I cannot discuss the article in detail until I've read it. But we've seen how you and TrebelRebel can distort things, so until proven otherwise, I think it's safe to assume you are distorting things found in this report, too.
TrebelRebel endlessly tries to claim that because scientists at Lawrence Livermore coated SOME spores with silica when doing tests described in the book "Microbial Forensics," that somehow proves the attack spores of 2001 were coated with silica.
In reality, a February 15, 2005 article by S.P. Velsko of Lawrence Livermore Labs titled "Physical and Analytical Analysis: A key component of Bioforensics" explains WHY they coated some spores with silica:
The knowledge base that is required to deduce process associations from measurement data consists of two basic components. The first is a systematic understanding of the many different possible “recipes” for generating agents. While much current expertise in this area centers around archival knowledge generated by the historical U.S. biological weapons program (and to a lesser extent, knowledge about foreign BW programs) it is important to recognize that would-be bio-terrorists are likely to utilize information from a broader range of sources, including open scientific literature, the internet, underground “cookbooks”, and information that has, unfortunately, been divulged to the news media in recent years. There is no necessary presumption that this information is always accurate or leads to an effective biological weapon. But only by collecting and organizing this information (and keeping it up-to-date) can we hope to recognize the recipe used to make an agent in the widest variety of possible incidents.
In other words, they created some samples just so people would know what such things look like, even though they wouldn't necessarily make an "effective biological weapon."
Top Secret
Re Operation Frog Soup
Ed is posting in red and large font. Should we wait until he goes to red caps?