Posted on 02/19/2002 6:50:16 AM PST by wimpycat
Edited on 07/06/2004 6:37:18 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
PRINCETON BOROUGH -- An advocate for the control of biological weapons who has been gathering information about last autumn's anthrax attacks said yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly letters.
But the FBI might be "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with "secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
Instead of the FBI "demanding" the attacker be an "American terrorist", I'm thinking all of this is misdirection.
If, as we suspect, the anthrax was delivered by al-Qaeda and originated in Iraq, there is every reason for misdirection.
If this had become public knowledge at the time, there would have been a public outcry for action against Iraq -- something we simply weren't prepared to undertake with a depleted military and ordinance inventory.
Now, with Afghanistan behind us, forces already in the area and the pipeline behind them starting to fill, we can start training the sights on Saddam.
Proof that the anthrax originated in Iraq will also come in handy when our European allies start getting huffy about our "threatening gestures".
There was nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by a premature announcement. I suspect we'll discover the actual source of the anthrax once the stage is properly set.
My personal hunch is
that ATTA was the mastermind
and organizer
of the whole September 11th business,
and that bearded fool in Afghanistan
knew nothing about it.
(Why would ATTA take the risk
of having someone spill the beans????)
Initially formulated his plans
with his friends in Germany.
Eventually they found others
to go along with them.
It probably was ATTA
who approached the Iraqis
and asked for an anthrax sample.
Saddam, who may be dying of cancer, said
"What the heck! Why not give it a try!"
(Not the first time Saddam was known to be reckless.)
If my hunch is correct,
ATTA wanted the world to know.
I doubt anonymous martyrdom was a sufficient force to drive him.
He wanted glory
in this world as well.
Rubbish.
See today's Wall Street Journal
Dr. Paul Keim says the exact opposite.
Because anthrax mutates so slowly,
it almost is impossible
to pinpoint
with precision
the lab
in which the anthrax was produced.
I am listening to more and more about American DIS-information.
I think that the terrrors have been taking notes, watching our methods,and will be mounting new bio attacks!
If the anthrax attack was an inside job, by agents paid by America,I sure hope I am on the jury that gets to vote for the death sentence !
I do however believe Osama knew about it, at least generally enough to fund it and supply the extra martyrs - and, according to him, to speculate that the floors above would crumble.
From the Promed-mail article of 2/13/02:
The main chromosome of the bacteria contains 5 167 515 DNA letters holding information for 5960 genes. The bacterium also contains 2 small rings of DNA known as plasmids, which carry the genes essential for its virulence. The plasmid's DNA was decoded several years ago by scientists at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. Dr. Keim's success came from studying a site on the second of these plasmids called [the] poly-A tract. He found that Ames stocks held in different laboratories varied in the number of A's one of the 4 units of DNA they contained in the poly-A tract. The number of A's varied from 8 to 25.
Differences in Anthrax Strain Used
In Attacks Are Found by Scientists
By MARK SCHOOFS and ANTONIO REGALADO
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Two teams of scientists working with the FBI to track down the anthrax mailer have announced they have found genetic differences among samples of the Ames strain, which is the strain used in last fall's terror attacks.
The breakthroughs -- announced during the past week by researchers at the Institute for Genomic Research, known as TIGR, in Rockville, Md., and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff -- have raised hopes that it might be possible to trace the anthrax used in the terror mailings back to a sample held in a particular laboratory. That, in turn, would allow investigators to focus their probe on that lab -- a strategy the FBI has said it wants to pursue.
But, TIGR President Claire Fraser cautioned, "There's no guarantee that anything anyone's doing will pinpoint where this came from."
The Ames strain of anthrax "is one of the toughest" organisms to distinguish, says NAU's Paul Keim, because the oldest known sample is just 21 years old and it mutates very slowly. So to compare samples, Dr. Keim looks at specific regions of the bacterium's DNA that are known to mutate the quickest and that are therefore more likely to differ among samples. He has collaborated in this work with researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The mutable regions that Dr. Keim focuses on repeat a certain array of genetic letters, such as ATT. The more times this array of letters gets repeated, the longer that stretch of DNA. Dr. Keim compares the length of these variable regions with lined-up lengths of string.
Distinguishing among wholly different strains of anthrax is relatively easy and can be done by comparing just eight mutable regions of DNA. But trying to discriminate among samples within the same strain is much harder.
Dr. Keim compared four samples of the Ames strain -- one taken from a goat that died in 1997 and three taken from laboratories. (Last week, he reported he had compared five strains, which he now says was an error.) Dr. Keim says all the strains were in his laboratory before the investigation began, and he won't discuss his work with the FBI.
Dr. Keim compared those four Ames-strain samples by matching up 36 regions of their DNA. He found no differences whatsoever.
