MAG: Mailed Anthrax 'More Sophisticated Than Any Form Previously Known'

Newsweek via MSNBC ^ | 4/7/02 | Mark Hosenball, John Barry and Daniel Klaidman

[Brian Mosely]

Last fall FBI profilers announced that the person who sent deadly anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and Capitol Hill was probably a grudge-bearing, sociopathic male laboratory nerd with knowledge of the geography of Trenton, N.J. But a new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a

[Lessismore]

After the signing of the bioweapons treaty, some US biowarfare programs would have been converted to "defensive" studies, while others would have gone completely black.

The anthrax attacks had the effect of providing:

• a psychological link between the attack on the WTC, which used conventional means in an innovative way, with "Weapons of Mass Desctruction", and
• an amplification of the threat from Al Queada, which was essentially a privately run terrorist organization, to a threat associated with state-sponsored terrorism. Motive, means, opportunity.

[Ranger]

When Castro was in Iran last year didn't he announce a joint pharmaceutical and scientific program with them? At the time, some Freepers said that meant biological warfare as Iran already has a self-supporting pharmaceutical industry for its domestic needs?

[Ranger]

Thanks. I didn't realize it was from Texas to start with.

[Mitchell]

The earlier ones where described as the Ames strain. This is now claimed to be a natural strain out of Texas.

The Ames strain is from Texas, isn't it (in spite of the name)?

[chaosagent]

My question is...if this was such a highly deadly strain, why didn't it kill more people?

You mostly had senior citizens getting killed by this.

Is anthrax just not as big a threat as they're making out?

[Excuse_Me]

It was leaked in Newsweek which means the leakers wanted a wide mainstream distribution of the info. If this is later followed up with later more official reports that the strain is from Iraq, we will know that an invation will be mounted soon.

I don't think it was Iraq, or it would have come out sooner. They have been looking only for Pakistanis so far for the perps. They looked at a house where 4 Pakistanis lived in Trenton, and went into two Pakistani doctors' homes in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Australian newspapers reported they were looking for Pakistanis and only Pakistanis. I think it is quite possible that the I.S.I. created this for bin Laden, and they didn't want that fact coming out while Musharraf was co-operating. So they floated the lone nut right-winger story, because it worked so well in the Okalhoma City bombing.

[Mitchell]

U.S. investigators can’t rule out the possibility that a foreign government, perhaps Iraq but more likely the former U.S.S.R., could have put together such a team.

It could also have been China (among other possibilities). Notice that there's other news today also: The leader of the Liberal Party in Japan stated that Japan could easily and quickly build thousands of nuclear warheads; he made it clear that this was a threat against China.

When all is said and done, I think we will find that Bush's "axis of evil" wasn't just a figure of speech; it was based on his knowledge that we are up against an alliance of other countries.

I've been wondering for some time if, in the end, Japan will save us much as we saved the U.K. in World War II. (The rearmament of Japan, which is inevitable at some point, will change the whole balance of power in the world. Their disarmament was forced on them by the U.S., but it's no longer to our advantage for Japan to be disarmed. Therefore....)

[The Great Satan]

Is anthrax just not as big a threat as they're making out?

Anthrax Scenarios

[Free the USA]

fyi

[The Great Satan]

One of the scenarios described in the link above:

Assessment: An Anthrax Attack on Washington D.C.

A 1993 report by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment outlines a possible biological terrorism attack on Washington D.C. The imaginary perpetrators used a small airplane to deliver 100 kg (about 220 pounds) of anthrax spores upwind of the city. The number of fatalities would, according to the estimates, vary greatly depending on the weather conditions. The best-case scenario calculates the number of deaths to somewhere between 130,000 and 460,000. A medium estimation counts 420,000 to 1,400,000. The worst-case scenario recognizes that between 1 million to 3 million persons could die as the result of the attack. A fatality rate similar to, or even higher than, that of a hydrogen bomb.

I remind you that the gist of the article we are discussing is that the sample of anthrax sent to Daschle is of the highest grade of weaponization ever seen, exceeding anything ever developed by the US military.

[Helms]

Testing the produst for lethality takes hundreds of tests on Rhesus monkeys.

Don't bother here w/ monkeys, Iraq would easily use humans.

Also let us not forget that at least one of the bombers was treated for anthrax exposure.

No surprise that they went after the media outlets they did.

[chaosagent]

Then why would someone go to all the trouble and spend probabaly millions of dollars and not use it as a weapon.

What did they accompish?

[chaosagent]

Then why didn't they do this after spending all this time and money developing it?

[The Great Satan]

For the same reason we haven't nuked everybody we don't like, after spending trillions of dollars on our nuclear arsenal.

[chaosagent]

Then what did it accomplish as a warning?

[The Great Satan]

It told Bush not to point the finger at the real architect of 9/11, Saddam Hussein. So far, it has worked perfectly.

[chaosagent]

Seems like to me Bush has given every indication he plans on going after Saddam, and soon.

[The Great Satan]

Oh, really. How long is it since 9/11? How "soon" are we going to attack Saddam? Why won't Bush say outright whether he believes Saddam was linked to (i.e. responsible for) 9/11? Why does he waffle on that subject? Why has the public been treated to a six-month cavalcade of preposterous theories about the nature and source of the anthrax, when Dick Cheney and his staff were put on Cipro the night of 9-11-2001?

When two sides are in a standoff, both armed with weapons of annihilation, they can bluster and posture all they like. But that's all they do. That's where we are right now, in a nuclear-biological standoff with Iraq.

[Irene Adler]

"You are corretc of course. It now seems that anthrax was weaponized with a novel technique, using a novel mixture of inorganic elements for coating. It's one thing for a knowlegeable scientist to think of a way of doing this - it's another thing to actually do it. To do it takes huge resources, that only a state can provide. Testing the produst for lethality takes hundreds of tests on Rhesus monkeys. Try doing that in your bathroom."

Or kitchen. This is exactly my thinking. It's one thing for a supposedly brilliant, rogue, mad-scientist type to dream something like this up; it's quite another to actually produce it without sophisticated equipment and chemical compounds and processes that are available only in a pretty high-level lab.