Posted on 08/07/2008 11:49:06 AM PDT by Shermy
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday outlined a pattern of bizarre and deceptive conduct by Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist who killed himself last week, presenting a sweeping but circumstantial case that he was solely responsible for mailing the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001.
After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, officials of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department declared that the case had been solved. Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Lawyers for Dr. Ivins reasserted their late client’s innocence and criticized the government for presenting what they called “heaps of innuendo” that failed to link him directly to the crime and would never have to be tested in court. “It was an explanation of why Bruce Ivins was a suspect,” said Paul F. Kemp, who represented the scientist for more than a year before his death on July 29 at age 62. “But there’s a total absence of proof that he committed this crime.”
The conflicting views of Dr. Ivins emerged in a day of emotional crosscurrents. At a morning memorial service at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., weeping Army scientists praised Dr. Ivins as a beloved colleague “known for his patience and enthusiasm for science,” as a written program put it. At the same time, at F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and bureau officials were explaining to survivors of the anthrax attacks and relatives of the five people who died why they believe Dr. Ivins was a mass murderer.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Is that what you're trying to tell us gene?!
My own opinion starts with the flow of postal MTE (mail transport equipment, i.e. trays and sacks) through the processing systems in contaminated post offices BEFORE the attack was discovered.
It took several days for people to get sick so during that period thousands of pieces of equipment were contaminated.
One type of equipment, the "flat tray" (used for large letters and small parcels), is used in the bottom of traditional letter mail collection boxes. You drop in your letters and they fall into the tray inside. The collection employee comes around and simply swaps out the full tray with an empty one in seconds.
So, Franklin facility is contaminated, thousands of trays full of contaminated mail are moved out into their service area, an empty contaminated tray is placed in the bottom of a collection box in Princeton, the contamination is expressed out of the tray as the tray is filled, and even puffs out and contaminates the outside of the box.
That's the fundamental item the FBI bases 100% of its case on. They use that contamined piece of equipment to have Ivins running about the countryside, chasing down a sorority, and doing all this on a certain date where he is also working a couple of hours extra at night.
It is not possible to prove that a collection box within 500 miles of the Franklin facility or the DC post office was the point of mailing ~ since so many of them were "contaminated".
My conclusion is the FBI has come up with this story to cover-up the fact that postal executives actually conspired to suppress public knowledge of how widespread MTE contamination really was. That is, a felony was commited, and the FBI is flipping that into a reason why they could go after Dr. Ivins.
None of these pukes are to be trusted.
Tylenol with codeine is usually a long, long OD of several days with the liver and kidneys going into failure.
Muwiyah-with all due respect, I reviewed your tray scenario a long time ago,and couldn’t make it work : well thought-out as it was.
I still can’t make it fit. If we find it hard to believe Ivins drove to NJ to post the deadly letters,how much harder is it to believe he went to Florida to do the same ?
Ironically, the least explainable of the deaths-that of Kathy Nguyen-becomes less mystifying if she actually helped him distribute anthrax for religious reasons.
Ivins’ (alleged) motive was the punishment of notable Catholics who had taken a public stance favoring abortion.
If Nguyen- a devout Catholic had decided to join him in this “crusade” , she MIGHT have smuggled a small quantity of anthrax into a medical or nursing facility, and found some way to administer it to a patient we know nothing about(because the death was attributed to pneumonia or other natural causes.) This hypothetical “Patient X” may also have been a Catholic abortion supporter.
This would explain how Ms Nguyen became fatally contaminated herself...BUT...this is pure speculation,with absolutely nothing to support it; so, as far as I’m concerned, I’m closing my “file” for good.
She's going to have a large "flat tray" with her. She will walk over to the collection box and open it with a key. She opens the door. There's a "flat tray" inside. She pulls it out and places it on the ground. She then puts the empty tray inside and closes the door, which she then locks. She will then stand up, pick up the tray she's just removed from the box and take it inside the postal facility where that mail will be sent on to a mail processing activity ~ either there or some other facility.
This activity takes place thousands of times a day.
If the clerk has a tray contaminated with anthrax and she places it inside the collection box there's a very good chance the anthrax spores will be bounced out of the tray onto the walls, and into the opening at the top whenever anyone drops mail inside.
That's how that works. I can't imagine how you could screw it up.
Now, about Ivins going to Florida, he didn't have to. Someone else did the job in Florida!
At the time of that event I read every little piece of news about her activities watching for sign of contact with some MTE.
As I recall she had such contact.
BTW, the large "flat trays" are popular for home use. No doubt the general public continued to steal them at the normal rate during the period when thousands of them were contaminated. They're sitting there in the garage, or under the desk in the "study", laden with anthrax spores just waiting for a chance to kill again!
Whenever I visit someone's home and see one I notify them that they should call the Inspection Service an ask that they come and retrieve the tray lest it be contaminated with anthrax. I then back away slowly, get in my car, and get outta' there.
Also say the Greenwald stuff. Good stuff. He's moving away from the knee jerk "ABC and Bentonite got us into war" stuff too.
http://www.eveningsun.com/ci_10157273
Fairfield resident recalls time at Fort Detrick; worked with suspected anthrax terrorist
Ten years have passed since Fairfield resident Luann Battersby crossed paths as a coworker with a man the government said was the lone person responsible for deadly anthrax attacks, but Battersby said she never would have suspected him.
