It’s necessary to provide evidence that there were no additives when an unsupported statement given as fact is made like that. As Carl Sagan said - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Hmmm, could it be he couldn’t provide the data - because he’s NEVER SEEN IT and doesn’t even have access to it?
What are the parts of a food egg? There is a hard shell on the outside of the egg. Look at the shell through a manifying glass. What do you see? The shell is not smooth. It has small bumbs and dents. It also has invisible holes that let air move in and out (unless treated as explained in the earlier post).
Next, peel the shell off a hard-boiled egg. Cut the egg in half along its length. What do you find inside?
Right under the shell there is a thin, rubbery skin. It is the egg membrane. Then comes the white of the egg. It is the albumen. The last part is the yellow center. It is the yolk. The yolk is on Ed.
Now, kids, how does a hard boiled egg roll? Set a hard-boiled egg on the table. Give the egg a gentle push. What does the egg do? As the egg rolls, it wobbles from side to side. It does not move in a straight line. An oval object (egg) cannot be rolled as easily as a round object (ball). That is why eggs, not balls, are used in egg-rolling contests.
Now how do you crack a hard boiled egg?
The Washington Post, in an article “Hardball Tactics in an Era of Threats,” dated September 3, 2006 summarized events relating to George Mason University microbiology graduate student Ali Al-Timimi:
“In late 2002, the FBI’s Washington field office received two similar tips from local Muslims: Timimi was running ‘an Islamic group known as the Dar al-Arqam’ that had ‘conducted military-style training,’ FBI special agent John Wyman would later write in an affidavit.
Wyman and another agent, Wade Ammerman, pounced on the tips. Searching the Internet, they found a speech by Timimi celebrating the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, according to the affidavit. The agents also found that Timimi was in contact with Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, a Saudi whose anti-Western speeches in the early 1990s had helped inspire bin Laden.
The agents reached an alarming conclusion: ‘Timimi is an Islamist supporter of Bin Laden’ who was leading a group ‘training for jihad,’ the agent wrote in the affidavit. The FBI even came to speculate that Timimi, a doctoral candidate pursuing cancer gene research, might have been involved in the anthrax attacks.
On a frigid day in February 2003, the FBI searched Timimi’s brick townhouse on Meadow Field Court, a cul-de-sac near Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax. Among the items they were seeking, according to court testimony: material on weapons of mass destruction.”
Al-Timimi had rock star status in Salafist circles and lectured in July 2001 (in Toronto) and August 2001 (in London) on the coming “end of times” and signs of the coming day of judgment. He spoke alongside officials of a charity, Islamic Assembly of North America (”IANA”) promoting the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks. Another speaker was Ali’s mentor, Bilal Philips, one of the 173 listed as unindicted WTC 1993 conspirators. Bilal Philips worked in the early 1990s to recruit US servicemen according to testimony in that trial and interviews in which Dr. Philips explained the Saudi-funded program. According to Al-Timimi’s attorney, Ali “was referenced in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (”Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”) as one of seventy individuals regarding whom the FBI is conducting full field investigations on a national basis.”
The month before they searched Ali’s townhouse, they questioned Umar Lee. Police arrested Mr. Lee, an American-born Muslim in St. Louis, in mid-February 2003 on an unrelated charge and questioned him about whether he was planning any attacks against the U.S. government. Bret Darren Lee, whose Muslim name is Umar ben-Livan (and for simplicity he shortens it to “Umar Lee”), said that he was stunned by the questions asked by the FBI agents: “I just looked at them. I didn’t think they’d asked me anything worth responding to.” Mr. Lee said he was sleeping in his apartment about 5 a.m. Sunday when he was woken by loud knocking on his door. But rather than a Muslim neighbor waking him for prayers, it was several police officers with weapons drawn. They put Lee up against a wall and asked whether he had any weapons in the apartment. The National Rifle Association sticker affixed to the apartment’s front door was a cheap version of an alarm system. While he was down at the station house, the FBI agents spent a half-hour questioning his wife about whether he was a terrorist and his thoughts about the Taliban. Umar tells me that the suspicion reported in the Washington Post that Ali was involved in the anthrax mailings is nonsense. On his popular blog, he clarified a quotation of his that appeared at the time in the Post’s “Hardball Tactics in an Era of Threats.”
