Here’s the wishy-washy statement. It says precisely nothing. What it does say is, in fact, total BS.
Here’s the letter:
http://abcnews.go.com/images/WNT/fbi_holt_letter092806.pdf
“Contrary to the assertions in your letter, the investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001 has made significant progress and has been one of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted.”
As to the new scientific study showing the anthrax used in 2001 to be less sophisticated than previously thought, the FBI wrote, “Since the earliest months of this investigation, we have consulted with the world’s foremost scientific experts on anthrax and relevant bio-forensic sciences, both inside and outside the FBI. While there have been erroneous media reports about the character of the 2001 anthrax, the FBI’s investigation has never been guided by such reports.”
That is clearly total BS. We had Mason admitting in September 2003 that the FBI failed to reproduce the senate powder (link below). That is hardly consistent with the BS letter to Holt above.
Of course since you usually read the complete opposite of what is written on this case, I assume you read the words “FBI succeeds to re-create anthrax production” instead of “FBI fails to re-create anthrax production”
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/fbifailsanthrax.html
WASHINGTON — Two years after the nation’s deadly anthrax attacks, the FBI still has not been able to re-create the process the killer used to produce the substance sent through the U.S. mail, a top FBI official said Monday.
But Michael Mason, the new assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, said testing has helped investigators “narrow” some aspects of the investigation and convinced them that the culprit has special expertise.
They can say that again! And the dumbest of the "erroneous media reports" are the reports that a single failed test at Dugway meant that "The FBI failed to recreate" the attack anthrax powder, and that that somehow means that the anthrax powder was supersophisticated. That is just plain STUPID. That is probably why you believe it so thoroughly.
That is not what happened at all. We now know that from the December 4, 2006, issue of Chemical & Engineering News which contained this:
This September, Joseph Persichini Jr., acting assistant director of the FBI's Washington field office, acknowledged the major, if unheralded, role science is playing in the probe. Yet the FBI has said little about what science has revealed, citing the criminal nature of the case as its reason. What scientific tidbits the public has been fed come from media reports, and most of these have been incorrect or incomplete.
And particularly this:
Daniel Martin, a microbiologist in Dugway's Life Sciences Division, tells C&EN that Dugway was asked "to produce materials to see how they compared with the materials the FBI had in its possession." But, Martin says, Dugway did not reverse or back engineer the attack powder. "Back engineering implies that you know exactly what the material is and can replicate the material exactly, step by step." That isn't what Dugway did, he says.
Instead, Martin says, Dugway used the Leahy powder as the culture starter to "produce several different preparations using different media, and different ways of drying and milling the preparation" that the FBI could use for comparison purposes. Dugway, he says, never analyzed the Leahy powder and did no comparative analyses between the preparations made and the Leahy powder.