Battersby worked for eight years as a microbiologist for the government at Fort Detrick in Frederick County, Md., in the same department as Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist who committed suicide last month amid an FBI investigation. The Justice Department said Wednesday Ivins was the “only person responsible” for anthrax attacks that killed five people in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The FBI spoke to Battersby in 2001 about the situation, she said, and the incident involved a polygraph. The field agents she dealt with were “reasonable,” Battersby said.
“They knew I wasn’t a reasonable suspect,” she said. “But then again, I wouldn’t have suspected Bruce (Ivins) to be a reasonable suspect.”
....Senate Sergeant at Arms Terence Gainer attended Wednesday’s briefing for the victims’ families and said FBI agents told the group there was no evidence anyone else was involved in the attacks.
Battersby described Ivins as “more bottled up,” which she said was not unusual for a scientist. He was weird, she said, but “not any weirder than a typical scientist.”
“He was not the weirdest by far I worked with down there,” Battersby said.
Battersby would be surprised at anyone committing suicide, she said, but she never saw Ivins as a “strong person.”
“I would say he was milquetoast,” Battersby said. “The fact that he was a terrorist doesn’t really square with my opinion with who he was.”
...”I’m amazed at all this,” Battersby said. “I assume there’s evidence and that it’s true, but I certainly never would have suspected (Ivins).”
Battersby and Ivins worked in the same division but in different parts of the Fort Detrick complex: Battersby in bacteriology, doing work with immunology, and Ivins in biocontainment. Their similar employment meant Battersby and Ivins endured the same dreary Friday-afternoon meetings, Battersby said. She knew Ivins a little professionally, seeing him in the lab from time to time, but did not know much about his personal life.
“I thought he was completely harmless, if you ask me,” Battersby said of Ivins. “Maybe I didn’t know him that well.”
...”Seven years is a long time to do DNA fingerprinting to figure this out,” Battersby said. “It seems like an awful long time.”
...”Any competent microbiologist can grow up a culture of anthrax,” she said. “It’s not tough. Weaponizing it is a different issue.”
Battersby said she was amazed the person behind the anthrax attacks was someone who worked there. Instead, she said, she thought it was someone who had traveled to the United States. And while there were foreigners working at Fort Detrick, she said, she does not remember any working for the anthrax program.
...While civilians like Battersby work at Fort Detrick, the site has military management, she said. And some people, such as those who want to advance their careers, have stayed quiet about their experience there, according to Battersby.
But the few people not worried about talking about their experience with the government should talk, she said.
“It’s painful to me on a whole bunch of levels,” Battersby said. “I feel like I should tell my story because I know I can.”
“but the points she expressed in this story didn’t come up during the interview.”
wow.
>>I’d start investigating them.
It’s like in early 2002 when there was lots of discussion here about the incompetence, culpability or downright ignorance in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit of the FBI.
Dave Frasca was the name that comes to mind.
And heck, the administration, President Bush, has refused to allow Agent Wright to publish his account of the Saudi investigations.
So, lots more under the sheets we can only speculate about.
Meryl Nass’ 13 point criticism about the case against Ivins.
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2008/08/conclusive-evidence-of-means-motive-and.html
Blog on Aug. 5. documenting how the story seems thin, and changing at the time.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6247
(Maryland)Firms vie for anthrax pacts
Annapolis, Rockville companies seeking share of millions of vaccine doses
By Frank D. Roylance | Sun reporter August 11, 2008
Drug companies based in Annapolis and Rockville are battling for potentially lucrative federal contracts to supply at least 25 million doses of new, improved anthrax vaccine to protect Americans against another bioterror attack like the one in 2001.
PharmAthene Inc. of Annapolis, which is also developing drugs to protect against chemical nerve agents and the plague bacterium, says it could begin delivering its SparVax vaccine to the Strategic National Stockpile as early as 2012.
In Rockville, Emergent BioSolutions Inc. announced that it, too, had a recombinant anthrax vaccine in development.
Both companies filed proposals July 31 in response to a request from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a more modern, bioengineered vaccine to replace the current vaccine, BioThrax, made by Emergent.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services said contract awards could come as early as this fall.
"This will not be a cakewalk for us. We have very strong competitors," said David P. Wright, PharmAthene's president and CEO. "But I believe, with the caliber of the staff we have ... that we will be successful at the end of the day in producing for this country the vaccine we need."
Emergent's chairman and CEO, Fuad El-Hibri, said in announcing its participation, "We are confident that our ... vaccine is a leading candidate to be selected as an advanced ... anthrax vaccine. Our company is proud of our proven track record of delivering critical biodefense countermeasures to the U.S. government."
The government is still beefing up its biodefenses in the wake of the 2001 letter attacks that prosecutors say were launched by Bruce E. Ivins, a federal microbiologist who killed himself last month as officials prepared to indict him.
The push is now on to replace BioThrax, which requires six doses over 18 months to achieve immunity and has a history of side effects and shelf-life problems. Emergent said almost 2 million U.S. military personnel have received the vaccine.
-snip-
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20080810_DNA_is_just_anthrax_clue__not_clincher.html
DNA is just anthrax clue, not clincher...
