Posted on 07/01/2007 8:58:07 AM PDT by TrebleRebel
WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1992, Kanatjan Alibekov defected from Russia to the United States, bringing detailed, and chilling, descriptions of his role in making biological weapons for the former Soviet Union.
----------- Officials still value his seminal depictions of the Soviet program. But recent events have propelled questions about Alibek's reliability:
No biological weapon of mass destruction has been found in Iraq. His most sensational research findings, with U.S. colleagues, have not withstood peer review by scientific specialists. His promotion of nonprescription pills — sold in his name over the Internet and claiming to bolster the immune system — was ridiculed by some scientists. He resigned as executive director of a Virginia university's biodefense center 10 months ago while facing internal strife over his stewardship.
And, as Alibek raised fear of bioterrorism in the United States, he also has sought to profit from that fear.
By his count, Alibek has won about $28 million in federal grants or contracts for himself or entities that hired him.
The Los Angeles Times explored Alibek's public pronouncements, research and business activities as part of a series that will examine companies and government officials central to the U.S. war on terrorism -----------------------
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Why did Meselson lie about the spectrum AFIP published to C&E News?
Hmmm. That's your "best example?" I see it as a very good example of how YOU twist the facts. Let's look at the key paragraphs from that Chemical & Engineering News article:
At an Oct. 29, 2001, White House press briefing, Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, then-commanding general of the Army's Medical Research & Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, said silica had been found in the Daschle letter. Tom Ridge, then-director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, at a briefing a few days earlier said a binding agent had been used to make the anthrax powders.
As one of the former government officials tells C&EN, "Those judgments were premature and frankly wrong." At the height of the attacks, top government officials with no scientific background received briefings from people who also were not scientists, and "the nuances got lost," he explains.
Sometimes scientists misspoke as well, as was the case with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. AFIP studied the anthrax powder from the Daschle letter using energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, and a top AFIP scientist, Florabell G. Mullick, reported the presence of silica in an AFIP newsletter. Yet, the spectrum AFIP released shows a peak for the element silicon, not silicon dioxide (silica).
Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew S. Meselson, who has consulted for the FBI on the anthrax probe, dismisses these early statements as misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the scientific studies conducted on the Daschle powder. "I don't know of anybody with spore expertise who actually worked on the stuff who said the spores were coated," he says. The FBI has never publicly claimed the spores were coated with silica and, in fact, told members of Congress at classified briefings that the spores were not coated, he says.
And from all this, the only thing you can find to support your argument is a statement about whether AFIP's illustration shows silicon or silica? That's pretty desperate.
First of all, that comment about "a peak" was written by the author of the article. It's not a quote from Professor Meselson. You are twisting the facts.
Secondly, you are twisting the facts by changing what was said to your version: "it shows peaks for silicon dioxide (silica)."
Yes, it shows peaks for silicon and oxygen. Yes, it shows a peak for silicon. But, it's also an example. It is NOT a spectrograph of what was in the attack anthrax. What was in the attack anthrax was evidently NOT silica but polymerized glass resulting from lab contamination. So, it's important for everyone to know that peaks for silicon and oxygen do NOT have to indicate silica. Polymerized glass would also show such peaks.
Why did Meselson lie about the spectrum?
The FACTS are that AFIP published a spectrum of silicon dioxide.
The FACTS are that Meselson spoofed Lois Embers, author of the C&E News article, into believing that they published a spectrum of silicon and NOT silicon dioxide (silica).
The FACT is that Meselson lied.
The FACT is that this is now the fourth example of scientific misconduct by Meselson.
You seem to see Professor Meselson as some super mastermind behind some vast government conspiracy. But, as shown in my response above, you have to wildly distort the facts to promote that belief.
Do you find it totally impossible to discuss the anthrax attacks of 2001 without launching some kind of personal attack upon Professor Meselson?
Really? Were you there during that interview? Or are you just demonstrating that you have no facts of any kind to support your belief that the attack spores were coated with silica, so you must change the subject to an idiotic personal attack upon Professor Meselson?
You are the one changes the subject to put a smokescreen around the real question.
Why did Meselson tell Lois Embers that AFIP scientists published a spectrum of silicon when the FACTS show that they published a spectrum of silicon oxide.
I think you know the answer. Meselson has no data. Thus he has to lie about the real data.
That may be the "real question" to a conspiracy theorist like yourself who believes there is some evil mastermind who is manipulating the FBI, the scientific community and the media just to show that your beliefs are absolute nonsense. But for the rest of us here, this thread is about the anthrax attacks of 2001.
