FBI denies overestimating anthrax power

WASHINGTON - The FBI denied Thursday that it ever overestimated the potency of the anthrax spores used in mailings that killed five people in 2001.

The bureau also rejected a request for a classified briefing on the case from Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J. Citing media reports, Holt said Wednesday that the FBI should have determined in days, not years, that the anthrax was less sophisticated than initially believed.

Shortly after the attacks, media reports said the spores contained additives and had been subjected to sophisticated milling — both techniques used in anthrax-based weapons — to make them more lethal. Earlier this month, there were media reports that the FBI belatedly learned that those techniques were not used and the anthrax was not enhanced.

Bureau officials say the early reports of weaponized anthrax were misconceptions, and the more recent reports misunderstood how early the FBI was able to accurately analyze the spores.

"The FBI and its partners in this investigation have never been under any misconceptions about the character of the anthrax used in the attacks," Assistant FBI Director Eleni P. Kalisch wrote Holt on Thursday. "On the contrary, since the earliest months of this investigation, we have consulted with the world's foremost scientific experts on anthrax and relevant bio-forensic sciences, both inside and outside the FBI. 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."

In a letter Wednesday to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Holt had requested a classified briefing on the investigation.

Although Holt and other members of Congress got updates and briefings in 2002 and 2003, Kalisch said the FBI and Justice Department decided to stop briefing members of Congress after sensitive investigative information was reported in the media citing congressional sources.

Because this is a criminal investigation rather than an intelligence activity, a briefing of the House Intelligence Committee, of which Holt is a member, would be inappropriate, Kalisch wrote.

In an interview, Holt responded, "The inference that any member of the intelligence committee was the source of previous leaks is outrageous, irresponsible and without foundation."

The case "clearly falls within the purview of the intelligence committee," Holt added. "Our job is to see that the government functions well and in the anthrax investigation our government has not functioned well."

In 2001, anthrax contamination was found in mail facilities in and near Holt's central New Jersey district and in his office on Capitol Hill.

Holt had written Mueller that the FBI's delay in determining what kind of anthrax was used meant that "resources were diverted and countless agents wasted their time investigating a small pool of suspects, instead of the broader search we now know was needed."

Holt asked Mueller to have Douglas Beecher, a scientist in the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, testify before the House Intelligence Committee.

In April, Beecher wrote an article published in a scientific journal in August saying there was "a widely circulated misconception" that the anthrax spores were made using additives and sophisticated engineering akin to military weapons production.

The anthrax attacks, in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, killed five people across the country and sickened 17. There were five confirmed anthrax infections and two suspected cases in New Jersey but no fatalities.

I hate to tell you this, but an unattributed footnote in a paper saying there were no additives without a scrap of evidence is not a "scientific report".

As always, you are twisting what facts you aren't simply making up.

It was NOT a footnote. It was part of a scientific report written by a top scientist at the FBI labs, a report that was PEER REVIEWED and printed in a top microbiology magazine.

Instead, you choose to believe a self-serving, self-congratulating statement made in an AFIP newsletter.

Kind of strange that two years later the head of the Washington field office would admit that they had failed to reporouce the powder. Yeah, they knew what they were dealing with, but they couldn't reproduce it!

Another example of twisting facts. The article you cite states that, if they hadn't been able to reproduce a powder that can be easily reproduced, that could only mean that they were trying to reproduce it exactly, meaning they needed to reproduce the lab contamination process, too.

"How did they know that something they could not see under a scanning electron microscope was put there as an additive? How is that possible?"

Because they could see it. When you run EDX you automatically run an SEM at the same time (as you can clearly see from the picture at this link which shows a screenshot from the very tool they used http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/841229/posts ). On the left hand side is the SEM of the sample being analyzed. That particular sample is a pure silica refernce sample that AFIP used to help prove that what the addtive they were looking at in/on the Daschle spores was silica and not some other silicon compound. On the right is an EDX spectrum obtained from one small area of the SEM (that small area being a diamond cursor in the top right, directly on top of a large silica particle).

"What made this anthrax so easily aerosolized? A series of sophisticated tests revealed some clues, but the presence of another unidentifiable substance left the investigation incomplete."

Because they could see it.

No, they could NOT see it. That is just something you are ASSUMING in order to make your conspiracy theory work.

Dr. Beecher, a top expert at the FBI says there was NO ADDITIVE in the anthrax. His scientific article was PEER REVIEWED.

We have testimony from top experts saying that there was no VISIBLE additive in the anthrax. Just today, there is an article in Chemical & Engineering News which contains this:

Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew S. Meselson is one of several scientists asked to examine electron micrographs of the powders and confirms Beecher's statement. Meselson tells C&EN that he "saw no evidence of anything except spores."

Author Richard Preston interviewed the two experts at USAMRIID (Geisbert and Jahrling) who first examined the anthrax, and except for the "goop" which oozed OUT OF the spores, they saw no trace of any additives. His book describes the whole process which caused the misunderstandings about additives, even down to Geisbert's mistaken THOUGHTS as he examined the anthrax. Plus, Jahrling told everyone at the meeting at the White House on October 24, 2001, "This anthrax could have come from a hospital lab or from any reasonably equipped college microbiology lab."

It is absolutely clear that AFIP was just making assumptions.

They ASSUMED the presence of silicon and oxygen meant it was in the form silica even though they SAW no silica particles.

They ASSUMED silica was there as an additive to "weaponize" the spores even though they had no way of knowing that.