...At first, prosecutors seemed to suggest that forensic DNA had solved the case. U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said science had enabled the government to link the anthrax spores in the 2001 attack to a flask “created and solely maintained by Dr. Ivins” in his federal lab.
But at least eight other anthrax samples gathered from researchers in the investigation carried the same genetic signature as Ivins’ batch at Fort Detrick, Md., court documents say.
...”Anthrax spends the majority of time as a spore. That’s why we don’t see diversity in the genome that we see in [other] organisms,” said Ted Hadfield, a biologist at the Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and former head of microbiology for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
As spores, anthrax bacteria can exist for years in suspended animation without undergoing the cell divisions that allow mutations to crop up.
With human DNA, investigators can connect an individual to a crime sample by examining repetitive areas called STRs, or short tandem repeats.
Experts liken these to little stutters in the code. Counting the number of times these pieces repeat distinguishes one person’s DNA from another’s.
Anthrax DNA has far fewer such stutters, scientists say, making it much harder to distinguish one sample from the next.
Until recently, it was hard even to divide anthrax into distinct strains.
In 2000, microbiologist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University published a landmark paper on repeating regions called VNTRs, or variable number tandem repeats, that occur in anthrax.
Keim, one of the country’s top genetics experts, declined to be interviewed, but in several scientific papers he described how he and colleagues developed a system of distinguishing anthrax strains using these VNTRs.
That was one tool the investigators had in 2001. It took them less than a month after the attacks to identify the spores as belonging to an anthrax strain called Ames.
But that still left them with an overwhelming number of potential suspects, since the Ames strain was stored in labs around the world.
The name comes from Ames, Iowa, where veterinarians at the National Animal Disease Center isolated it from sick cattle in 1981. Because this strain was seen as particularly deadly, it became the most common one for laboratory studies, and was used to test the anthrax vaccine given to military personnel.
In the 1980s, a Virginia company called American Type Culture Collection kept samples of Ames anthrax and sent them to labs around the world - including ones in Iraq, which the United States was helping at the time.
Faced with an enormous haystack and an elusive needle, the FBI investigators requested that every U.S. researcher with access to anthrax send in samples of all possible strains. They ended up with 1,000 samples, according to FBI documents released last week.
The one hope they had for solving the case came from the fact that anthrax DNA can occasionally develop single spelling errors called SNPs.
These errors occur in only about one in a million bacteria as they’re grown in culture, microbiologist Hadfield said. That could create tiny but recognizable differences among samples.
Finding those spelling errors isn’t easy, researchers say. Such a feat would likely require a complete reading of the genetic codes of various samples and comparing them.
In 2001, biologists had just completed the Human Genome Project, for which they sequenced a small sample of human DNA.
At that time, sequencing an organism’s entire genetic code would have taken $1 million and months, Hadfield said. But this technology has advanced rapidly, so now it takes just days and about $25,000.
“As we got better at sequencing, we got a better feel for what the SNPs were and where the occurred,” Hadfield said.
Investigators eventually found four such SNP-type mutations that distinguished bacteria used in the attacks from samples of the original Ames strain.
Those four mutations were found in only eight of the 1,000 samples under investigation. This subgroup was labeled RMR-1029.
According to the FBI, all the people with positive samples said they had obtained them from Ivins.
But the sample Ivins initially provided in 2002 tested negative for the four key mutations.
In 2004, the documents say, investigators entered Ivins’ lab and seized samples, including the “parent” flask that had allegedly supplied the other positive RMR-1029 samples.
The bacteria in that flask allegedly carried the four telltale mutations.
That analysis alone, however, doesn’t rule out researchers who worked with the eight samples.
...Richard Spertzel, a bioweapons expert who worked at the same army lab as Ivins, said the perpetrator had used a sophisticated process to turn the spores into the deadly powder used in the attacks.
He said the machine in Ivins’ lab known as a lyophilizer is a common piece of equipment used to dry spores and would not by itself allow someone to create the 1.5- to 3-micron particles used in the attacks.
“He must have used some other new technique that we don’t know about,” he said.
Spertzel said he found it unlikely that someone acting alone could have created the anthrax used in 2001. “I’d like to see the details behind the hype.”
post 111
Nass’s 13 points are an excellent summary of the problems with the FBI’s case.
See post 111
Thanks for the ping.
Not a surprise, as I keep reading about the threat, on the Gov. sites and in the news.
Did you ever hear more about the lady scientist in the eastern US, who was found drowned in the water tank?
Was the case solved?
I’m not aware of that being solved. I’ve watched for it too on my local news since it is in my state.
Doesn’t give one a warm/fuzzy, does it?
Yes for #110.
And pay special attention to the link in point #3 in Nass’s post!
(Spertzel)
(I don’t think this important WSJ article has been posted)
Discussion of Douglas J. Beecher 2006 Anthrax paper
August 12, 2008
The suicide of Bruce Ivins and press conference of Jeffrey Taylor pinning the 2001 anthrax attacks on Ivins from Ft. Detrick Md including the letters to Daschle and Leahy has brought up issues relating to whether the original anthrax in the Senate letters was weaponized or required special procedures to make not available to Ivins.
The issues are
Was the anthrax in the Senate letters of 1 trillion spores per gram?
Is that purity achievable by Ivins with the equipment he had?
Was the Senate anthrax also weaponized in additional ways beyond purity?
