Source: The New York Times [edited] <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10andrews.html?ref=opinion>
8-12-08 On Wednesday [6 Aug 2008], the United States Justice Department revealed its evidence that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, on his own, committed the worst act of bioterrorism in the country's history. This 18-year veteran scientist of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., is accused of killing 5 people and sickening 17 others in the fall of 2001. Dr. Ivins died on 29 Jul 2008 of an apparent suicide without a chance to give his side of the story.
After reading the affidavits and listening to the Justice Department briefing, I was both disheartened and perplexed by the lack of physical evidence supporting a conviction. Dr. Ivins was a friend and colleague of mine for nearly 16 years. We worked together at Fort Detrick. He was a senior scientist, and I was, first, a bench scientist and, from 1999 to 2003, the chief of the bacteriology division.
The Justice Department has presented different types of evidence to support its argument that Dr. Ivins was the person who mailed anthrax to Tom Brokaw, Tom Daschle and others in September and October of 2001. Much of this evidence is outside the realm of science: Dr. Ivins's alleged fixation with a sorority; strange comments in excerpts from his e-mail messages; a connection to a Greendale school that might or might not explain the fictitious return address on anthrax mailings. I will not address these points beyond noting that they are highly circumstantial. As a scientist, however, I feel compelled to comment on what should have been the Federal Bureau of Investigation's strongest link between Dr. Ivins and the terrible crime: deadly anthrax spores. In the summary of its findings, the FBI states that investigators used 4 different genetic techniques to match the anthrax-laced attack letters to a unique DNA footprint of a single anthrax spore preparation in one flask that had been in Dr. Ivins's custody.
Sounds reasonable. Yet the investigators present no details on the scientific methods they used to make this match or how they employed them. That's a problem, because without such detail it is hard to tell if they specifically ruled out a similar match between the anthrax in the letters and anthrax preparations with the same DNA footprint kept at a number of other labs around the country. The basic methods of genetic analysis are well known. Why not provide enough detail about their procedure to enable other scientists to tell whether they could actually single out Dr. Ivins's spore preparation as the culprit?
The investigators fail to address another underlying problem with their anthrax match: that Dr. Ivins was an investigator in the case before he was a suspect. After the anthrax attack, Dr. Ivins himself worked directly with the evidence. The FBI asked Dr. Ivins to help them with the forensics in the case by analyzing the contents of suspicious letters. And he did so for years, until the authorities began to suspect that the anthrax spores used in the mailings might have originated from his lab.
Dr. Ivins, for instance, was asked to analyze the anthrax envelope that was sent to Mr. Daschle's office on 9 Oct 2001. When his team analyzed the powder, they found it to be a startlingly refined weapons-grade anthrax spore preparation, the likes of which had never been seen before by personnel at Fort Detrick.
It is extremely improbable that this type of preparation could ever have been produced at Fort Detrick, certainly not of the grade and quality found in that envelope.
But even leaving that aside, there are important questions left unanswered. 1st, isn't it possible that the manipulation of the contents of the anthrax letters in Dr. Ivins's laboratory might have contaminated the work environment enough to potentially jeopardize the integrity of subsequent samples taken from the lab? Might that perhaps explain why the anthrax powder used in the attacks was later found to have the same DNA footprint as the other anthrax preparations in Dr. Ivins's lab? At the very least, wouldn't this call his guilt into doubt?
It was as if a gun used in a murder was unintentionally returned to the scene of the crime several days after the murder. What are the legal implications of such a possibility? Wouldn't a court be especially cautious in considering evidence involving a weapon in such circumstances?
This case is apparently closed with Dr. Ivins's death. But until the FBI discloses its scientific testing methods and data, many questions will remain unanswered.
[Byline: Gerry Andrews] -- Communicated by: ProMED-mail
****** [2] Date: 10 Aug 2008 Source: The New York Times [edited]
When Perry Mikesell, a microbiologist in Ohio, came under suspicion as the anthrax attacker, he began drinking heavily, family members say, and soon died. After a doctor in New York drew the interest of the FBI, his marriage fell apart and his practice suffered, his lawyer says. And after 2 Pakistani brothers in Pennsylvania were briefly under scrutiny, they eventually had to leave the country to find work.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's path to Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who committed suicide late last month as federal officials moved closer to indicting him for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, was long and tortuous. Before the investigators settled on Dr. Ivins -- and his defenders still say the FBI hounded an innocent man to death -- they had focused on Steven J. Hatfill, another Army researcher, for several years. But along the way, scores of others -- terrorists, foreigners, academic researchers, biowarfare specialists and an elite group of Army scientists working behind high fences and barbed wire -- drew the interest of the investigators. For some of them the cost was high: lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships.
