Allan,
I’d be glad to post at length my lay understanding of the technical issues as soon as tomorrow after I’ve heard and incorporated the information from the FBI’s press conference. To sum up, though, I credit Gary and Stuart’s understanding the reason for the AFIP detection of silica, I just think the silica
— or actually I think it was a siliconizing solution — was in the culture medium. That resulted in the “silicon signature.” That led to its great flyability. The purpose was explained in the PhD thesis by Dr. Crockett. She credits Dr. Alibek and Dr. Patrick. She was two doors down from Al-Timimi.
I also agree with Stuart that a unipolar charge was imparted. I’ve suggested it was imparted after filling the envelope.
I believe the US DOJ has reason to think that Andrew Card’s former assistant, Ali Al-Timimi, accessed this information at Discovery Hall. That year, this man working with the 911 imam and Bin Laden’s sheik, would be 15 feet from the leading anthrax scientist and the former deputy USAMRIID. He would preach on the end of times along the likes of Abdel-Rahman’s son, who was on the AQ 3-member WMD commander. He spoke alongside leading jihadists on the end of times and inevitable clash of civilizations, and even supervised the former founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad writing for a periodical. When the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology first detected silica, the former USAMRIID deputy commander Bailey said he wasn’t going to explain the reason for the silica because he didn’t want to give terrorists any ideas. Well, as he said, Ali’s desk was perhaps not more than 15 feet away. So it falls under the category of “Oops, too late.” As Dr. Alibek would say, this isn’t rocket science. If Amerithrax is closed with Dr. Ivins, who merely was the original source of the stream of matching samples, then the US Attorney Jeff Taylor should resign and there needs to be an investigation by the US DOJ Inspector General. The suicide no doubt caught the DOJ off guard. It’s never too late to correct their course.
TrebelRebel:
I believe you know something about aerosolization.
I would be extremely grateful
if you briefly could describe the equipment used to aerosolize products,
how large it is,
what it looks like
etc.
Also
Do you think such equipment could be made operate in a BL3 lab
without contaminating the environment?