This could include silica aditives.
This could include some means to make it more “energetic” i.e. to repel instead of clump.
Did the aerosolization observed in the Senate letters require some anti-clumping mechanism beyond just purity?
The Beecher FBI article claimed no special powder was needed beyond purification to 1 trillion spores per gram. It also claimed this was not itself such a great feat.
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/72/8/5304
Applied and Environmental Microbiology, August 2006, p. 5304-5310, Vol. 72, No. 8
0099-2240/06/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/AEM.00940-06
Forensic Application of Microbiological Culture Analysis To Identify Mail Intentionally Contaminated with Bacillus anthracis Spores{dagger}
Douglas J. Beecher*
FBI Laboratory, Hazardous Materials Response Unit, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, Virginia 22135
Received 20 April 2006/ Accepted 22 May 2006
The article is about the search of the Senate letters, mail system, buildings, etc. for anthrax. Its not about lab science on anthrax and its properties. “To Identify Mail ” is the purpose of the analysis and what he did.
Note from part of the abstract:
The discovery of a letter intentionally filled with dried Bacillus anthracis spores in the office of a United States senator prompted the collection and quarantine of all mail in congressional buildings. This mail was subsequently searched for additional intentionally contaminated letters.
Conclusion
This paper shows that there was successful integration of microbiological methodology with law enforcement and hazmat objectives and procedures.
It was not a paper about lab science by the FBI about the properties of producing an aerosol of anthrax or the aerosol produced at the Senate.
Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents (6). 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 (3, 6, 12; J. Kelly, Washington Times, 21 October 2003; G. Gugliotta and G. Matsumoto, The Washington Post, 28 October 2002). 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.
No lab results from analyzing the spores was given, nor does it appear it happened for this paper. Its not a secret lab analysis with limited disclosure. Its a paper about collecting the letters that were contaminated.
He now argues for his opinion or hypothesis by citing the following
Purification of spores may exacerbate their dissemination to some extent by removing adhesive contaminants and maximizing the spore concentration. However, even in a crude state, dried microbial agents have long been considered especially hazardous. Experiments mimicking laboratory accidents have demonstrated that simply breaking vials of lyophilized bacterial cultures creates concentrated and persistent aerosols (4, 8). The potential for propagating disease with crude lyophilized material is illustrated by an outbreak of 24 cases of Venezuelan equine encephalitis throughout three floors of a Moscow virology institute. These infections were caused when vials containing dried infected mouse brain were accidentally broken on a stairwell landing and were spread by air currents and foot traffic (11).
This is his basis for the claim of no weaponization in the Senate anthrax.
He claims the purification in the Senate letters was nothing special. This also is pure assertion.
Particles aerosolized from purified powdered spores consist either of individual spores or aggregates of individual spores. The great majority of particles are generally the smallest particles in the population (2), which are single spores in spore powders. This is reflected in the count distribution, which should have a mode of roughly 1 to 2 µm. This size distribution phenomenon has practical safety implications. In essence, even if most of a spore powder is bound in relatively few large particles, some fraction is composed of particles that are precisely in the size range that is most hazardous for transmission of disease by inhalation. For perspective, a crudely ground preparation consisting of only 1 to 10% loose individual spores by mass would contain 1010 to 1011 loose individual spores in 1 g, considering that moderately purified dried spore preparations contain roughly 1012 spores per g (1).
“moderately purified dried spore preparations contain roughly 1012 spores per g ” i.e. 1 trillion spores per gram. Others describe this as close to the theoretical maximum and difficult to obtain. The former head of the US anthrax weapons program was expecting 1/20th of this purity.
We have the following questions
Could Ivins have prepared 1 trillion spores per gram pure anthrax from liquid anthrax in his lab?
Could he have escaped detection?
Is there a way to tell if the anthrax used in the letters came from anthrax powder prepared at Dugway instead of the Ivins beaker by methods used at Ft. Detrick?
Do they really know the Senate anthrax came from the Ivins flask at Ft. Detrick?
Based on what?
Is anthrax of purity 1 trillion spores per gram pure enough to aerosol as much as the Senate anthrax did without any anti-clumping means used in addition?
Wasn’t this approach what was tried and failed earlier?
==
http://cryptome.org/anthrax-powder.htm
In December 2002, the FBI decided to test whether a high-grade anthrax powder resembling the one mailed to the Senate could be made on a small budget, and without silica. To do this job, the bureau called upon Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground, a desolate Army test range in southwestern Utah. By February 2003, the scientists at Dugway had finished their work. According to military sources with firsthand knowledge of this effort, the resulting powder “flew like penguins.” The experiment had failed. (Penguins can’t fly.)
Military sources say that Dugway washed and centrifuged the material four times to create a pure spore preparation, then dried it by solvent extraction and azeotropic distillation —a process developed by the U.S. Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick in the late 1950s. It is not a simple method, but someone familiar with it might be able to jury-rig a lab to get the job done. As recently as 1996, Bill Patrick says he taught scientists at Dugway how to do this.