At the Army biodefense laboratory in Frederick, Md., where Dr. Ivins worked, the inquiry became a murder mystery, the cast composed of top scientists eyeing one another warily over vials of lethal pathogens. "It was not pleasant," recalled Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, a former official there. "There was a general sense of paranoia that they were going to get somebody no matter what."
Some critics fault the FBI's investigation as ignorant, incompetent and worse. Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who was a Princeton University physicist, said that the disclosures linking Dr. Ivins to the crime notwithstanding, the inquiry was "poorly handled" and "resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy."
The bureau's defenders, though, say it did what was necessary to track down a dangerous killer. "You do the best you can, and it's not always pretty," said Robert M. Blitzer, a former director of the FBI's section on domestic terrorism. "Here you have a bunch of people dead and several diminished, and you're charged with solving the crime. You try not to step on people's toes, but sometimes it happens."
Over 7 years, the anthrax investigators conducted nearly 100 searches and more than 9000 interviews in the most complex criminal case in bureau history. They hunted an attacker who, in September and October 2001, had mailed anthrax-laden envelopes that killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and threw the nation into a panic. Early on, with more zeal than solid information, agents turned on 3 Pakistani-born city officials in Chester, Pa. One, Dr. Irshad Shaikh, was the health commissioner; his brother, Dr. Masood Shaikh, ran the lead-abatement program. The 3rd, Asif Kazi, was then an accountant in the finance department. Mr. Kazi was sitting in his City Hall office one day in November 2001 when FBI agents burst in and began a barrage of questions. "It was really scary," Mr. Kazi recalled in an interview last week. "It was: 'What do you think of 9/11? What do know about anthrax?' "
Across town, an agent pointed a gun through an open window at Mr. Kazi's home while others knocked down the front door as his wife was cooking in the kitchen. At the Shaikh brothers' house, agents in bioprotection suits began hunting for germ-making equipment and carted away computers. None of the 3 men had ever worked with anthrax. But for days, they were on national television as footage of the searches ran on a video loop and news announcers wondered aloud if they were the killers. The men were cleared after it turned out that a disgruntled employee had sought revenge by calling in a bogus tip. But for all 3, trouble followed. The Shaikhs' path to citizenship was disrupted, their visas ran out and both had to find work abroad, Mr. Kazi said.
Mr. Kazi, already a citizen, was searched and interrogated for as long as 2 hours every time he traveled back from visiting his brother in Canada. Only about a year ago was his name removed from a watch list, allowing him to travel freely. When Mr. Kazi heard that Dr. Ivins was said to be the culprit in the attacks, he had only one request. "We'd just like our names cleared," Mr. Kazi said. "There's no problem for people who know us. But out in the community, someone might still think, 'Maybe these guys were guilty.'"
In late 2001, agents discovered that the germ used in the attacks was not foreign in origin but a domestic strain. That prompted the FBI to focus mainly on scientists inside the United States. Casting a wide net, the bureau sent a letter to the 30 000 members of the American Society for Microbiology. "It is very likely," it said, "that one or more of you know" the attacker.
The bureau began looking at biodefense insiders like Mr. Mikesell, an anthrax specialist who had worked in the 1980s and 1990s with Dr. Ivins at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Frederick. He had then joined Battelle, a military contractor in Columbus, Ohio, who became deeply involved in secret federal research on biological weapons. In 2002, Mr. Mikesell came under FBI scrutiny, officials familiar with the case said. He began drinking heavily -- a 5th of hard liquor a day toward the end, a family member said. "It was a shock that all of a sudden he's a raging alcoholic," recalled the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of family sensitivities. By late October 2002, Mr. Mikesell, 54, was dead, his short obituary in The Columbus Dispatch making no mention of his work with anthrax or the investigation. "He drank himself to death," the relative said.
