I’ve subjected the email that FoxNews correspondent Cathering Herridge was waving around to scanning electron microscope (SEM) — or was it a Transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
I get confused on the difference. I also zoomed in on it using a big screen tv — and I have bifocals.
As best as I can make out it is titled “HOT News.” It is from Bruce himself. He wrote it to his friend Patricia Fellows, who had left for SRI. This is the email that recounts how one fellow in his examination found that it matched most closely what another fellow had made. The media reports that the FBI suggests that it was an attempt to deflect suspicion. The email is a little confusing, and one might interpret it as meaning the stuff made by the one fellow linked to USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick rather than at Battelle. Hurried writing in emails or internet posts can be like that.
If there were less compartmentalization among scientists and investigators — and the public spent more time informing itself about Zawahiri’s effort to infiltrate US and UK biodefense establishment — there would be less sensitivity about this email.
Ivins always argued passionately that Al Qaeda was responsible for the mailings. See WSJ.
A bioevangelist theory, IMO, was always mistaken. The investigators on the one investigator squad were just not in a position to judge the quality of their sorority theory. Besides, it was their job to develop the best possible case under a bioevangelist theory. Which they seem to have done.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the FBI is not as confused as it seems and they were just caught off-guard by Dr. Ivins’ suicide. And they are making this up as they are going along — using intense surveillance, electronic and otherwise, in the hopes of bringing this case to a successful resolution.
While we wait to have some more shoes dropped, consider this: Who are the FBI undercover operatives? Where’s Waldo? In an investigation this well-funded, surely the DOJ has more imaginative use for its resources than paying GS-11’s to follow other people around to public libraries. They must be doing some really cool stuff with undercover agents and electronic mikes spiked through bedroom walls.
Remember: look around. Look to your left. Look to your right. If you can’t spot the undercover FBI operative, it’s probably you.
And if you don’t know where Aafia Siddiqui has been for the past 5 years, you may not be read into the case.
Consider the dummy office they set up for suspected spy Robert Hanssen.
There were so many waves going through that office he might have just as well been in a microwave.
Are we really going to get our insights from Amerithrax from press accounts that suggest, for example, that Ivins moved to Gaithersburg and lived a block away from Dr. Haigwood — when the readily available news articles from the time show he and his wife had moved from Gaithersburg in January 1981?
Amerithrax is far more interesting than this stupid concocted sorority narrative that on its face never made any sense and was not a coherent theory. Mind you, it was perfectly appropriate for a probable cause affidavit and we would want the FBI to leave “no stone unturned.”
Once an FBI fan-boy, always an FBI fan-boy.