The FBI-Dugway effort produced a coarse powder. The spores—some dried under an infrared lamp and the others airdried —stuck together in little cakes, according to military sources, and then were sieved through “a fine steel mesh.” The resulting powder was placed into test tubes. When FBI officials arrived at Dugway to examine the results, a Dugway scientist shook one of the tubes. Unlike the electrostatically charged Senate anthrax spores that floated freely, the Dugway spores fell to the bottom of the test tube and stayed there. “That tells you the particles were too big,” says Spertzel. “It confirms what I’ve been saying all along: To make a good powder, you need an additive.”
==
Mr. Patrick postulated that the concentration of anthrax would be 50 billion spores per gram. ”This assumes a dried powder of moderate ability to generate into an aerosol when the envelope is opened,” he wrote.
In his report, Mr. Patrick said the American program had achieved a concentration of one trillion spores per gram — what scientists today say is near the theoretical limit of how many of the microscopic spheres can be packed into a tiny space.
Today, no terrorist or scientific maverick is known to have published anything that comes close to describing how to make concentrated anthrax powders. Timothy W. Tobiason, a habitué of gun shows who sells a self-published cookbook on how to make germ weapons, including ”mail delivered” anthrax, sketches out only the most rudimentary steps.
Experts judge Mr. Tobiason’s recipes as flawed in spots and at best capable of producing only low-quality anthrax. His book deals mostly with the production of wet anthrax, though it does suggest a way to grind clusters of dried anthrax into microscopic pieces, which can settle into the lungs.
It is unclear if any foreign nation has achieved high anthrax concentrations. The United States suspects that more than a dozen countries are clandestinely studying biological weapons, with anthrax among the top agents.
Ken Alibek, a former top official in the Soviet germ weapons program who is now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas, Va., said that it was routinely possible to create dry anthrax that contained 100 billion spores per gram and that, with some effort, 500 billion was possible.
Thus the US and Soviet expert disagree with the FBI article that 1 trillion spores per gram is easy.
“considering that moderately purified dried spore preparations contain roughly 10 to the 12 spores per g” i.e. 1 trillion per gram.
Moderately purified anthrax is 1 trillion per gram according to FBI guy. But according to others, 1 trillion per gram is “what scientists today say is near the theoretical limit of how many of the microscopic spheres can be packed into a tiny space.” So the FBI guy says 1 trillion per gram is moderately purified. The scientists say that 1 trillion per gram is almost theoretical purity, i.e. its not moderately pure, its almost absolutely pure.
This casts doubt on the FBI article from 2006 on the claims it makes of this type. Its really an article about the decontamination process and letter identification process. Its not an article about analyzing the spores. Its really about finding the Leahy letter unopened. The Daschle letter was opened by staff. The Leahy letter was found unopened by the FBI. The Beecher article is not about analyzing spores in the Senate letters or the science of anthrax. The Beecher letter would better be titled, my finding the unopened Leahy letter out of many letters unopened after the Daschle letter was opened and the Senate office building shut down.
However, it appears the FBI took these statements made off hand in the report on the discovery of the unopened Leahy letter as being based on some secret lab experiments on anthrax done by the FBI. There was no such basis for this Beecher paper. It was about his discovery of the unopened Leahy letter.
The title says it all:
Forensic Application of Microbiological Culture Analysis To Identify Mail Intentionally Contaminated with Bacillus anthracis Spores{dagger}
This is a paper about identifying mail contaminated with anthrax and his big career discovery of the Leahy letter unopened. Leahy’s staff didn’t discover the Leahy letter, Beecher and the FBI did.
--Your honor, Defense Evidence #1 !!!
Almost two years ago this prescient person predicted the flimsy Beecher paper would be used as the scientific "proof" that the anthrax was not sophisticated.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/812/1
The Anthrax Case: From Spores to a Suspect
By Martin Enserink
ScienceNOW Daily News
12 August 2008
The scientific evidence against Bruce Ivins, the 62-year-old Army scientist who killed himself while about to be indicted for the anthrax murders, is finally emerging. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) laid some of its cards on the table. One key document, scientists say, now enables a reconstruction of the trail that led the FBI from the deadly letters back to Ivins’s lab at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The investigation relied heavily on outside labs such as The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, which sequenced a large number of anthrax samples; it also required the development of new genetic tests. Although none of the steps was revolutionary or particularly inventive, researchers say, combining them to solve a criminal case was. Surprisingly, many past speculations on the forensic science were wrong on one point: Sophisticated fingerprinting techniques for Bacillus anthracis developed at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, widely rumored to be crucial, didn’t play a significant role.
Scientists say they need many more details to decide the merits of the case against Ivins. But despite the bureau’s widely ridiculed mistakes—including an early focus on Ivins’s former colleague Steven Hatfill—”the scientific evidence is probably really strong,” says Steven Salzberg, a former TIGR researcher now at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park. “They’ve got some very good people,” Salzberg says. “The impression that they’re not good may just come from their style. They never tell you anything.”
The main document unsealed last week is an October 2007 affidavit by Thomas Dellafera, a postal inspector. Filed in support of a warrant to search Ivins’s home, cars, and a safety box, the 25 pages of text didn’t spell out the details of the evidence. But a close reading of the four paragraphs about the FBI’s genetic analysis helps clarify how the bureau approached the problem, says microbiologist Jeffrey Miller of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The key to understanding the investigation is that the anthrax used in the attacks didn’t have a single, uniform genetic makeup, a source close to the investigation says. Each of the envelopes likely contained many billions of spores; within such a population, there are always subpopulations of cells bearing mutations that set them apart from the majority. The same minorities would presumably have been present in the “mother stock” of anthrax from which the spores were prepared.