Two weeks later, at the same time the FBI was searching the townhouse of PhD candidate Ali Timimi, searches and arrests moved forward elsewhere. In Moscow, Idaho, FBI agents interviewed Nabil Albaloushi. (The FBI apparently searched his apartment at the same time they searched the apartment of IANA webmaster Sami al-Hussayen, who they had woken from bed at 4:00 a.m.) Albaloushi was a PhD candidate expert in drying foodstuffs. His thesis in 2003 was 350 pages filled with charts of drying coefficients. Interceptions showed a very close link between IANA’s Sami al-Hussayen and Sheikh al-Hawali, to include the setting up of websites, the providing of vehicles for extended communication, and telephone contact with intermediaries of Sheikh al-Hawali. Al-Hussayen had al-Hawali’s phone number upon the search of his belongings upon his arrest. Former Washington State University animal geneticist and nutrition researcher Ismail Diab, who had moved to Syracuse to work for an IANA-spin-off, also was charged in Syracuse and released as a material witness to a financial investigation of the IANA affiliate “Help The Needy.” After the government failed to ask Dr. Diab any questions for nearly 3 months, the magistrate bail restrictions and removed the electronic monitoring and curfew requirements.
In Moscow, Idaho, the activities by IANA webmaster Sami al-Hussayen that drew scrutiny involved these same two radical sheiks. U.S. officials say the two sheiks influenced al Qaeda’s belief that Muslims should wage holy war against the U.S. until it ceases to support Israel and withdraws from the Middle East. Sami Hussayen, who was acquitted, made numerous calls and wrote many e-mails to the two clerics, sometimes giving advice to them about running Arabic-language websites on which they espoused their anti-Western views.
According to witness testimony in the prosecution of the Virginia Paintball Defendants, after September 11, 2001, “Al-Timimi stated that the attacks may not be Islamically permissible, but that they were not a tragedy, because they were brought on by American foreign policy.” The FBI first contacted Timimi shortly after 9/11. He met with FBI agents 7 or 8 times in the months leading up to his arrest. Al-Timimi is a US citizen born in Washington DC. His house was searched, his passport taken and his telephone monitored. Ali Al Timimi defended his PhD thesis in computational biology shortly after his indictment for recruiting young men to fight the US in defending against an invasion of Afghanistan.
Some of his communications in 2002 with dissident Saudi sheik Safar al-Hawali, one of the two fundamentalist sheikhs who were friends and mentors of Bin Laden, were intercepted. The two radical sheiks had been imprisoned from September 1994 to June 1999. Al-Hawali’s detention was expressly the subject of Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War against the United States and the claim of responsibility for the 1998 embassy bombings.
ABC reported in July 2004 that FBI Director Mueller had imposed an October 1, 2004 deadline for a case that would stand up in court. The date passed with no anthrax indictment. Al-Timimi was not indicted for anthrax. He was indicted for sedition. Upon his indictment, on September 23, 2004, al-Timimi explained he had been offered a plea bargain of 14 years, but he declined. He quoted Sayyid Qutb. He said he remembered “reading his books and loving his teaching” as a child, and that Qutb’s teaching was prevented from signing something that was false by “the finger that bears witness.” He noted that he and his lawyers asked that authorities hold off the indictment until he had received his PhD, but said that unfortunately they did not wait. On October 6, 2004, the webmaster of the azzam.com website Babar Ahmad was indicted. It was not until 2007 that the North Brunswick, NJ imam who mirrored the azzam.com website was indicted (on the grounds of income tax evasion).
The indictment against the paintball defendants alleged that at an Alexandria, Virginia residence, in the presence of a representative of Benevolence International Foundation (”BIF”), the defendants watched videos depicting Mujahadeen engaged in Jihad and discussed a training camp in Bosnia. His defense lawyer says that the FBI searched the townhouse of “to connect him to the 9/11 attacks or to schemes to unleash a biological or nuclear attack.” Famed head of the former Russian bioweaponeering program Ken Alibek told me that he would occasionally see Al-Timimi in the hallways at George Mason, where they both were in the microbiology department, and was vaguely aware that he was an islamic hardliner. When what his defense counsel claims was an FBI attempt to link Al-Timimi to a planned biological attack failed, defense counsel says that investigators focused on his connections to the men who attended his lectures at the local Falls Church, Va. In the end, he was indicted for inciting them to go to Afghanistan to defend the Taliban against the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan. During deliberations, he reportedly was very calm, reading Genome Technology and other scientific journals. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 70 years.
At his sentencing, Dr. Al-Timimi spoke in clear and measured tones:
“I will not admit guilt nor seek the Court’s mercy. I do this not out of any disrespect to the Court. I do this simply because I am innocent.
My claim of innocence is not because of any inherent misunderstanding on my part as to the nature of the crimes for which I was convicted nor is it because my Muslim belief recognizes sharia rather than secular law. It is merely because I am innocent.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I declare the government’s recitation poor as it stripped those words of their meaning.
