just updated my article with this; someone got a reasonable explanation for Google's shoddy performance? Plenty of hyperlinks in the article, see comments at the opednews link for more hyperlinks and the discussion thread. Don't believe me, try the searches yourself. Google blocks Archive.org, so there's no way to go back and see if Salon.com was ever really indexed, but it's absurd to claim they wouldn't be, for reasons stated in the article.

Is Google Censoring Anthrax Coverage by Glenn Greenwald?

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=8500

UPDATE: Stranger still, the Google NEWS search for Salon.com turns up NO hits on Salon.com in the 1st 3 pages (I didn’t go deeper), but plenty of articles linking to Salon.com, including Greenwald’s Anthrax reporting.

Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, has the number one hit for EW.com, and EW articles are also featured in the search results. EW.com is a site with a comparative amount of traffic to Salon.com, but is perhaps less “news” oriented; unless you think events involving celebrities are more newsworthy than false-flag attacks on the US government, media and American people.

I don't know about your claim but it would be my guess that the people at Google don't think to highly of people like Glenn Greenwald. They probably consider him a threat. They should.

Google, in court filings: "Complete Privacy Doesn't Exist."

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0730081google1.html

http://ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/google-sued-over-street-view-mapping-private-homes/

You have the NYT editorial that you link to as being from 8/7/2007 - not 2008.

You can delete this comment. Otherwise it will self-destruct.

I just typed in the word salon & anthrax and got all the articles right at the top.

The trouble may be that they list GG in the web search area, not specifically in the "news" search.

Read today's New York times. Very interesting.

-In 2002 Ivins stood on the side lines and mingled with FBI investigators and helped in a Red Cross tent during a hunt for clues. When law enforcement discovered he was an Anthrax research scientist who could compromise the investigations they hustled off the site.

" I would not describe him as brilliant or some kind of genius', W. Russle Byrne, who supervised Ivins for many years.

It occurred to me that the interview with Prof. Chomsky was conducted over the phone, perhaps? A speakerphone would be the way to do it but those little, low tech micro-cassette recorders will work with the very low tech magnetic pickups you attach by a suction cup to a land-line telephone handset. Records both sides of the conversation right to tape without a speakerphone in use. Most of this is older, low tech now. Still comes in handy when all else fails.

They look like this:

http://www.blockemf.com/catalog/images/magneticPickup.jpg

Ntried one a cell phone. I doubt if it works but can't say for sure. I don't plant bugs, tap phone lines or record conversations anymore.

:-)

Professor Greenwald,

Please read this hypothesis that Ivins could not have applied the high-tech anti-clumping/anti-static coating found on the anthrax: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/08/ivins-could-not-have-coated-killer.html

Keep up the great work!

Pretty please?

Of course, if you feel that'd be somehow counterproductive, taken out of context, or whatnot, I'll understand.

I needed some hardboiled, manly Summer reading, so I picked up The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler and there it was:

*A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.*

Condolences.

Once I wasted a month of lab work because I contaminated my PCR reagents - total loss. Then I wasted another month trying to find out what was contaminated. Then I went out and got drunk - it helped. At the time, I was working on sequencing ribosomal genes from (friendly, non-carnivorous) marine bacteria.

So, here is what general kind of knowledge is needed to understand the microbial forensics issue:

Bacillus anthracis is part of the larger Bacillus cereus group, which also includes Bacillus thuringiensis, which is an insect predator. (On one hand, BT is used by organic farmers in wet culture form as an insecticide; on the other, the toxin has been engineered into corn plants (Bt-Corn), where it is expressed inside the plant tissues - yuk!).

Bacillus anthracis itself is a new evolutionary species (maybe 10,000 years old) according to the genetic analysis that have been done. It has low genetic diversity and reproduces only by cloning inside animal hosts. It may have arisen along with animal husbandry (in stable muck, maybe). Unlike Bt toxin, anthrax toxin attacks mammalian white blood cells. The toxin allows the bacteria to proliferate without interference, followed by the death of the host from septic shock. The bacteria then turn themselves into sealed spores, drain out into the soil, and wait around (for many years) for the next hoofed mammal to come along and ingest them.

There are many different Bacillus strains, but due to low genetic diversity they were difficult to distinguish from one another using simple methods - but much effort was expended to meet that problem. Thus, there is now a good genetic map of the diversity of Bacillus anthracis, mostly created by people like Paul Keim and Northern Arizona and the folks at Craig Venter's TIGR institute (I recall when they published their first microbial genome - and now it only costs $1000!).

Once you have a good map of the diversity, it is possible to develop all kinds of tricky rapid tests that can assign a particular isolate or spore sample to a particular strain of anthrax - and that can be used to rapidly screen 1000's of samples.

That work was also done by a group from Northern Arizona Univ and TIGR, That is here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17093023 (2007)

A similar paper is here: http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/14/4/653.htm - Note that this paper does have a member of Ibis Biosciences on their publication, so it should be safe to assume that Ibis does have access to the latest anthrax-detection technology.

However, the only claim being made is that the team developed a rapid test that can selectively and rapidly identify the Ames strain of anthrax using a PCR (polymerase chain reaction, the basic workhorse of molecular biology these days) method.

The use of these SNPs coupled with real-time PCR allows specific and sensitive (<100 fg of template DNA) identification of the Ames strain.

There is no published literature that would indicate any greater degree of resolution is possible without doing whole-genome comparisons.

AS well, to verify that your rapid test didn't hit a false positive, you'd want to verify it. The entire 5 million base pair chromosome (and plasmids) of the letter spores were sequenced, and any target identified by the rapid test should also have been sequenced. Apparently, this wasn't done.

Since the details of what test the FBI used have not been revealed (for example, primer sequences used?), there is no way to judge their claimed results. "We got it - trust us" is what they are saying - but it sure seems fishy.

Let alone that this long after the initial attack, there are some serious chain-of-custody and contamination issues. The FBI shut down and searched Fort Detrick in 2004, for example - but my question is, did they ever shut down and search Dugway Proving Grounds or Battelle's West Jefferson Ohio site, or collect samples from there? And if not, why not?

Ike Solem