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Thanks for the ping. I thought this was an interesting and informative article which has conflicting theories from two leading bioterrorism experts and well worth reading in ny opinion. I tend to agree with each of them to a certain degree. Elbright knows the Trenton area. He is an expert in the field and works at Rutgers (a university known for microbiology studies). Just as Atta and the others were flight school students, I believe that the anthrax perpetrators were also students, only their specialty was microbiology. The article is a couple of months old but I think during that time is when most of the pertinent information was released and is worth going over.

Anthrax whodunit: Conflicting theories on source

By MATT CRENSON The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Bioterrorism experts say the teaspoonful of powdered anthrax spores sent to Sen. Tom Daschle’s office could have come from an Iraqi weapons laboratory or a New Jersey basement.

They say it could have been made by experienced biological weapons scientists or educated amateurs with access to special equipment, techniques and advice. More than six weeks after anthrax-tainted letters began arriving, federal authorities say they still know almost nothing about where the deadly powder comes from or who cooked it up.

“We don’t know its origin,” Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said Wednesday. “We have not ruled out whether this was an act of an individual or a collective act, whether it was a domestic source or a foreign source.” And the experts offer competing theories about the attacker — someone who did an excellent job of covering the tracks.

Terrorists have mailed at least six anthrax-laced letters since the Sept. 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. But the one received by Daschle on Oct. 15 has attracted the most attention from biowarfare experts.

Stunned officials used words like “weaponized” and “potent” to describe the powder in the hours after it wafted out of an envelope addressed to Daschle in crude block letters. Later, a rigorous analysis by the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Md., found that the powdered anthrax in the Daschle letter was the perfect size to float in the air and lodge in the lungs. The powder had also been mixed with silica, a mineral that keeps the particles from clumping together.

Because of those characteristics Army scientists settled on “professionally done” rather than “weaponized” as the best way to describe the powder, Gen. John S. Parker told a Senate subcommittee Oct. 31.

“From what we know about this powder it could have been made by anybody,” said Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist and bioterrorism expert at Rutgers University. Still, whoever did make it knew more than a little bit about germ weapons, said Jonathan B. Tucker, a biowarfare expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington, D.C.

“You’re talking invisibly small particles,” Tucker said. “It does require specialized equipment and know-how.” The terrorists were smart enough to use a common but deadly strain of anthrax, the Ames strain. That strain has never been turned into a weapon by a major state-sponsored biological weapons program, although Iraq reportedly sought to obtain it in the late 1980s.

Iraq has used a strain known as Vollum in its anthrax weapons; the United States used a derivative of the same strain. The Soviet Union created its own genetically engineered anthrax strain far deadlier than any natural form.

Whoever made the weapon sent to Daschle and the news media did not genetically endow the strain with exceptional virulence or resistance to antibiotics, which would have been strong evidence of involvement by a sophisticated state-sponsored weapons program.

In addition to knowledge, it probably took a well-constructed laboratory to produce the high-quality powder that was sent to Daschle’s office, said former United Nations weapons inspector Richard Spertzel. “I would not envision it being done in somebody’s garage or basement,” said Spertzel, who visited Iraq 40 times during his career as a weapons inspector. “You would need a small laboratory and you would have to know exactly what you’re doing.”

If it were set up in a populated area, a clandestine anthrax factory would have to be outfitted with sophisticated containment systems. Without them, the spores would dissipate through the neighborhood just as easily as they did the nation’s mail system, causing an anthrax outbreak.

“The quality of that powder, you start messing around with that without the appropriate safety conditions, you’re going to contaminate everything,” Spertzel said. He believes a foreign country is the source of the anthrax in the Daschle letter, most likely Iraq. But Ebright thinks the powder was produced much closer to its target.

After stealing or purchasing anthrax bacteria from any of hundreds of labs worldwide, Ebright said, the attacker could have outfitted a bioweapons laboratory without straying more than a few miles from the Trenton location where the letters to Daschle, NBC and the New York Post were mailed.

The equipment needed to create a liquid broth of anthrax spores can be purchased by mail from any laboratory supply house, and the process is straightforward enough to be performed by anybody with minimal microbiology training. But to dry that brew into a fine powder of pure spores requires knowledge that few people in the world possess and specialized processing equipment, including spray dryers and grinders. In New Jersey, a region crowded with pharmaceutical and food processing plants, at least the equipment is easy to find.

During the heyday of its biological weapons program, Iraq bought two spray dryers, commonly used in food processing. A scaled-down version of the spray dryers Iraq purchased could be bought used for about $30,000, according to a New Jersey dealer. Grinding equipment to mill the dried anthrax powder into smaller, more deadly grains would cost another $10,000 to $15,000.

“I continue to believe the most likely prospect is that it was produced by a single person or a small group of people locally,” Ebright said. “By locally I mean New Jersey.” Ebright argues that one or two biological weapons experts could have visited New Jersey long before Sept. 11, imparted their rarified knowledge to a few local operatives, then left without ever being noticed. Public health investigators may be thinking along the same lines. They are probing every person and place that Kathy Nguyen, the most recent person to die from inhalation anthrax, encountered in the days before she got sick. Nguyen began to feel ill 16 days after the last known anthrax letter — the one stamped Oct. 9 and sent to Daschle — was postmarked. But most other victims got sick about a week after their exposures. That discrepancy has led investigators to suspect that Nguyen was not infected by tainted mail, but by some other source that she encountered in her daily routine. “She may have been walking by the wrong place at the wrong time,” Spertzel said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody was filling the letters and she walked by outside.”