Dr. Hatfill, who worked at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999, also drew the investigators' attention. He loved covert exploits and padded his resume, habits that intrigued F.B.I. agents and, not long after that, reporters. In June 2002, officials tipped off television stations that the bureau would search Dr. Hatfill's apartment, just outside the gates to Fort Detrick. Later, F.B.I. agents told the woman he was living with at the time that he was a murderer and warned that she could be charged as an accomplice if she failed to tell all. At a teary press conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill protested his innocence. For at least a year, F.B.I. surveillance teams followed him everywhere, and in one remarkable encounter, a car that was trailing him ran over his foot. (Dr. Hatfill, not the agent, was given a ticket.) But there was no arrest, and Dr. Hatfill, who said his career was ruined, fought back, filing a series of lawsuits, including against The New York Times. In June [2008], long after the hunt had been narrowed to Dr. Ivins, the government agreed to pay Dr. Hatfill USD 4.6 million. On Friday [8 Aug 2008], the Justice Department issued a statement exonerating him.
Another casualty was Kenneth M. Berry, an emergency room physician with a strong interest in bioterrorism threats. In August 2004, agents raided his colonial-style home and his former apartment in Wellsville, a village in western New York, as well as his parents' beach house on the Jersey Shore. In scenes replayed for days on local television stations, the authorities cordoned off streets as agents in protective suits emerged from the dwellings with computers and bags of papers, mail and books. "He was devastated," Clifford E. Lazzaro, Dr. Berry's lawyer at the time, said in an interview. "They destroyed his marriage and destroyed him professionally for a time."
By 2005, thanks to new genetic testing, the F.B.I. had traced the anthrax in the letters to a single flask at Fort Detrick. Dr. Ivins had created and controlled the batch of deadly germs. But more than 100 scientists potentially had access to the pathogens.
For decades, the researchers of Fort Detrick had worked to build defenses against deadly germs used in war, mainly by creating new vaccines. They considered themselves patriots. In the early days of the anthrax investigation, the experts -- including Dr. Ivins -- threw themselves into helping the F.B.I., working around the clock.
Increasingly, though, the scientists found themselves viewed as potential culprits in the nation's worst case of bioterrorism.
Dr. Adamovicz, the former Fort Detrick official, said the bacteriological division, which eventually had about 100 people including technicians and assistants, was like a family. But the growing air of mutual suspicion caused conversations to become stilted, even as some scientists became increasingly agitated and isolated from friends and colleagues. "It became a game to talk in platitudes without mentioning the specifics," Dr. Adamovicz said. "You had to."
A least a dozen members of the division eventually were called to testify before a grand jury. "We were unclear on whether we were all suspects or whether there were specific suspects," Dr. Adamovicz recalled. The air of growing distrust ended some relationships. At one point, Dr. Ivins was advised by his lawyer to stop speaking with Henry S. Heine, an anthrax colleague. Dr. Ivins was led to believe that Dr. Heine might have raised questions about him. "They implied that Hank was pointing the finger at him," recalled W. Russell Byrne, a retired Army doctor who once supervised Dr. Ivins. "They told Bruce that 'Hank Heine is not your friend.' Then Bruce's lawyer told him not to talk to Hank anymore."
And even Dr. Ivins, according to court documents, began pointing his finger at specific colleagues as suspects.
Dr. Byrne, who did not know of Dr. Ivins's history of deep psychological problems that was disclosed by federal officials last week, said he could see signs of the growing stress Dr. Ivins was under as the investigation seemed to focus on him. One day, in March 2008, he showed up for a Sunday church service with a black eye. "The F.B.I. been roughing you up?" Dr. Byrne recalled joking.
Last month, Dr. Ivins told an Army colleague that his experience of F.B.I. pressure was similar to what Mr. Mikesell went through. "Perry drank himself to death," the colleague recalled Dr. Ivins as saying some 2 weeks before he killed himself.
Federal officials say they are confident Dr. Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks, even if his suicide means their case will not be proved in court. And they reject criticism from lawmakers and others about the conduct of the investigation and express no regret about those who were caught up in it. The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, in his 1st public comments since the presentation of the evidence against Dr. Ivins on Wednesday, said Friday that he was proud of the inquiry. "I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation," he told reporters. It is erroneous, he added, "to say there were mistakes."