Would you characterize Meselson’s manipulation of the media after Sverdlovsk as the work of an evil mastermind? Or would you characterize it as the work of a misguided scientist who was eager to cover up the FACT that the treaty he pushed nations to sign was being broken? Either way, you have to agree that he certainly did manipulate the media by providing false statements to them.
excerpts from Mangold and Goldberg’s Plague Wars:
CHAPTER NINE Incident at Sverdlovsk
Page 76:
The Soviets now went to extraordinary lengths to buttress their lies and make them supportable and credible worldwide. What had begun as a local cover-up in Sverdlovsk, now became an international fairy tale, a fiction of breathtaking audacity.
Page 77:
Throughout the rest of the 1980s, Matthew Meselson, a respected Harvard professor of microbiology and longtime arms control activist, unwittingly helped the Soviet caravan of deception and disinformation gain acceptance in the West.
Meselson emerged as the leading scientific expert to oppose his own government’s interpretation of Sverdlovsk in favour of the Soviets’ old tainted-meat cover-up. He defended the Soviets’ case publicly and doubtless from the most honest of beliefs. President Reagan was now in the White House and, no matter how forcefully his administration complained about Sverdlovsk, Meselson remained utterly convinced that there had been an accident with bad meat and it had nothing to do with any secret biological weapons plant.
.........
With his well-deserved and impressive academic/scientific credentials, his views were usually sought and carefully listened to. He also became an important figure for the US media to consult. His opinions about Sverdlovsk were widely quoted in the serious press, books, and prestigious scientific journals. The record shows that after 1980 his publicly stated views on Sverdlovsk broadly agreed with the explanations issued by the Soviets themselves.
Page 81:
But the guilty involvement reached even higher. Next, it emerged that Boris Yelstin himself also must have known about the cover-up. In May 1992, Yeltsin’s new Russian government formally acknowledged what was now well known, but still had no official imprimatur. The man who had been the powerful communist party chief of the Sverdlovsk region in 1979 was none other than President Boris Yeltsin. He now admitted that the outbreak had been caused by an accident at the biological weapons facility, and not by natural causes. This presumably correct version became the official position of the Russian government, and remains so to this day.
Meselson, however, remained unfazed. In the face of Yeltsin’s admission and the Russian and US press disclosures, the professor assembled a team of expert American scientists and went with them to Sverdlovsk in June 1992 to see for himself. They interviewed two outstanding Sverdlovsk doctors Faina Abramova and Lev Grinberg who participated in the 1979 autopsies at Hospital 40. For thirteen years, these brave pathologists had secretly hidden incontrovertible medial evidence from the KGB including preserved tissue samples, slides, and autopsy reports which proved that the victims had died from breathing in the anthrax.
Meselson later claimed that he and his team had made the discovery of the new truth from these important witnesses, but again, the facts were against him. The two Russian doctors had previously spoken to Soviet reporters and the Wall Street Journal, so Meselson was simply taking credit for being the final arbiter who had authenticated the evidence.
After making a second trip to Sverdlovsk, Mesleson finally published his results in 1994 in the journal Science; the article accepted that the tainted-meat story was bogus. But, perversely, he still would not admit that the US government had been right for fifteen years, or that he had been wrong. Rather, he trumpeted the fact that he anf his team had finally uncovered the “defenitive proof” that the true cause of the outbreak was pulmonary anthrax.
“This should end the argument about where the outbreak came from,” Meselson somewhat pompously told the New York Times “Right up until now, people have still been debating the matter.”
Yet, to the bitter end, Meselson still clung to a benign interpretation of Soviet motives. He noted that the cause of the accident was still not determined, which implied that it may have involved only a Soviet research centre, one for finding an antidote to an anthrax attack, and not a military production centre for biological weapons. By clinging to this position, he could still argue that the Soviets were not violating the BWC, but were conducting permissable research under the treaty.
I acknowledge that the spectrum above is indeed a silica spectrum. It's an image taken specifically to show what the silica spectrum looks like.
Are you claiming that Meselson told the truth and AFIP DID publish a spectrum of only silicon?
There's no reason to believe Meselson had anything to do with the statement about silicon in the article. And it's ridiculous to argue that when someone says the peak is for silicon, that they're wrong. The main peak IS for silicon. Yes, there are very much lesser peaks for oxygen and carbon. But it's still a stupid argument over wording.
And it's ridiculous beyond belief to assume that some evil mastermind was behind the wording used in the article!