But then he looked at another segment of DNA called a "poly A tract," so named because it repeats the letter A of the genetic code. According to Dr. Keim, this stretch of DNA ranges from about 12 to about 35 A's in a row. The four different samples of Ames each had a different number of A's.
If Dr. Keim's method were used to compare the terror anthrax to samples of the Ames strain housed in different laboratories, the best that investigators could hope for is an exact match -- a sample that has the exact same number of A's on that segment of DNA.
But it is likely that the terror strain won't match up exactly with Ames strains held by any lab, due to mutations. Lacking an exact match, scientists would try to draw a kind of family tree, called a phylogenetic tree, showing how closely related the terror isolate of anthrax is to the samples of the Ames strain held by different laboratories.
Scientists can't draw a tree based on just one genetic marker. So Dr. Keim and other researchers thus are trying to find more markers -- and TIGR announced this week that it has made progress in doing just that.
TIGR scientists have sequenced the entire genome of a reference strain of Ames and of the anthrax that killed Bob Stevens, the first person to die in the bioterrorism mailings. They have found some points where the genetic code differs by just one letter. There are more than five million letters in the genetic code of anthrax; if researchers can identify just several that differ among samples of Ames, that might allow them to home in on the source lab.
At a scientific meeting on Sunday, Dr. Fraser presented data showing TIGR had detected 80 differences that she said were reliable and not due to errors in sequencing the genome. In an interview, she said additional work had narrowed that number to "below 80," but she declined to elaborate. Dr. Fraser cautioned, however, that it would be "premature" to conclude that these findings could trace the terror anthrax back to a particular lab.
Write to Mark Schoofs at mark.schoofs@wsj.com and Antonio Regalado at antonio.regalado@wsj.com
On the truly dispositive issue of the weaponization signature, the government spin machine has been strangely silent. The only people who have been willing to stick their necks out publicly were the five independent experts who told ABCNews that the distinctive weaponization process favored by the Iraqis was used to prepare the anthrax. This assertion was the subject of a curiously-worded, non-denial denial by the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
The phony "sub-typing" spin followed earlier, discredited spin that the anthrax was possibly or probably from (a) a natural source, e.g. a mountain stream, (b) a criminal but not necessarily terrostic source, e.g. a celebrity pissed off at the National Enquirer, (c) a rightwing militiaman's homebrew, (d) a disgruntled, lawnmower-weilding Batelle scientist, etc., etc. This is how public perception management works. And yet, we know that Vice President Cheney and his staff were put on Cipro on 9/11. The origin of the anthrax is the most important national security question facing the United States, since whoever holds it may very well be positioned to kill millions of American citizens. If you read one-on-one interviews with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich, you will appreciate that this is not lost on the national command authority. Naturally, when Bush speaks, he is more circumspect: the POTUS cannot tell the people of the United States that we face a credible threat of massive retaliation by Saddam should we point the finger at him for 9/11 and, for the time being, there is not a damn thing we can do about it. That is a "bad truth," in some ways a humiliating, unacceptable truth. Nevertheless, if you watch what Bush does -- e.g. the massive biodefense budget increase, or his naming of Iraq in the "Axis of Evil," you will see that he is acting completely consistently with the scenario that I have outlined.
Rosenberg is a typical left wing hack, á la Richard Garwin. We can safely ignore her commentary on this matter, which is purely designed to further the standard socialist anti-US, anti-military, pro-globalist, pro-UN agenda.
No. Let's not forget that the primary targets were card carrying liberals. And let's not forget that the letters were written by someone very poorly portraying themselves as Islamic. A muslim, writing in english would not say "Allah is great," he would say "God is great," because "God" is the english word for Allah.
The evidence points very strongly to a far right luny. It's time for normal conservatives to come to grips with the fact that the far off the edge right is just as nutty and just as dangerous as the far off the edge left.
Otherwise we fall into the pit of using "negative evidence" to assert guilt. May I remind you that the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post were NOT ATTACKED! And the premier left-wing media institution in the US, National Public Radio, was likewise not attacked.
Does that mean they engaged in a conspiracy against the two major tabloid format publishers - the New York Post and AMI (National Enquirer)?
It does not. And the same goes for the idea that some right-wingnut did the job.
One of us is badly confused. I'm under the impression that the government is making no bones whatever about having done research on bioweapons, and that news articles for months have reported that they suspect the source of the postal anthrax is a disgruntled US worker who learned about the technology in US labs. I also don't think there's any treaty violation implied. What treaty do you think would be violated and why?
Yeah, sure, like the New York Post, or the Sun tabloid. The original target was the office of the 9/11 hijackers' landlord's office. The first target was chosen, for reasons still unknown, long before anybody but the hijackers themselves would have known about the connection. That fact alone is entirely dispositive of the source of the anthrax. That anybody could even entertain the idea that the anthrax threat campaign is not associated with the 9/11 attacks is a testimony to the almost limitless power of human stupidity.
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