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Two problems here (1) AFIP was an FBI partner, (2) The media got their information on additves from named sources at AFIP.

The assistant director appears to be conveniently not referencing any of this - almost like it doesn't exist.

How was AFIP a partner of the FBI? Everything seems to indicate that the initial investigation of the anthrax powder was handled exclusively by USAMRIID with a little help from AFIP. (USAMRIID didn't have an energy dispsersive X-ray spectrometer (EDX), so they had to use the one at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). Tom Geisbert from USAMRIID just spent one morning at AFIP, the morning of October 25, 2001.)

In Chapter 15 of my book I describe how the military made a series of silly mistakes, some of which misled some people into thinking there were additives in the Daschle anthrax.

1 - USAMRIID's John Ezzell put the edge of the Daschle envelope into a groove in the bottom of the glove box to stand it up so he could photograph it, and he failed to realize there was bleach still in the groove from when he cleaned the glove box. As a result, the Daschle envelope has a wet stain at the bottom, and the letter has a brown stain along a fold.

2 - USAMRIID's Tom Geisbert used a Transmission Electron Microscope to examine spores which had been soaking in HazMat chemicals and then killed with other chemicals. When Geisbert saw "goop" oozing out of the spores under high-magnification, he thought it was an additive put INTO the spores by the person who made them. In reality, it was just the chemicals Geisbert and HazMat had soaked into the spores. Geisbert made that mistake on October 16, 2001.

Geisbert and others at USAMRIID still hadn't realized they made that really silly mistake when USAMRIID's Peter Jahrling briefed people at a meeting at the White House on October 24, 2001. Jahrling passed around pictures of the "goop" oozing out of the spores. Information was leaked to the media, and the next day The New York Times was writing about an "additive" in the spores and scientists were speculating about what it meant. (The blind leading the blind.)

At that White House meeting, the FBI asked if there was any kind of chemical "signature" in the anthrax which could be used to determine where it came from. To me, that indicates that the FBI still didn't have any access to the anthrax. It also indicates that for over a week the scientists at USAMRIID didn't think to check on what chemicals might be in the anthrax.

The next day, October 25, 2001, Geisbert took a DRY sample of anthrax (a sample which had been killed with radiation instead of chemicals) to AFIP, and they checked it with the EDX. They found two atomic elements which didn't belong in anthrax: silicon and oxygen.

Speculation began immediately that the silicon and oxygen was silica. It may have been some form of glass, or it may have been silicone or some other compound of silicon and oxygen, but the GENERAL ASSUMPTION was that it was silica.

The problem was: No one SAW any additives in the anthrax. They'd examined it under a TEM and SEM and there were no additives visible (except for the "goop" which had oozed out). How could there be silica in the anthrax if no one could see any silica particles? That was the big mystery.

But the media doesn't like a mystery. When they learned that there was silica in the anthrax, they ran with it. And soon nearly everyone was talking about additives in the anthrax. No one mentioned that NO ONE ACTUALLY SAW ANY ADDITIVES. It was all just ASSUMPTIONS.

It wasn't until sometime in November that the FBI began to get information about "lab contamination" and how spores can somehow pick up silicon from lab equipment. Professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard found two scientific articles from 1980 which talked about such contamination.

That started the ball rolling on formalizing the new science of microbial forensics. The lab contamination would have to be from THE CULPRIT'S LAB. It could help identify exactly which lab made the spores!

The news stories about additives in the anthrax were believed by some conspiracy theorists who felt that meant the anthrax was from some secret and ILLEGAL U.S. government bioweapons program. Somehow, they focused on Dr. Steven Hatfill as being the person most likely to have sent the letters. They intially believed he as a CIA agent or rogue agent doing the bidding of the Bush administration to destroy the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BTWC) which was trying to require inspections of bioweapons labs, which the Bush administration totally opposed.

There is a lot more to this than meets the eye. It's easy to just conjure up a conspiracy theory and blame the FBI for everything. But, when you look at the FACTS, the FBI seems to have done a pretty good job -- until they were PRESSURED into publicly investigating Dr. Hatfill.

There's a good possiblity that a lawsuit Dr. Hatfill filed against one of the conspiracy theorists will be settled very soon -- maybe even this week or next. Let's hope that when it happens, there will be some news stories which will clarify just how Dr. Hatfill became "a person of interest."