[Byline: William J. Broad and Scott Shane, Eric Lipton contributed reporting]
-- Communicated by: ProMED-mail
The comment from previous post (06) remains relevant: [One of the advantages of living in a working democracy is that these questions can be asked and the subject openly discussed, even as a government agency insists it did nothing wrong. - Mod MHJ]
Source: BWPP Website [edited] <http://www.bwpp.org//cgi-bin/forum/post_download.pl?pid=13981>
On 6 Aug 2008 the Department of Justice held a press conference on the Amerithrax investigation at which the United States District Attorney who led the event described the evidence that had led them to conclude that Bruce Ivins, alone, was responsible for the anthrax attacks [1]. The District Attorney agreed that much of that evidence is circumstantial, but he presented one critical hard fact that has recently emerged thanks to rapid and remarkable scientific advances: the anthrax in the letters can be traced to a single flask of spores with unique properties, created and maintained by Dr. Ivins at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). "This means that the spores used in the attacks were taken from that specific flask, regrown, purified, dried and loaded into the letters," said the District Attorney.
There are, however, 2 major gaps in the evidence he laid out, aside from the uncertainty resulting from the inability of the FBI to bring an indictment and prosecute the case because of the death of the suspect.
First is the question of access to the stock of spores in the flask, which was available to at least 10 scientific colleagues of Dr. Ivins' at USAMRIID and possibly to quite a few more, including visitors from other institutions and workers at laboratories in Ohio and New Mexico that had received samples from the USAMRIID flask [2]. Laxity about access, transfers and record-keeping on biological agents was once commonplace at USAMRIID [3].
The 2nd major gap is the question of how the letter spores had been processed. Colleagues have expressed doubt that Ivins had the technical capability to make the letter anthrax [4]. The FBI has only said that Dr. Ivins had access to a sophisticated lyophilizer for drying spores [5]. The FBI's implicit assumption is that the letter anthrax consisted simply of dry spores with no additives or further treatment.
The FBI dealt with the issue of the letter spores' processing in an article in the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, submitted in April 2006 and published in the journal's August 2006 issue [6]. The article implied that the anthrax in the letters was a simple spore preparation requiring no special expertise or access. A follow-up article in the Washington Post [7] -- based on the scientific article and interviews with FBI officials, "law enforcement authorities" and "scientists"-- brought this impression to public notice [8]. Specifically, questions were raised about whether the anthrax in the Senate letters of 2001 was "weaponized" and whether special knowledge and expertise were required to prepare it. If these earlier surmises were wrong, then -- as the Washington Post noted -- the number of possible persons of interest in the case would expand. By the end of 2006, the notion that the anthrax mailer needed no special knowledge had become the accepted wisdom.
What the Washington Post called "the most expansive public comment on the nature of the powder [in the anthrax letters] by any FBI official" is contained in just one paragraph (reprinted and discussed here in the Annex below) from the Discussion section of the journal article authored by Douglas J. Beecher of the FBI laboratory in Quantico, VA. The article, which is entitled "Forensic application of microbiological culture analysis to identify mail intentionally contaminated with _Bacillus anthracis_ spores," is otherwise a simple technical description of the procedures used to search bags of Congressional mail for possible additional anthrax letters, after a letter containing anthrax had been received by Senator Daschle's office. The article contains no data about the origin, preparation or composition of the anthrax in the Senate letters. A military analyst who works with the FBI commented that the paragraph in question "clearly had nothing to do with the content of the article" [9].
Dr. Beecher refused to comment on the article, referring the Press to the FBI office leading the anthrax investigation; that office also refused comment and would not allow Beecher to be interviewed [10]. However, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, L. Nicholas Ornston, told Chemical and Engineering News that "the statement should have had a reference; an unsupported sentence being cited as fact is uncomfortable to me. Any statement in a scientific article should be supported by a reference or by documentation" [11].
Subsequently, a Letter to the Editor [12] appeared in the August 2007 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, one year after the Beecher article. The letter, entitled "Unsupported Conclusions on the _Bacillus anthracis_ Spores," was signed by Dr. Kay A. Mereish, Chief of Biological Planning and Operations at the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), the unit that inspected Iraq for biological weapons in 2002-2003. The letter had been submitted on 14 Dec 2006. After hearing nothing from the journal for 3 months, Dr. Mereish questioned the Editor of the journal, who wrote back that he had been waiting for Beecher, the author of the FBI's article, to provide a response. It is journal policy to print the author's response to any criticism received. Although the Editor said that he expected to have the matter finalized in a few more days, publication of the letter was further delayed by months. The Editor finally gave up and decided to publish the letter alone, writing Mereish that Beecher did not provide a response [13].
