Do you suppose they had a lab built
somewhere out in the forest?
(Keri, if you are you there somewhere,
I would appreciate your opinion on this)
This is new to me (about the glue). How can the glue not have gotten contaminated if the envelopes were porous enough to let spores through? Wouldn't some spores have gotten on the glue that way?
Also, how would they have put the spores in the envelopes and then sealed them, without disturbing the spores enough for some to bounce and get stuck on the glue? (These are the same uncharged spores that fly easily and don't clump.)
Maybe the spores were placed in the envelopes while still inside some other sealed container? The envelopes would then be sealed, and the inner container would then be destroyed from outside, or maybe the inner container was made of a material that disintegrated. (This is a bit too much like Maxwell Smart, but it could be done.)
Do you suppose they had a lab built somewhere out in the forest?
I'm not convinced that it takes a complex lab to fill envelopes, or to put sealed containers inside envelopes. Certainly the requirements are much less than what's needed to prepare the anthrax spores in the first place.
And there are vast open spaces in the U.S. Mohamed Atta did a lot of traveling in Summer, 2001, for some unknown purpose.
Notice that, after the envelopes were opened, the subsequent contamination was limited. Only a small number of people were infected in a building, and adjacent buildings were not affected at all. (There appear to be only two exceptions to this -- Kathy Nguyen and Ottilie Lundgren.) If the envelopes were filled while on, say, a 50-acre tract, there would be no obvious contamination even if the terrorists had been a bit sloppy.
Even assuming they had vaccinations and prophylactic antibiotics (and that is a fair assumption) every precaution would have been taken.
I think the envelopes were filled in the lab where the spores were produced. There was no charge on the spores, so the question in my mind is not where the envelopes were filled, but how the perps managed to get these spores into the envelopes. Some kind of negative pressure system and a glove-box would be needed, at the least.
It is absurd to think someone could fill paper envelopes with *this* anthrax outside a lab where conditions are not predictable or under control.