The ASSUMED silica was a "key component" even though they could not SEE any silica. It seems clear they made that ASSUMPTION because the element silicon showed a major spike on a graph and/or because they mapped the location of the silicon and thought they saw a lot of it. But they didn't know the same kinds of readings would appear with lab contamination. It had happened TWICE in reports written in 1980, and that contamination was definitely NOT a "key component". We have the graphs and the maps from those instances.

Instead of just making stuff up about what AFIP saw or did, why not take your own advice and wait to see how AFIP explains what they said in their newsletter? They seem to be in a pretty tight spot where an explanation of some kind is required.

I don't need to make up what "AFIP saw or did". AFIP said they (or Detrick) saw an "unidentifiable substance" (it's difficult to call something an "unidentifiable substance" unless you notice it's presence in the first place).

It is perfectly clear from Richard Preston's book "The Demon In The Freezer" that the "unidentifiable substance" was the "goop" they saw oozing OUT OF the spores under high-magnification on the Transimission Electron Microscope.

But the spores they took to AFIP for examination under the EDX were not the same spores with that "unindentifiable substance". They were evidently smart enough to realize that the EDX would pick up the chemicals used to kill the spores, so at AFIP they used dry spores which had been killed with radiation.

The facts are there. You just have to pay attention to them, and not just assume everything which disagrees with your theory is wrong or part of some conspiracy.

The Other Shoe That Dropped

Which we subsequently dropped.

By Jim Geraghty

NRO ONLINE.

Periodically, I find myself saying,

“It’s amazing that we haven’t had another attack on our soil

since Sept. 11, 2001.”

And then I stop myself. And I realize I’ve made a mistake that grates on me.

We did have another attack on our soil, not too long after the attacks — the anthrax mailings that killed five and infected 22.

Each time I let it slip, I feel like I’ve disrespected, or simply forgotten, the dead - Robert Stevens in Florida, Kathy Nguyen of New York City; Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford, Connecticut, and Thomas Morris Jr. and Joseph Curseen, employees of the Brentwood mail facility in Washington, D.C..

Once we’re reminded, we remember those days well. White powder being reported in just about every major office building and spurring evacuations. Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN, putting white power in an envelope and showing how it could puff out with the slightest of movements. People speculating whether they ought to microwave their mail. Celebrities clamoring for Cipro. Crashing airplanes had traumatized us already; now we had to worry that someone was exposing us to a silent killer we could breathe in, obliviously.

I admit, I take this a bit personally. The path of my life and the path of the anthrax investigations have crossed from time to time. I had a good, close friend in Sen. Tom Daschle’s office who was among the first to be exposed, who had to go on Cipro. I was among the first reporters to reenter the reopened Hart Building, a dusty time capsule of midday October 15, 2001. A close relative ended up working on the decontamination and redesign of the Hamilton, New Jersey postal facility.

And here we are, on the eve of five years later, and the guy who did it remains unknown, and presumably at large, or unmolested. I had figured at some point we would have found some guy in a house outside Trenton, keeled over from accidental exposure to his own poisons.

But the case remains a mystery. I’m reminded of the moniker “Rollo Tamassi” — the name that a cop in L.A. Confidential gives to the unknown, never-caught suspect who killed his father. The Guy Who Gets Away With It.

Read enough true-crime novels and talk to enough cops and law-enforcement folks, and you come to the conclusion that despite what we see in pop culture, there are no criminal masterminds — or they are so exceedingly rare as to be almost nonexistent. Most criminals take up crime because they want something — usually money — and they can’t figure out a legitimate way of getting it. The vast majority of criminals are stupid, greedy, and sloppy. There are no Kaiser Sozes. If you’re really that smart, you figure out how to make money in a way that doesn’t get the cops chasing after you.

There are no unsolvable crimes. It’s just a matter of resources and intellectual capital spent on the case.

Wait long enough, and just about everybody gets caught. Eric Rudolph. The Green River Killer. The Unabomber. Someday, somebody will get James J. “Whitey” Bulger. D. B. Cooper’s bones are probably hanging in some tree in an Oregon forest.

So how did Anthrax Guy manage to terrorize America for weeks, kill several people, and leave no clues?

I can’t help but wonder if this guy had help from powerful friends — maybe a foreign-intelligence service. This is entirely speculation. If somebody wants to offer forth evidence pointing to Joe Scientist with an Axe to Grind, I’ll hear ‘em out (but really, the FBI’s the one who needs to hear it).

But could Joe Scientist with an Axe to Grind to pull off, arguably, the biggest unsolved crime in the last half century? To outwit everybody at the FBI, the intelligence community, every cop, and amateur sleuth?

I’m skeptical. It strikes me as beyond the capacity of an ordinary crook, pulling this stunt for the first time. The 9/11 hijackers, perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, left behind tons of evidence.

But that leaves us wondering out loud if the person had help from a hostile foreign government. There’s no direct evidence of that, but just... it makes a bit more sense than the Lone Nut or Lone Evil Genius theories.

This Theoretical Hostile Foreign Government would only have needed to send one person, if they were trained well enough. In November 2001, after the last mailing, he could fly from Philadelphia or Newark or New York to Islamabad or Tehran or Baghdad or wherever never to be seen again. Or it could be a government’s intelligence service, operating without orders from their leaders.

Who knows? But the unsolved case, the lack of closure, of answers, of even a working theory amongst those who have the duty of protecting us — nags at me, and I’ll bet many other folks as well. This is a wound that won’t quite heal.

I’m glad we remember 9/11, and that we pledge, year after year, to never forget. I just hate the thought that the other horrifying terror attack of that year could disappear down the memory hole.

— Jim Geraghty, who writes the “TKS” blog on National Review Online, is author of Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership.

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