***
Imprisonment of any term, as this Court well knows, is a crisis for the incarcerated and his or her loved ones. I am no exception to that.
But the real crisis brought on my imprisonment, I sincerely believe is America’s. For if my conviction is to stand, it would mean that two hundred and thirty years of America’s tradition of protecting the individual from the tyrannies and whims of the sovereign will have come to an end. And that which is exploited today to persecute a single member of a minority will most assuredly come back to haunt the majority tomorrow.”
KSM invoked George Washington in his statement to a military tribunal in March 2007. That was far less compelling because he was admitting to many serious crimes. The evidence presented at Al-Timimi’s trial, however, was offered only to show that Dr. Al-Timimi was guilty of nothing other than exhorting some young men to go abroad and defend their faith. It seems that, under the government’s case, his only crime was to put his religion before his nation-state. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 70 years. As one Washington Post reporter said of such cases, the government seemed to be engaged in shadow boxing.
As Al-Timimi explained in his eloquent statement upon sentencing, he was convicted out of fear.
The former head of the DARPA Biological Countermeasures Program, Dr. Stephen S. Morse, in an interview airing on Charlie Rose on October 10, 2001, explained that there was no need for the public to fear. He noted that maybe the mailer had a personal reason — there was no reason to assume the Florida death related to terrorism or a large group. Dr. Morse urged that we put it into perspective and inform the public so as to remove the mystery. He explained we should not allow ourselves to feel fear. As reiterated in other interviews that week, he said mailed anthrax was not a great danger. As those words aired, however, more letters were en route from that mailbox at 10 Nassau St. in Princeton. The anthrax mailer asked a pointed question in the letter containing a much more highly refined product — product that aerosolized much more readily. The new batch of letters asked: “Are you afraid?”
The answer was clearly yes. To use the technical Army expression with such a biohazard, it had “major pucker factor.” After the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology detected silica, former USAMRIID Deputy Commander Charles Bailey, identified as a scientist at Advanced Biosystems Inc. at George Mason University, declined to comment on the purpose of the silica. He told one reporter: “I don’t think I want to give people — terrorists — any information to help them.” Oops. Too late.
Dr. Timimi’s attorney was understandably annoyed that they kept moving Al-Timimi between prisons and did not let him consult privately with his client. George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley, his counsel on appeal, explained that last year they were playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?”, preventing him from consulting with his client.
He did provide evidence. You just ignore it. Or you don't consider it to be evidence.
Whether you accept it or not, the Amerithrax investigation is an ONGOING investigation. Publicly discussing confidential evidence in an ongoing investigation is both illegal and stupid. The anthrax powder is evidence in a crime that resulted in the deaths of 5 people.
So, instead of directly discussing the evidence, he discusses what is widely known about ordinary anthrax powders:
On page 5309 he wrote:
Purification of spores may exacerbate their dissemination to some extent by removing adhesive contaminants and maximizing spore concentration. However, even in a crude state, dried microbial agents have been long considered especially hazardous. Experiments mimicking laboratory accidents have demonstrated that simply breaking vials of lyophilized bacterial cultures creates concentrated and persistent aerosols
And
While size analysis of freshly prepared powders may bear signatures of the production process and predict some of their performance characteristics, size determinations for material recovered after it has been deployed must be viewed with circumspection. Particle size distributions are dynamic, changing as a powder experiences different conditions upon handling, such as compaction, friction, and humidity among other factors.
And
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, which are single spores in spore powders.
And particularly this statement:
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.
This is elementary microbiology and shouldn't need documentation support. And this information about elementary microbiology is the support for the statement you seem to find fault with:
Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents. 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.
So, he provides statements about elementary microbiology to show that "even in a crude state, dried microbial agents have been long considered especially hazardous." And he points out that "Experiments mimicking laboratory accidents have demonstrated that simply breaking vials of lyophilized bacterial cultures creates concentrated and persistent aerosols."
He also points out that people who claim that spores cannot do this without "weaponization" are misleading research (which is EXACTLY what happened when the authors of the Aerosol Science article believed what they read in The Washington Post.)
You just ignore all this. Instead, your argument boils down to a demand that the FBI and the government SHOW us images of the actual spores that are evidence in a murder/terrorist investigation. And you seem to believe that if they do not show you that evidence, then they are LYING about it.
Your argument is a basic "conspiracy theory" argument. If the governent doesn't do as you demand and publicly show confidential information, then there is some kind of vast and sinister conspiracy going on.