Posted on 09/29/2003 2:34:05 PM PDT by GeneD
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The deadly 2001 U.S. anthrax attacks may have been carried out by someone who did not intend to cause any harm, a top FBI official said on Monday.
Of the possibility that a scientist wanted to issue a wake-up call about the bioterrorism threat and it went out of control, FBI Assistant Director Michael Mason told a news conference, "That's a possible theory, but it's all conjecture."
Asked why their had been no other attacks, Mason said, "I suppose the leading thought might be the person didn't intend to cause harm, and did."
The FBI has been investigating anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to the news media and politicians in September and October 2001, which resulted in five deaths in a country already shaken by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mason, who recently took over as head of the Washington field office and the anthrax probe, said the FBI has made some refinements, but no fundamental changes, to the profile of the person believed responsible for the attacks.
According to the profile, the FBI said the person probably was an adult male who may have worked in a laboratory or had a scientific background. He was suspected of working alone.
Mason rejected criticism that the investigation has languished. He said 27 FBI agents, and U.S. Postal Service investigators, continued to work on the investigation, conducting interviews and following scientific leads.
More investigation remained to be done. "There's still much work to be done before we can say with certainty what it may have taken to commit this crime," Mason said.
Really basic psych work here.
"Gee golly whiz maw! I only wanted to scare them with that deadly microbe! I didn't know it was loaded!"
Source?
First one says antibiotic, "Penacilin", doesn't say what for. Second says anthrax.
Would an American scientist or such warn to use penicillin? Not the American-recommended treatment. But used in less sophisticated countries.
So, the perp didn't care a lot.
Why the letters say this? I don't have all the answers but wouldn't the perp say something to call attention to the message? If atrax just went around, would an AQ or such terrorists feel his message was made?
BTW, AQ never says "it's us, AQ!" But the message is sent other ways. What would an AQ terrorist say?
The first message didn't get the point across, so the perp targeted, for the last time, political officials, and specifically said "anthrax." The writing was also more controlled reflecting the perp's intention to make this batch work (doesn't preclude fake Islamist, though).
Would the perp faking an Islamist terrorist know how to fake the sloping envelope lines indicative of a person normally trained to write right to left? Fake islamist knows about America and Israel...but what about the "afraid" angle? Part of the fear psychology of the Islamist mind, though maybe a faker could have picked it up off TV after 9/11.
The mailer could have killed far more people by surreptitiously dispersing it. And it would have been clear it was anthrax, eventually.
But did the mailer have enough for such an attack? And it would be clear it's anthrax...eventually. Is "eventually" what an AQ terrorist wants? And would anonymous dousing be effectively linked to AQ and it's message?
And had far more terror effect.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe other plans for other things were in the works. And if they followed the Aum Shinrikyo example, they learned that Aum's public disbursement of atrax didn't work.
But, it's essentially the "PC" of FR to blindly toe the AQ line on the anthrax attacks and simply make snide mocking comments to anything that even remotely hints of anything to the contrary,
I'm open to other theories, and don't discount yours. But I've seen so many "remote hints" that are so laughable, and so much proposed by the govt., that I question them from the onset. Ask yourself, if you ran the government, and wanted to keep people calm, which story would you tell?
and basically blindly ignore the above, the fact the only government targets were Democratic senators, etc.
The "etc." is what? New York Post was hit, they're conservative and pro-Israel, vocally. Ask yourself, if Democrats were specifically hit, who else other than "right wing guy" would so target? Despite what one might read on FR, democrats were associated with supporting Israel, not republicans. Bush had much Arab support before 9/11. His family is old friends with the shieks.
Daschle is an obvious target being a big name. Why Leahy? Maybe the perp has Vermont contacts. Or maybe, as Pokerbuddy0 has found, Leahy and his "Leahy Law" would be especially odious to AQ and Arab govts. Or the perp just saw their faces a lot on TV after 9/11. Wouldn't right wing guy target the big bugaboo of a Vermont senator - Jumpin' Jim Jeffords?
Anyways, I don't totally discount the "domestic-domestic" theory. I find it flaky. And it is over-reported compared to other theories. Just as flaky as the govt's attempts to claim that Hadayet at the Los Angeles Airport wasn't a terrorist attack. Why they say it? Airline industry worries.
"...Asked why their had been no other attacks, Mason said, "I suppose the leading thought might be the person didn't intend to cause harm, and did."
Jeez, the mailer, whoever he was, KNEW he killed Stevens before he mailed the second batch!
Contrast with the following, from http://www.research.umn.edu/research/gia/SP03Kortshagen.htm:
A variety of plasma processes has been used to demonstrate plasma decontamination and sterilization....
...Corona discharges around sharp pointed electrodes were used in ref. [3] to destroy concentrations of 1010/ml of E. coli and B. subtilis spores in less than 15 minutes. A corona discharge was also used in ref. [4] where the role of H2O2 admixture to the gas was studied. Another discharge type that was studied by several groups is the so called “atmospheric pressure glow discharge” [5,6] . In this type of discharge, plasma is produced by applying an AC high voltage to a pair of plane parallel plates. The tendency of this arrangement to form violent spark discharges is prevented by covering the electrodes with an electrically insulating dielectric. The current flow in the plasma leads to a charge build up on the insulator that reduces the voltage and quenches the plasma. Laroussi used a discharge in helium with traces of air to destruct a concentration of 4x106/ml of cells of P. fluorecens [7] in 10 minutes. Kelly-Wintenberg et al. [8] used a similar discharge to inactivate B. subtilis spores. A variation of the pulsed atmospheric pressure glow discharge is the resistive barrier discharge, in which the non-conducting dielectrics are replaced by resistive barriers in order to prevent spark formation. Laroussi and co-workers [9,10] used helium plasmas produced with this discharge type to achieve a four order of magnitude reduction of B. subtilis cells in about 10 min.
While the above mentioned schemes are advantageous compared to low pressure plasmas they still require stationary electrode set-ups that make this unsuitable for mobile decontamination applications. This problem was overcome by the atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ) proposed in [11] (Figure 1) that can be designed in a mobile form such as a handheld spray gun. In this scheme plasma is created by a applying a high frequency voltage to two cylindrical, coaxial electrodes. The authors report the inactivation of spores of B. globigii, a stimulant for anthrax [12] ....
Click on the link above if you want to see the references; I haven't checked them myself.
If the deactivation effect were to occur as described here, it would appear to make moot the weaponization effect that has been suggested. One would have to be able to apply the technique for physical weaponization without causing biological deactivation of the spores.
Comments?
How would one estimate the charge from the information we have?
Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that the process used was the one that you've proposed. As I understand it, first the spores would be coated with silica, in some way similar to what's done in that research paper you've mentioned on inhalational delivery of pharmaceuticals. Then the coated spores would be exposed to large numbers of high-energy electrons in order to give the particles a charge. Correct?
The question I have at this point is: What would actually become ionized in this scenario? The silica? Or molecules in the spores themselves? Or both?
Is the idea here that the spores could be grown directly on the tiny particles of silica? What would keep large numbers of spores from growing on the same particle, forming too large an agglomeration?
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