Mereish's Letter to the Editor said that "the data supplied in the [Beecher] paper could not be used as evidence for judging the quality of the spores or to support or dismiss conceptions about the presence or absence of spore additives or about the production engineering used to prepare the spores. Furthermore, ...[the data presented] could not be used for extrapolation of ideas concerning spore quality or the method of production."
Mereish then cited a knowledgeable source who said that, contrary to the implication in Beecher's article, the letter anthrax did contain an additive. "In a meeting I attended in September 2006," she wrote, "a presentation was made by a scientist who had worked on samples of anthrax collected from letters involved in the same incident [as that studied by Beecher] in October 2001; that scientist described the anthrax spore as uncoated but said that it contained an additive that affected the spore's electrical charges (D. Small, CBRN Counter-Proliferation and Response, Paris, France, 18-20 Sep 2006; organized by SMi [<http://www.smi-online.co.uk>])"
[14]. Dr. Mereish said the anthrax work referred to at the meeting was done under government contract [15].
During the 7 years since the anthrax attacks, diametrically opposing descriptions of almost every aspect of the letter anthrax have at one time or another been attributed directly or indirectly to FBI investigators, along with correspondingly discordant assessments of the necessary qualifications of the perpetrator. However, the FBI maintains that they "have never been under any misconceptions about the character of the anthrax used in the attacks. ... While there may have been erroneous media reports about the character of the 2001 anthrax, the FBI's investigation has never been guided by such reports" [16]. This is probably a true statement. It would not be in the national interest to publicize a full and accurate description of what was obviously an anthrax preparation that was highly effective as a weapon. Accordingly, efforts to cover up some early slips that were made to the media have been apparent to the observant eye. For example, on 29 Oct 2001, Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, Commander of Fort Detrick (who retired soon thereafter), stated that "there is silica in the samples" [17]. He testified 2 days later that USAMRIID had at first reported to the FBI that the Daschle letter anthrax had some attributes consistent with "weaponized" anthrax; but then "revisited the term 'weaponized' and decided the terms 'professionally done' and 'energetic' as more appropriate descriptions in lieu of any real familiarity with weaponized materials" [18].
The chief FBI scientist, Dwight Adams, briefed Senators Daschle and Leahy in late 2002, telling them that the letter anthrax contained no additives [19]. Some years later, Adams admitted in a sworn deposition on 11 Jan 2006 that scientific information obtained by the FBI about the letter anthrax is too sensitive to reveal to either the public or the Senate, Congress or their staff [20].
Like Adams' 2002 briefing, the FBI's scientific article also seems to imply that the letter anthrax was produced without using additives or sophisticated engineering (i.e., the anthrax was not "weaponized") but was, instead, a simple spore preparation. The Washington Post article about the FBI's scientific publication defined "weaponized" to mean "specially treated or processed to allow them to disperse more easily" [21]. It is well-established that the anthrax spores in the letters dispersed very easily, contaminating the AMI building in Florida and the Senate Hart office building when the letters were opened [22], and passing through the pores of the paper envelopes to contaminate postal buildings where the letters were handled. As Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pointed out early on, "you can call it [the letter anthrax] whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent" [23].
Whether a highly efficient bioterrorist agent could be made without special knowledge and expertise is questionable and, hopefully, wrong. In November 2002, the FBI asked the DOD laboratory at Dugway to try to "reverse engineer" the mailed anthrax on the basis of various hypotheses [24]. When the work was complete Michael Mason, then the director of the FBI's anthrax investigation, acknowledged that the effort to reverse engineer the letter anthrax had failed, although it had helped investigators "narrow" some aspects of the investigation and convinced them that the culprit had special expertise [25].
Dugway, the Army laboratory that conducted the reverse engineering experiments, is the only US laboratory known to have "weaponized" anthrax [26]. Dugway also made the bacterial spore preparation that was given to the Canadian military for use as an anthrax simulant to demonstrate the consequences of opening an envelope containing anthrax [27]. An outside investigator has written that the preparation given Canada contained an unidentified additive and a type of silica, and had been additionally treated or processed in some (presumably classified) way at Dugway [28].
