seanmcbride says:

There is nothing unbelievable about what is going on -- this is what a classical cover-up looks like.

I’m going to stick to the forensics issues, as they are more concrete. Speculation has to rely on some level of fact, right?

As far as we know, it was the 9/18 and 10/9 anthrax attacks. No letter was ever recovered in Florida, nor at CBS or ABC. There were NO mail contamination cases associated with the first round of anthrax terrorism, postmarked 9/18.

In the second round, there was widespread contamination of mail sorting centers (and this is probably where the Princeton NJ mailbox spores came from). Unlike the other letters, the Daschle Senate letter was immediately recognized when opened and went straight to Detrick for analysis. Within 48 hours, the FBI was seeking a second opinion on the anthrax powder’s potency, and they flew a sample to Battelle’s West Jefferson Ohio complex for analysis, where, infamously, they autoclaved it to sterilize it before their “analysis” - and began claiming it was not the high-tech prep that had been reported by Geisbert, Jahrling, etc. at Detrick.

So, there were apparently two forms of the powder, made with the same strain, and the second round was more lethal than the first. This implies that the terrorist was dissatisfied with the media response to the first round of letters, and used a more potent, top-secret military preparation for the second round. There is no way that Ivins could have done that. It also implies that a major media response (not murder) is what the terrorist(s) were after.

The other aspect of the forensics, the microbial genetics, immediately showed that all of the spores were from the same Ames strain, and all indications are that they were also clonally identical - meaning that if you sequenced the entire five million bases pairs of the anthrax that killed Bob Stevens, it would be identical, exactly, to the spores found in Princeton, Brentwood, NBC, etc.

The Ames strain is described in Van Ert, 2007: http://jcm.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/45/1/47

...the Ames strain was originally isolated from cattle in Jim Hogg County, Texas, in 1981. The isolation of two of these Ames relatives in 1997 and 2001 suggests the Ames lineage is endemic in this region.

If you went back and dug around in Texas, you might find an Ames relative, but not an exact match to what was sent in the letters. If you had some rapid test that you thought you could use to scan 1000’s of samples for the exact match, you’d want to verify it by doing whole genome sequencing, which is now cheap and available. Not done by the FBI.

USAMRIID distributed the Ames strain to only about five labs, although it could have moved on from there. If you put the two forensic approaches together, the spore preparation and the genetic strain, you suddenly are left with Dugway Utah or West Jefferson Ohio as the only two places with access to both.

Regarding the coverup:

I think what you are talking about is motive. Biowarfare defense contracts? Those might have been forthcoming regardless, after 9/11.

So, just to speculate, let’s imagine a scenario, just as unsupported as the Bruce Ivins story, which might have taken place: A day after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld and Cheney decide they need to raise the fear level in country, by launching a round of letter-borne anthrax attacks, using Rumsfeld’s contacts in the biodefense world. The biodefense people agree, lured on by the promise of a huge biodefense contracting expansion.

They decide to send the letters to Boca Raton Fl, near where Atta lived, and also to major media centers, to raise the fear level. However, they only write “take penicillin” on the letters, and they are largely ignored by the recipients in the post-911 atmosphere. The terrorists must have been watching and waiting all through the end of September - no response!

Then, with Congressional opposition looming, and the country filled with outrage and grief , but NOT fear - they decide to use their most potent anthrax preparation in the hopes of sparking a major response - which was very successful - indeed, it was TOO successful and killed a lot of people, and left all kinds of arrows pointing directly back to the source - not Iraq, but the U.S. biowarfare program operating out of Dugway and West Jefferson.

If this was the plan, then it failed because the preparation was far more sophisticated than anything ever made in Iraq - and the Ames strain was involved, which Iraq never had. This didn't keep the media from uncritically reporting that there was a link, however, nor did it keep Colin Powell from waving a simulated anthrax weapon around at the UN building.

In any case, what the anthrax attacks really did was raise the fear level across the country. Hijackers with knives are easy to thwart, but people with access to weaponized anthrax spores could launch a bio-Hiroshima if they had enough of the stuff.

Remarkably, our biodefense program itself (most likely some very small group within it) was the source of the first anthrax bioterror attack on U.S. soil.

Anthrax is really something out of the movie Alien - sits silent in spore form, incubates inside the host, and bursts out in horrific fashion - all happening at the microscopic level. It was sheer insanity to try something like this, and whoever did it is still at large.

Want to know who else is paying close attention to this? Every military and intelligence service on the planet, I would guess. Biological Arms Race, anyone?

... to dive in yet but I do hope you both continue this dialogue. -- L.W.M.

Not much more tonight, I just got back from the wedding reception. Damn, the Filipinos in the family are wild at these things.

I will fire off one more, but I am not really engaged much since he is just a Bushie. Perhaps tomorrow I'll go deeper.

This case is apparently closed with Dr. Ivins’s death. But until the F.B.I. discloses its scientific testing methods and data, many questions will remain unanswered. -Gerry Andrews

I posit that even when/if the FBI discloses many questions will still remain unanswered.