Posted on 10/26/2001 11:19:17 AM PDT by woofie
A bioweapons expert from Sandia National Laboratories says the anthrax-by-mail attacks suggest a degree of sophistication beyond the al-Qaida terrorist organization.
"Unless they bought it from Iraq or something, it's not likely to be al-Qaida," Alan Zelicoff said in an interview Thursday from Washington, D.C. What makes the current attacks different from anthrax outbreaks of the past is not the anthrax itself, but rather the way it has been dispersed, said Zelicoff, who joined Sandia 12 years ago and works for its Center for National Security and Arms Control.
The anthrax in the current attacks has been treated "with materials that make it float in the air. That's no mean trick; it's a hard thing to do," Zelicoff said. "It suggests a sophisticated program with a lot of expertise, not in biology . . . but in aerosol physics."
"That's the big cataclysmic shift," he said.
Ordinarily, anthrax spores would simply fall to the ground, which has kept the bacteria from being a widespread bioterrorism threat in the past.
The current attacks suggest "roomfuls of equipment, specialties in aerosol physics and lots of testing," Zelicoff said.
"It's a hard, hard, hard thing to do and way beyond the capacity" of groups such as the al-Qaida terrorist network or militia organizations, he said.
The United States considers Osama bin Laden, head of al-Qaida, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
A story in Thursday's editions of The Washington Post quoted government sources as saying the anthrax that contaminated Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office might have been made in America. The story said the anthrax was treated with a chemical additive made only in the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq. It quoted an unnamed source as saying "the totality of the evidence in hand" suggests it was unlikely to have come from the former Soviet Union or Iraq.
However, Zelicoff - who stressed he has no information on the threats beyond what he has read in newspapers - said Iraq has the necessary sophistication, based on information released by a United Nations special commission that did weapons inspections in Iraq through much of the 1990s before Iraq closed its borders to inspections.
"They had the drying equipment; they had the milling equipment; they had the aerosol testing equipment, the expertise on staff in engineering and physics, to do this kind of work," he said.
Scientists at several medical labs around the country have spent days analyzing the bacteria from the attacks, but officials have said it's still unclear whether the mailed anthrax spores, which have caused illness in New York, Washington, Florida and New Jersey, all came from the same place.
There have been 13 cases of anthrax nationwide in the past few weeks, most with known connections to mail.
Zelicoff, whose area of expertise is early detection of large-scale dissemination of biological organisms, was in Washington on Thursday to brief Congress about monitoring for biological threats. The briefing was canceled because of the anthrax investigations.
"The truth about routine monitoring is we do not have it," Zelicoff said. "And that will be key if there's large-scale biological (threats) or someone, God forbid, uses a communicable disease such as smallpox or a new influenza strain."
America's public health system - the repository of information about diseases - is severely underused, he said. It's cumbersome for doctors to report disease information, and it's difficult for public health officials to analyze information when they're not getting enough data from doctors.
For example, one of the postal workers who died came in with flulike symptoms. But, Zelicoff said, there had not been a single case of flu reported in Washington since last winter.
"The doctors don't know that. They don't get routine information, not even to say there's not any flu, so they're not going think twice about dismissing" respiratory complaints, he said.
"It's easy to shrug someone off as having flulike symptoms. . . . But if someone is telling me there's not one single case of flu in Albuquerque, I'd think twice about a bad respiratory illness and not shrug it off as flu," said Zelicoff, a medical doctor.
New Mexico has a pilot program aimed at alerting public health experts to unusual cases or clusters of cases as soon as doctors become aware of them. The program currently operates only at University of New Mexico Hospital and at sites connected with Memorial Medical Center in Las Cruces.
The system "gives data to public health officials in Santa Fe who are the experts. . . . They're good at looking at it and saying, We've seen this before, there's no need to worry,' or That's an unusual pattern, we need to start investigating,"he said.
Such a system made easy for doctors to use and widely operated would allow the nation to spot bioterrorism diseases, since they cause severe symptoms in people who ordinarily are healthy.
"It will capture those cases - not as the result of physicians - but because of patterns of unusual disease," Zelicoff said.
But within the capacity of home-grown American "hate" groups? Which is it, folks?
"They had the drying equipment; they had the milling equipment; they had the aerosol testing equipment, the expertise on staff in engineering and physics, to do this kind of work," he said.
Now we know why Saddam went to ground (literally) when the anthrax attack broke publicly.
But, another possibility is it is stolen from the US. The article about the al Qaeda member who was in the US military for years is an eye opener.
An opporative like that could have pilfered some somehwhere along the line.
The real one will be a massive distribution with mutated anthrax.
You need to apologize to me
But not beyond their budget!
The point of the terrorist network is that it is a loosely knit group of cells, all of whom are committed to the downfall of the United States, and dedicated to helping out in each other's plots. For instance, when the FBI stormed a NJ house where a cell was mixing a chemical bomb planned for the UN a couple years ago, they found a famous terrorist bomb expert from Peru with the al-Qaida members. In another case, the FBI also picked up a member of the Japanese Red Army who was also doing specialized work for al-Qaida. (See Yossef Bodany's book TERROR on the first World Trade Center bombing.)
What people aren't yet absorbing is that we are fighting an alliance of world terrorist groups! Al-Qaida is just in the limelight right now.
Imagine this one about slamming airliners into the WTC and Pentagon: "Unless they hijacked the planes or something, it's not likely to be al-Qaida," Alan Zelicoff said. He went on to explain that the terrorists in Afghanistan certainly had no production facilities capable of manufacturing large, twin-engine passenger jets.
Where can I sign up to an "expert" and get my fifteen minutes of fame? Sheesh!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.