In April 2002, it was reported that an unusual chemical, unlike any chemicals that had been used by the US or other countries in biological weapons, was found in the letter anthrax, according to "law enforcement officials" [29] and "a high-ranking government official" [30]. The unusual chemical may be "polymerized glass," based on information obtained in 2003 from "biowarfare specialists who work for the governments of 2 NATO countries," who had been briefed on this by "US intelligence officers" [31]. The sources "said they had never heard of polymerized glass before" [32]. On 5 Aug 2008, Richard Spertzel, the former head of the biological weapons section of UNSCOM from 1994-99 and a member of the Iraq Survey Group, wrote that: "Apparently, the spores were coated with a polyglass, which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. That's what was briefed (according to one of my former weapons inspectors at the United Nations Special Commission) by the FBI to the German Foreign Ministry at the time" [33].
The available evidence suggests that some form of sophisticated treatment or processing requiring special knowledge and expertise was necessary to make the highly dispersible anthrax spores in the letters. If so, the letter anthrax was "weaponized," according to the Washington Post's definition (specially treated or processed for dispersion).
The letter anthrax did prove to be a potent weapon. If it was comprised simply of spores, the Army's Dugway laboratory would surely have been able to prove that by producing an identical sample. If they had done so, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been anxious to make that information public, for the edification of future terrorists. The FBI's scientific paper is therefore more likely to be a rollback effort than a change of opinion [34].
Footnotes
1: Transcript of the Amerithrax Investigation Press Conference, <http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/August/08-opa-697.html>
2: New York Times, "Pressure Grows for F.B.I. to Show Anthrax Evidence," August 4, 2008.
3: Washington Post, "'No One Asked Questions': Scientists Recount U.S. Biodefense Labs' Security Lapses," February 19, 2002; Hartford Courant, "Anthrax Easy to Get Out of Lab: Security Was Based on Trust in Scientists," December 20, 2001.
4: Washington Post, "Anthrax Suspect Known for Quiet Research, Odd Behavior," August 1, 2008.
5: Transcript of the Amerithrax Investigation Press Conference, and appended documents (see footnote 1). Although a lyophilizer was not needed for preparing samples for vaccine testing, it was used in another project Ivins had conducted for DARPA (Washington Post, "Anthrax Dryer a Key To Probe: Suspect Borrowed Device From Lab," August 5, 2008).
6: Douglas J. Beecher, "Forensic application of microbiological culture analysis to identify mail intentionally contaminated with Bacillus anthracis spores," Applied and Environmental Microbiology 72 5304, August 2006.
7: Washington Post, "FBI is Casting a Wider Net in Anthrax Attacks," September 25, 2006.
8: The Washington Post article was picked up and echoed by news media around the country, coming as it did at the fifth anniversary of the anthrax letters: see, for example, Washington Times, "FBI hit for anthrax 'dead-ends'", October 25, 2006; International Herald Tribune (AP), "FBI denies it misunderstood the quality of the anthrax used in 2001 attacks in US," September 28, 2006; South Florida Sun-Sentinel, years after anthrax attacks, are we any safer? Terrorist attacks remain a mystery," October 1, 2006; Frederick News-Post, "5 years later, and few answers in anthrax probe," October 4, 2006; Palm Beach Post, "Anthrax attacks fodder for rumors," October 5, 2006.
9: Chemical and Engineering News, "Anthrax Sleuthing: Science aids a nettlesome FBI criminal probe," December 4, 2006.
10: Hartford Courant, "New Anthrax Theory Offered: FBI Scientist Says Little Expertise Needed," September 22, 2006;Washington Post, September 25, 2006, op.cit.; New York Times, "Anthrax Not Weapons Grade, Official Says," September 26, 2006.
11: Chemical and Engineering News, December 4, 2006, op.cit.
12: K. Mereish, Letter to the Editor: "Unsupported Conclusions on the Bacillus anthracis Spores," Applied and Environmental Microbiology 73 5074, August 2007. <http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/73/15/5074>.
13: Interview of Dr. Kay Mereish about publication of her Letter to the Editor of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
14: K. Mereish, Applied and Environmental Microbiology 73 5074, August 2007, op. cit.