However, standard sequencing—which would require the DNA from thousands of spores—would have resulted in a “consensus sequence” for the spores, in which such rare mutations were simply drowned out. To find them, researchers used a different technique: They grew spores from the envelopes on petri dishes, generating hundreds or even thousands of colonies per dish, each the progeny of a single spore. They then searched for colonies that looked different from the majority; the affidavit mentions variations in “shape, color, texture.” (Those colonies might have been rough instead of smooth, or much smaller than most, Miller says.) Next, they set out to find the mutations that made those colonies different.
To do that, the FBI used a brute-force approach: It had the entire genomes of the bacteria in the minority sequenced. TIGR—which merged into the J. Craig Venter Institute in 2006—sequenced “probably somewhere between 10 and 20” such genomes in the years after the attacks, Salzberg says. TIGR could not handle live anthrax cells itself; the FBI gave the lab purified DNA produced by Paul Keim’s lab at NAU, Salzberg says. Claire Fraser-Liggett, who led TIGR at the time and is now also at UMD, declines to discuss details of the investigation. But two other sources confirm TIGR’s role.
Comparing the sequence of the variant colonies to an original B. anthracis strain called Ames, widely used in research, identified a number of mutations, says Salzberg; they included single-nucleotide polymorphisms, a change of a single base pair, and tandem repeats, in which a short piece of DNA is repeated a variable number of times.
The FBI then had scientists at other labs develop tests that allowed them to screen any anthrax sample for four of these mutations. Such assays “are very easy to design,” for instance, using a polymerase chain reaction-based strategy, says evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing; molecular biology labs do it all the time.
Armed with the four tests, the FBI examined more than 1000 anthrax isolates, collected from 16 labs that had the Ames strain in the United States and several more in Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In only eight of those samples, they found all four mutations seen in the envelope samples; and each of these eight, the affidavit says, was “directly related” to a “large flask” of spores, identified as RMR-1029, which Ivins had created in 1997 and of which he was the “sole custodian.”
That still leaves many questions open, researchers say. One thing that needs to be explained, says Miller, is whether the eight isolates that were “directly related” to RMR-1029 were all found at USAMRIID, or whether some came from other laboratories. In the latter case, it’s unclear why the FBI ruled out those labs as the potential origin. (One clue that the affidavit offers is that USAMRIID is the only lab in Maryland or Virginia, the states where the particular envelopes used in the attacks were sold.)
It’s also unclear how many of the 1000 samples had fewer than four, but more than zero, of the mutations. “If a whole bunch of them had two or three,” that would increase the odds that the perfect match at USAMRIID was just a false positive, Lenski says. Another key question, he adds: Where in the anthrax genome did the four mutations occur? If they were in hypervariable regions, that would also probably make the case against Ivins weaker.
Whether the analysis would hold up in court seemed to be front and center in the FBI’s thinking, says Salzberg. For instance, when researchers from TIGR and NAU published a comparison of two anthrax strains in Science in 2002 (14 June 2002, p. 2028), a top FBI researcher named Bruce Budowle encouraged them to include a statistical analysis to estimate the data’s accuracy, Salzberg says. “Budowle felt it would be useful to have it all go through peer review, in case it went to court,” he says.
The FBI has invested heavily in microbial forensic expertise since 2001, and Budowle has co-authored many papers on the topic. But the bureau farmed out much of the scientific bench work, in part because the Marine Corps doesn’t allow bioweapons agents at its base in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI Laboratory is located. The work was “highly compartmentalized,” says a source close to the investigation: Most labs didn’t know exactly what the others were doing.
The affidavit is very unclear about whether the spore preparations might have undergone physical or chemical treatments to make them disperse more easily—still a point of major confusion, says Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a bioweapons specialist at Purchase College in New York. Scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology reported in October 2001 that the spores sent to U.S. Senator Tom Daschle’s office had been mixed with silica to make them more easily dispersible. However, in congressional briefings and in a paper published in the August 2006 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, FBI officials described the powder as a simple spore preparation without additives.
The affidavit reports that there was “an elemental signature of Silicon within the spores” in all four letters that were recovered. This silicon signature is later cited as part of the evidence linking the mailed anthrax to the flask of spores that Ivins had access to. But what the silicon was for, or whether other samples were tested for the signature, remains unclear.
Science aside, the affidavit relies heavily on circumstantial evidence. For instance, it notes unexplained spikes in Ivins’s nighttime lab activity right before the two waves of letters were sent. It also claims that he tried to mislead investigators to hide his involvement. In April 2002, he submitted samples from his lab that tested negative for the four mutations, according to the affidavit; but on 7 April 2004, an FBI agent seized the RMR-1029 flask, which tested positive for all four. Ivins insisted he had given agents RMR-1029 the first time around, however.
One of the weak points in the affidavit is Ivins’s motive, says Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense specialist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The FBI suggests that Ivins was afraid of losing his job if the government ended a project he was working on that was trying to solve regulatory issues around the so-called AVA anthrax vaccine. It “seems a bit of a stretch” that Ivins would have thought his job hinged on that project, says Koblentz. His group “would have had plenty of other anthrax vaccine-related work to keep them busy.” A glaring omission, meanwhile, is any evidence placing Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, on any of the days the envelopes could have been mailed from there.
