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.
I'd say this is flat out lies and manipulation from somebody.
Last week's issue of New Scientist, 20 October 2001 issue, -- a very well respected British science journal -- contained an editorial which commented on a US Defense Department study from last year in which 1.6 million dollars was spent to fund "people with only a base technical knowledge" and see if they could _culture_ and _weaponize_ an organism very similar to anthrax. Contrary to expectations, the test subjects were able to grow a large amount of the material _and_ they were able to mill it down to inhalation size...
Of course, that says nothing of this "special coating" which is supposed to on the anthrax from the east coast.
But, at this point, I'm coming very close to dismissing _everything_ I get from the mainstream media...
Mark W.
Just because al-Queda can't make suitcase nukes doesn't mean they can't blow one off in downtown Tulsa.
Whoever is mailing this Anthrax is PROBABLY, maybe I'm wrong here, but PROBABLY not ther same person who manufactured it.
Dunce...
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.
Simple fact is, the Chicoms didn't go through decades of weapons development to produce a Neutron bomb or the merving capabilities, so Osama pig Laden could have purchased the data and equipment, set it up inside Afghaniscan and hire ex-Russian or current Pakistani scientists to work there. Truth is, the weaponizing of anthrax is not as sophisticated a thing as the author would have us believe, especially when you consider that the technologies are already worked out by our weaponization and for sale from the leftists bastards that want U.S. humbled.
It's not militia organizations, they would have been burned like the people at Waco were or already busted like the Texas Republic for far less than sophisticated anthrax labs. One thing we know, the government was not monitoring foreign groups, but it was very closely monitoring militia and right wing groups.
I also think the hoof-and-mouth disease epidemic that England just had was a field trial or done to weaken England.
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