15: Interview of Dr. Kay Mereish about her Letter to the Editor.
16: Assistant FBI Director Eleni P. Kalish, letter to Congressman Rush Holt, September 28, 2006, quoted in Rep. Rush Holt's letter to S. Reyes, Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, March 2, 2007, and also in an AP article in the International Herald Tribune, "FBI denies it misunderstood the quality of anthrax used in 2001 attacks in US," September 28, 2006.
17: Major General John S. Parker, Commander of Fort Detrick and of the US Military Research and Materiel Command, transcript of White House Press Briefing by Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge et al, 11:52 am EST, October 29, 2001; San Francisco Chronicle, "Silica grains detected in anthrax letter are tiny clues," October 30, 2001. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) carried out and reported on the analysis (The AFIP Letter, August/October 2002 (<http://www.afip.org/cgi-bin/whatsnew.cgi/current.html article #115>); see also Washington Post, "A Terrorist's Fragile Footprint: Letter's Anthrax Spores Pose Many Obstacles to Analysis," November 29, 2001). There was no mistaking the presence of silicon, said the Chief of AFIP's Chemical Pathology Division (quoted in G. Matsumoto, Science, "Anthrax Powder: State of the Art?," November 28, 2003).
18: Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, testimony to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and the Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Service, "Terrorism Through the Mail: Protecting the Postal Workers and the Public," October 31, 2001.
19: Information about the briefing was later reported by Matsumoto, who obtained it from "sources on Capitol Hill" (Matsumoto, Science, November 28, 2003, op. cit.). This may have been the leak from "Congressional sources" referred to by the Assistant Director of the FBI's Office of Congressional Affairs, in refusing to provide a classified briefing to Congress on the progress of the anthrax investigation (letter from Eleni P. Kalisch to Rep. Rush Holt, September 28, 2006, quoted in Rep. Holt's letter to S. Reyes, Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, March 2, 2007 (<http://holt.house.gov/pdf/hearing_Request_Letters.pdf>). That the Matsumoto Science article referenced above was of concern to the FBI is clear from the deposition of FBI Lead Investigator Richard Lambert in the Hatfill vs Ashcroft, DOJ, FBI et al. lawsuit on August 3, 2005 (Exhibit A in document 121 of the Docket, accessible at <http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/Docket.html>).
20: Dwight E. Adams, Deposition made in the Hatfill vs Ashcroft et al. lawsuit, under questioning by Hatfill's lawyer Thomas Connolly, January 11, 2006 (<http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/Update-History2006.html>, scroll down to questioning of Adams). The full name of the lawsuit is Hatfill vs John Ashcroft, US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Timothy Beres [DOJ employee], Daryl Darnell [DOJ employee], Van Harp [FBI supervisory Special Agent], and All Unknown Agents/Employees, Case # 1:03-cv-01793-RBW, filed 8/26/2003 in US District Court, District of Columbia, assigned to Judge Reggie B. Walton. The Docket and some documents can be accessed at <http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/Docket.html>.
21: Washington Post, September 26, 2007, op. cit.
22: The letters contained only a minute amount of anthrax (0.871 grams in the Leahy letter): New York Times, "Anthrax Sent Through Mail Gained Potency by the Letter," May 7, 2002.
23: New York Times, "More Checked for Anthrax; US Officials Acknowledge Underestimating Mail Risks," October 25, 2001.
24: New York Times, "Threats and Responses: Bioterrorism; Director says FBI Is Trying To Recreate the Deadly Anthrax, November 2, 2002.
25: USA Today, "FBI fails to re-create anthrax production," September 29, 2003. Previously, in April 2003, after some of the "reverse engineering" trials had taken place, it had been reported (according to "government sources") that a spore preparation without a "coating," made using simple methods, inexpensive equipment and limited expertise, had matched the letter anthrax "closely enough," but it was not of the same high purity and small particle size (Baltimore Sun, "Tests point to domestic source behind anthrax letter attacks: Army reproductions hurt theories of foreign culprit," April 11, 2003).
26: Baltimore Sun, "Army confirms making anthrax in recent years: Military laboratory in Utah says powder is all accounted for," December 13, 2001; New York Times, "US Recently Produced Anthrax in a Highly Lethal Powder Form," December 13, 2001.
