“I can see that Doug Beecher may have been asked or persuaded by Professor Meselson to add the comments about the attack spores having no additives. He should be applauded for doing so.”
He should not be applauded for publishing unsupported information in a peer reviewed scientific article. Editors of microbiology journals agree that is quite improper.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/government/84/8449gov1.html
This is the FBI’s first public statement on the investigation since it began analyzing the material in the Leahy letter and the first time the bureau has described the anthrax powder. Beecher, however, provides no citation for the statement or any information in the article to back it up, and FBI spokeswomen have declined requests to interview him.
“The statement should have had a reference,” says L. Nicholas Ornston, editor-in-chief of the microbiology journal. “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,” he says.
But it's "unsupported" only to people who refuse to believe it.
Perhaps he could have cited statements made by experts who stated that they saw no additives in the anthrax. He could have provided testimony by hundreds of microbiologists to "prove" that you do not need additives to make anthrax spores "fly." But he didn't.
It certainly would have been nice if he had published pictures of the attack anthrax to show that there were no additives, but such pictures are evidence in a crime. Going as far as he did was probably as far as he could go.