Zack,
Here is a question I’d like you to ask one of your experts:
The recovered letters
with the anthrax in them,
to which lab were they taken,
a BL3 lab or a BL4 lab???
You saw the anthrax simulant expert’s opinion they were loaded wet and then it was dried, right? If so, and if it is feasible, why doesn’t that suffice? Load it. Put it in a plastic bag. You’re done. No muss. No fuss.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17pubed.html
The Public Editor — Headlines and Exonerations
By CLARK HOYT
Published: August 16, 2008
LATE on Aug. 8, the Justice Department finally exonerated Steven J. Hatfill, acknowledging six years after labeling him a “person of interest” that he was not the man who killed five people with anthrax attacks on Congress and news organizations in 2001.
If the intent was to call as little attention as possible to what amounted to a painful admission of error — Hatfill said his life and career were ruined by government leaks that wrongly painted him as the murderer — the timing could not have been better. It was a summer Friday afternoon [like the latest story], and the news was about to be swamped by the opening ceremonies at the Olympics. Weeks earlier, in a terse, two-paragraph statement, the Justice Department had announced that it was settling a lawsuit by Hatfill with a deal that would cost taxpayers $4.6 million.
...
Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times Op-Ed columnist, intends to be more stand-up. He pointed to Hatfill as someone needing closer investigation in a series of columns in 2002 castigating the F.B.I. for “an unbelievably lethargic” investigation of the anthrax attacks. Now that Hatfill, a former government biologist, has been formally cleared, Kristof told me he plans to write a column looking back on the case and apologizing to Hatfill for any “extra scrutiny and upheaval the columns brought to him, and wrestling with the journalistic issues involved.”
...