27: The Canadian study was conducted early in 2001 and was made known to US military and some other Federal officials months before the anthrax attacks occurred: Defense Research Establishment Suffield (Canada), Risk Assessment of Anthrax Threat Letters, Technical Report DRES TR-2001-048, September 2001; Washington Post, "Agency With Most Need Didn't Get Anthrax Data: CDC Unaware of Canadian Study Before Attacks," February 11, 2002.
28: G. Matsumoto, Science, November 28, 2003, op. cit.
29: Washington Post, "Powder Used in Anthrax Attacks 'Was Not Routine,'" April 9, 2002.
30: CNN.com, "Official: Unusual coating in anthrax mailings," posted 7:55 am EDT, April 11, 2002.
31: G. Matsumoto, Science, November 28, 2003, op. cit. "Polymerized glass" is a silane or siloxane compound. Matsumoto claims to have information that both polymerized glass and silica are present in the letter anthrax.
32: Ibid.
33: Richard Spertzel, "Bruce Ivins Wasn't the Anthrax Culprit," Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2008.
34: On September 18, 2006, Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, said about the Amerithrax investigation: "There are times that we may know a lot about a crime or an event that occurred, but we may not have the admissible evidence that we need to prove it in court" (CBS News, "Anthrax Investigation a Cold Case?," September 18, 2006).
ANNEX
The paragraph in the FBI's scientific paper of August 2006 that has drawn notice is the following:
"Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents [reference given here by Beecher to an article by Matsumoto [35]]. However, a widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production. This idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone [5 references]. The persistent credence given to this impression fosters erroneous preconceptions, which may misguide research and preparedness efforts and generally detract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations."
When examined closely, the wording of this paragraph can be seen to be amenable to multiple interpretations, unlike the straightforward wording of the rest of the article. Some questions concerning the interpretation of the paragraph are discussed below:
1st sentence in the paragraph: There are probably very few individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders. Not all of them agreed, prior to the DOJ's Press Conference of 7 Aug 2008, that the powders were comprised simply of spores. Do they now?
2nd sentence: Its meaning is contingent upon what is meant by the modifying phrase "supposedly akin to military production." Does it mean that it is a misconception to suppose that the letter spores were produced by the methods used in the old US biological weapons program before it was abolished in 1969, or in the Soviet program?
Or does the phrase include methods used currently for risk assessment in the US biodefense program (what if the letter spores were a "diabolical advance in biological weapons technology," a belief Matsumoto (op. cit.) attributed to an FBI faction)? In at least one sense, the Senate anthrax is known to have been produced with more sophisticated engineering than that used in US military production, for which the spores were milled [36].
3rd Sentence: It is true that the references given (except for the Matsumoto paper (op. cit.), which is referenced again in the critical paragraph) simply assume, without discussion, that the letter anthrax was a sophisticated preparation and therefore more dangerous than spores alone. But the FBI article does not show that this assumption is wrong.
4th sentence: This sentence simply says that it would be erroneous to assume, when developing safety and security precautions, that simple spore preparations are not dangerous. Following the 4th sentence there is a paragraph that gives examples, with references, of the hazards of ultra-simple dried microbial cultures and infected mouse tissue (none of which, in fact, contained anthrax).
Annex Footnotes
35: G. Matsumoto, "Anthrax Powder: State of the Art?" Science, November 28, 2003. This article actually says that there are 2 opposing schools of thought at the FBI regarding the sophistication of the letter anthrax, and goes on to argue in detail that the spore preparation in the Senate letters was NOT comprised simply of spores but was complex and included additives.
36: Washington Post, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted: Attacks Not Likely Work of 1 Person, Experts Say," October 28, 2002; G. Matsumoto, November 28, 2003, op. cit.). Milling breaks some of the spores, destroying their infectivity. It has been known since December 2001 that the Daschle anthrax was not milled, because it did not contain significant debris from broken spores (Washington Post, "A Terrorist's Fragile Footprint: Letter's Anthrax Spores Pose Many Obstacles to Analysis," November 29, 2001; Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, testimony to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and the Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Service, "Terrorism Through the Mail: Protecting the Postal Workers and the Public," October 31, 2001; Dr. Ken Alibek, verbal testimony before the House International Relations Committee, December 5, 2001).
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