I would characterize this whole obsession you have about Professor Meselson as being pathological. It twists everything YOU say, making everything YOU say open to question. You've shown that YOU twist the facts endlessly to promote your beliefs.
I have no interest in what Professor Meselson did outside of the statements he has made about the anthrax spores used in the attacks of 2001. Everything else is irrelevant. You just endlessly bring up irrelevant matters because you have been shown to be totally wrong about the anthrax attacks of 2001, and you wish to sidetrack the conversation to something else.
Why do you think Meselson’s track record in talking to the media about anthrax is irrelevant?
Do you or do you not agree that he manipulated the media over the anthrax release in Sverdlovsk? Or are the authors of Plague Wars wrong?
Why is that everytime the subject of silica has come up Mesleson’s name seems to be connected with it?
Just to remind you, he wrote a letter to the WP stating that the silica finding may only be a rumor and that people should wait until knowledegable government officials announce their results.
Knowledgeable government officials (AFIP) then did indeed announce their results just as Mesleson asked for. They stated that silica was the key component that caused the Daschle anthrax to fly.
But then Mesleson went out of his way over many years to either deny the existence of the AFIP statement or distort it. The distortion in the C&E News article is transparent as I have already demonstrated.
Because this thread is not about Professor Meselson's "track record". This thread is about the anthrax attacks of 2001.
Because you are merely using your pathological hatred of Professor Meselson as an excuse to distract people away from the fact that you have been totally wrong about nearly everything you've said regarding the anthrax used in the attacks of 2001.
Because nearly everything that Professor Meselson has said about the attack anthrax of 2001 can be verified via other sources. His observations about the Daschle anthrax were confirmed by Ken Alibek and match the image published in Richard Preston's book and the descriptions of "pure spores" stated repeatedly by people who have actually seen the attack anthrax. Meselson's observations are also confirmed by FBI scientist Douglas Beecher. Meselson's comments about the lab contamination reports from 1980 can be verified by looking at the reports. (I have copies.)
Because what Professor Meselson has said about the attack anthrax of 2001 is based upon good science, while nearly everything you seem to believe can be shown to be total nonsense and BAD science.
So why did Meselson conduct a media campaign to mislead the world about the anthrax at Sverdlovsk, as has been well documented, and as even you agree with?
And why did he say AFIP did not publish a silica spectrum, as has also been well docuumented? Even you agree AFIP published a silica spectrum.
They "announced" those speculative "results" in a self-serving newsletter. It was a newsletter written to show employees of AFIP what kind of work AFIP is doing and how important that work is. It was NOT a scientific report, even though you endlessly try to make it appear so.
If Professor Meselson is going out of his way to clear up BAD INFORMATION from AFIP, he should be applauded for his efforts. If he goes out of his way to clear up the nonsense published in the media about silica coatings, he should be applauded for doing so.
You can argue that because you do not like Professor Meselson, everything he says is wrong. But such an argument can be seen to be just plain ridiculous by anyone looking at the actual data. Even though you endlessly try to twist and distort things, the FACTS support Professor Meselson.
So cleaning up “bad” information from AFIP involves making misleading statements about it, right?
Like claiming they published a spectrum showing only silicon and not silica, right?
Does Meselson still claim less than 1 g of anthrax was released at Sverdlovsk?
As stated above, the comment was made by the author of the article. We have nothing to show that what the author wrote had anything to do with what Professor Meselson said. We certainly don't have any actual quote from Professor Meselson.
You may believe that Professor Meselson is "misleading the media," even though the C&EN article clearly shows that the author interviewed MANY sources. You may believe that Professor Meselson "duped" Douglas Beecher into adding comments about the attack anthrax to his report, but that report was supported by many scientists who actually worked with the attack anthrax.
You may see Professor Meselson as some evil mastermind who is misleading the media and duping FBI scientists in order to show you to be wrong about the attack anthrax. But the FACTS also show you to be wrong. And arguing about petty matters and things that happened 30 years ago doesn't change the fact that YOU are the one who is trying to mislead the media and everyone else about the attack anthrax of 2001. It seems very clear that you attack Professor Meselson because he is showing that everything you have said about the attack anthrax of 2001 was a load of crap.
But why did Meselson tell the C&E News reporter (Lois Embers) that AFIP did NOT publish a silica spectrum when they DID publish a silica spectrum?
I would hardly call the Sverdlovsk events “petty matters”. Meselson put people’s lives in jeopardy (directly for outstanding Sverdlovsk doctors Faina Abramova and Lev Grinberg) so he could promote his false story about contamintated sausages).
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