A spokesperson for the FBI’s laboratory declined a request to interview Budowle and referred scientific questions to the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office. “In the near future the FBI will determine the best way to address the science involved in the anthrax case,” she e-mailed Science. Many suspect that with so many burning questions, a full account of the evidence—including the scientific details—is now just a matter of time.
With reporting by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.
“He wants details of the measurements of oxygen isotopes in the attack anthrax, which reportedly identified where it was grown, and why logs showing late work in Ivins’ lab before the mailings did not focus the investigation on Ivins earlier.”
(The isotope ratios indicate the anthrax was grown in the Northeastern US according to an earlier MSNBC report.
_______________________________
Interesting Grassley focused on that one, of many, arcane scientific points.
Maybe REp. Holt, a physicist by training, is helping the Senator?
Making Ivins Crazy, August 11, 2008
http://www.governmentalityblog.com/my_weblog/2008/08/making-ivins-cr.html
Anthrax case spurs liability questions
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-11-anthrax_N.htm
(am informed the cited “Turley” is a lawyer for Al-Timimi
Dina Temple-Ralston, “Charles Ivins ‘Stunned’ By Evidence Against Brother,” August 10, 2008
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93483076
Amateur Economists, August 13, 2008
http://www.amateureconomists.com/view_articles_detail.php?aid=83
Our own worst bioenemy
The U.S. bioweapons program has grown so large that it has become a threat to Americans.
By Wendy Orent
August 13, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-orent13-2008aug13,0,1045104.story
Talk Back: Do you believe Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks? August 13, 2008
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/display.htm?StoryID=78746
“Should we believe the government this time?,” August 13, 2008
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/082008/08132008/400114
FBI Shifts Anthrax Blame to Dead Man, August 13, 2008
http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=171598
Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008
Two former Montgomery Village residents troubled by anthrax suspect
http://www.gazette.net/stories/08132008/germnew202448_32482.shtml
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2008/08/13/olbermann-us-provoked-russia-troubling-neocon-echoes
OLBERMANN: Anthrax-gate. The idea that the FBI and the Bush administration are somehow covering up what really happened by blaming it on the late Dr. Bruce Ivins creeps more and more total plausibility.
I haven’t looked closely at all the links at #126, they were supplied to me. A couple of points though. The second to last article is about Nancy Haigwood who is credible about how Ivins possibly stalked her. The second from beginning article is from the Los Angeles Times. Predictably, it begins with a charge Ivins “most likely” did it. Predictably, I say, because every other news outlet I’ve seen takes an agnostic view on the case against Ivins, but the Los Angeles Times was the gullible outlet of first choice for the Feds to spin their tale.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2058930/posts
In Anthrax Case, Hindsight Shifts View of Ivins
Actions to Aid Probe Appear Now As Cover-Up
WASHINGTON — One night in autumn 2001, as the U.S. reeled from the worst act of bioterrorism in its history, Bruce Ivins was alone in his cluttered Fort Detrick, Md., office, scrubbing phones, walls and furniture.
......
Dr. Ivins, his colleagues said, argued that al Qaeda was responsible. “He was very passionate about this,” former boss Jeffrey Adamovicz said. “He was very agitated.” In these conversations, Dr. Ivins dwelled at one point on a purported link between Florida victim Robert Stevens, a photographer for American Media, and an apartment rented to 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta, Dr. Adamovicz said. (The FBI discounts that as an explanation.)
......
That winter, the FBI asked Dr. Ivins to take his first and only lie-detector test, according to a law-enforcement official. The polygraph was part of the bureau’s vetting of investigators. The FBI hasn’t released the results. Dr. Ivins retained his role in the investigation.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2055865/posts
Scientists Question FBI Probe On Anthrax
Washington Post ^ | Sunday, August 3, 2008;
Posted on Sunday, August 03, 2008 01:31:44 PM by Perdogg
For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick’s Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects.
Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins’s former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed numerous times. Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-suspect1-2008aug01,0,1343109.story
The famous Los Angeles Times story from August 1 that started it all. Has the “He’s messy, he’s guilty” claim, and the infamous quotes from one of Ivins’ brothers, but the L.A. Times failed to mention the brother hadn’t spoken to Ivins in 23 years. FBI had to have fed the LA Times reporter with that brother, and not Ivins’ other brother.
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/display.htm?storyid=78746
Talk Back: Do you believe Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks? (August 13)
Interesting because it’s from the Frederick newspaper, where a reporter can do a “man on the street” poll and find someone who knew Hatfill.
I think I'll pass on this one..
Yeah that flask of which he was the sole custodian.
And the FBI has total proof he was the sole custodian.
(How do you prove a negative?)
And the FBI can prove there were no other ‘flasks’
with the same genetic mutations???
This reads like a lot of BS bafflegab
the FBI trying to snow us
blow smoke into our eyes
(but not aerosolized anthrax smoke, I hope)
And what the heck is ‘ScienceNow Daily News’, anyhow??
Re: Olberman #126
One thing I am sure about.
