea of how to do this "Anthrax Trick". If I can make a decent guess at it using publicly available information, I'm sure the Russian biowarfare program can too. So, I think it is okay to discuss the details of this particular issue publicly.

There is only one technology capable of creating liquid aerosols with precisely defined diameters, and that is something called electrospray. A thin stream of liquid is subjected to an electric field, causing it to break into droplets of very specific size, based on various parameters that you don't need to know about.

In a low-humidity sealed chamber, those droplets will evaporate, leaving only the solid materials behind. This is how the drug industry hoped to create dry powder inhalant drugs, using proprietary technology controlled by Battelle Memorial Institute - for example, one recipe is a mix of antibiotics with other chemicals (sugars, mostly). Want to see the details? Just click the link at signature, or cut and paste:

http://www.rcjournal.com/contents/12.02/12.02.1419.cfm

Introduction -Experimental System and Methods

Liquid Break-Up, Droplet Dispersion, and Monodispersity - Required Liquid Physical Properties and Scaling Laws - Electric Charge: Consequences and the Need to Neutralize the Droplets - The Need for Multiplexing - The BattellePharma Electrospray Nebulizers

There is NO WAY you can create such a preparation using a lyophilizer, even if one had a 100% pure spore preparation. What a lyophilizer does is extract water under vacuum, at low temperature - the material typically ends up stuck together in clumps, definitely not as individual silica-coated spores. You get big chunks, and a wide range of particle sizes, definitely not a 1.5-3.0 micron spread. (Viruses like smallpox, by comparison, are about 1/100th that size.)

This leads back to the anonymous leak that led to the WaPo's "scoop": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/08/04/ST2008080402359.html

Anthrax Dryer a Key To Probe: Suspect Borrowed Device From Lab, By Carrie Johnson, Joby Warrick and Marilyn W. Thompson, Washington Post Staff Writers, Tuesday, August 5, 2008; Page A01 - "Bruce E. Ivins, the government's leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores, according to sources briefed on the case."

Joby Warrick has a lot to answer for, as do his editors. This reporter has been publishing FBI leaks, contradictory or not, ever since day one, and even though his stories contain blatant contradictions to his earlier stories, the WaPo has never printed a correction. Who, exactly, was Joby Warrick's source for this story? And why didn't he check it before repeating it verbatim?

The media hasn't changed since they repeated all the lies about Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons without question - still the same story. Ivin's didn't have the necessary equipment to make the Oct 9th spore preparation, so there is no way he could have been the culprit. Who did? The only people who had access to both the Ames strain and the necessary technology were affiliated with Battelle, and more specifically, the Battelle start-up, "Battelle Pulmonary Therapeutics."

According to the WaPo excerpt:

"... government sources briefed on the case said yesterday."

The "government sources" were "briefed" - assume FBI was doing the briefing of FBI, Justice and Bush Administration political appointees.

So FBI may not be the "sources" for this story.

Also, the journalistic notion of multiple sources establishing verification and credibility in a story like this is nonsense - the sources would have to be government.

As we know, these guys get the memo and all repeat the talking points while sticking to their story.