There has been absolutely no pressure
on the FBI
to ‘close’ this case
before this administration leaves office.
http://www.gazette.net/stories/08142008/walknew191857_32465.shtml
Ivins’ colleagues remain skeptical
Aug. 6
by Keith L. Martin and Margarita Raycheva | Staff Writers
A day after the U.S. Justice Department released hundreds of pages of court documents detailing its case against Dr. Bruce Ivins, Dr. W. Russell Byrne sat in disbelief about the possible link between his friend and colleague and the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks.
“I am absolutely stunned at what they consider evidence,” said Byrne, who headed Ivins’ USAMRIID division from 1998 to 2000. “… Plus, all these e-mails. I knew [Ivins] was having a hard time in life, but I did not know this was the way it was.”
......
Other anomalies include the fact Byrne said Ivins knew e-mails were not “private” and could be read by anyone. And, he argued, if the FBI had hairs from the Princeton, N.J. mailbox where the anthrax letters were mailed, why were they never compared with Ivins’ hair?
“I think [the public] is being taken advantage of because they don’t know the science … or know anything about USAMRIID,” Byrne said.
...
Byrnes’ skepticism is matched by Dr. Meryl Nass, a Maine physician and expert on anthrax and bioterrorism who has testified before Congress. She met Ivins in 1991 and last exchanged correspondence with him six years ago.
Since the government’s case has been made public, Nass has posted several questions on her Web site – www.anthraxvaccine.org – and said the Justice Department’s case is not clear. The closest link the FBI found between Ivins and Princeton, she said, is a detail of Ivins’ alleged fascination with the Kappa Kappa Gama sorority, which has an office near the Princeton collection box.
“The profusion of non-evidentiary material is profound,” she said. “If the FBI is spending [pages] detailing his connection to a sorority … it is pointing that out because it doesn’t have a case … The FBI knows this case is too complex for the public to comprehend, that’s why this nonsense [about the sorority] is out there.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-web-anthrax-lataug14,0,4362601.story
Anthrax hair samples don’t match
By Carrie Johnson | The Washington Post
7:19 PM CDT, August 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered human hair samples from a telltale mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.
FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the postbox from which germ-filled letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.
The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence that researchers continue to puzzle over in the notorious case, which ended abruptly after Ivins committed suicide while prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment.
Last two posts 1. Dr. Byrne asks why no tests were done on the mail box hairs, 2. Later story reveals the hairs didn’t match.
Which brings the bigger issue, why were the hairs mentioned the released papers at all? Or were they for a court warrant application and the inspectors misled the judge with innuendo tht the hairs were Ivins?
Doesn’t give one a warm/fuzzy, does it?<<<
Not when you give thought to the dead Somali man in Denver, with a full pound of cyanide in the hotel room.
Why?
You have a friend who says that. But why couldn’t be done under a hood on a small scale?
My big problem with analyzing any of this is that I still don't see a reliable particle size distribution analysis of this anthrax powder. "Smoke" is typically just over .5 micron. Cab O Sil fumed silica is 0.2 - 0.3 micron. I don't know anything about anthrax soup. An Aerobell can make 2-3 micron direct droplets readily that shrink as they dry. The satellite droplets are usually a third of that, which you could then air classify (which isn't too bad if you don't care about yield). Of course, containing it well enough to stay alive through all that is another matter.
A few details would be helpful.
>>>And that makes it overwhelmingly likely it was an inside job by a disgruntled federal employee and not AQ terrorism.
Saddam Hussein’s son had access to that lab,
I’ll take door number 3 for $500.
>>>After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, a guy kills himself and it turns out he’s completely to blame and acted alone.
He may not have killed himself on purpose. He O.D.ed on Tylenol. That is not hard to do; especially since he was mentally unstable either by stress or medial history.
bump
or by accident
>>>I’m beginning to wonder if they knew he was depressed and suicidal and intentionally drove him into the ditch.
Apparently, the therapist, with a criminal background, was giving the FBI progress notes on Ivins.
>>>You don’t just whip up a batch of sedatives,scarf it down, and hope for the best.
Gene, it was Rx Tylenol. No whipping up required.
>>>Postal Inspector: Anthrax suspect had communist ties
>>>>>>>So does Barack Obama
I would use ‘has’.
From USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-13-anthrax_N.htm?csp=34
WASHINGTON — Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, whose Senate office received the first anthrax-tainted letter in 2001, says he is satisfied the FBI has found the culprit.
Daschle, a former Democratic senator from South Dakota, called the Justice Department’s case against Bruce Ivins, an anthrax scientist at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., “complete and persuasive.”
“I think the evidence is pretty compelling,” he told a group of reporters at USA TODAY’s Washington bureau.
...
The most compelling evidence Daschle heard was that the DNA “fingerprint” of the anthrax could be traced to a flask controlled by Ivins.
“That’s as close to a smoking gun as I think you’re going to get,” Daschle said.
_____________________________________________________
The best thing about this article, the title,
“Daschle buys Ivins as sole culprit in 2001 anthrax attacks”
I think there’s some editorial disapproval in “buys”
May-be to remind people of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski when revealed that hairs are not of Ivins?
'Kaczynski described in his writings how he placed two human hairs he found in a bus station into a bomb "to deceive the policemen, who will think that the hair belongs to whoever made the device," KPIX reported.'
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/29/national/main2213782.shtml
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