What about the "schism" that developed amongst scientists familiar with the Daschle-Leahy anthrax samples? Well, Matsumoto is an establishment journalist, which means that he is not permitted to think aloud in public. So he is careful to separate the John Ashcroft designation of Steven Hatfill in August 2002 as a "person of interest" from what follows way below in the article, and careful not to integrate the two facts into a coherent narrative, but to his full credit he does all that he can with a picture that is worth a thousand words. Hatfill is grimacing in fury, not the furtive guilt of a trapped perpetrator:
About-faceBy the fall of 2002, the awe-inspiring anthrax of the previous spring had morphed into something decidedly less fearsome. According to sources on Capitol Hill, FBI scientists now reported that there was "no additive" in the Senate anthrax at all. Alibek said he examined electron micrographs of the anthrax spores sent to Senator Daschle and saw no silica. "But I couldn't be absolutely sure," Alibek says, "because I only saw three to five of these electron micrographs." Even the astonishingly uniform particle size of 1.5 to 3 micrometers, mentioned in 2001 by Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), now included whopping 100-micrometer agglomerates, according to the new FBI description recounted by Capitol Hill aides. The reversal was so extreme that the former chief biological weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission, Richard Spertzel, found it hard to accept. "No silica, big particles, manual milling," he says: "That's what they're saying now, and that radically contradicts everything we were told during the first year of this investigation."
In the cold. The U.S. Justice Department revealed that it was investigating scientist Steven Hatfill (bottom), formerly of Fort Detrick, and searched a nearby pond for clues.
Glassy finish
More revealing than the electrostatic charge, some experts say, was a technique used to anchor silica nanoparticles to the surface of spores. About a year and a half ago, a laboratory analyzing the Senate anthrax spores for the FBI reported the discovery of what appeared to be a chemical additive that improved the bond between the silica and the spores. U.S. intelligence officers informed foreign biodefense officials that this additive was "polymerized glass." The officials who received this briefing--biowarfare specialists who work for the governments of two NATO countries--said they had never heard of polymerized glass before. This was not surprising. "Coupling agents" such as polymerized glass are not part of the usual tool kit of scientists and engineers making powders designed for human inhalation. Also known as "sol gel" or "spin-on-glass," polymerized glass is "a silane or siloxane compound that's been dissolved in an alcohol-based solvent like ethanol," says Jacobsen. It leaves a thin glassy coating that helps bind the silica to particle surfaces.
Thus, the shift of anthrax description in the fall of 2002 occurs just in time to make Attorney General John Ashcroft fingering Hatfill seem superficially plausible to those without knowledge or memories. Alibek, a Soviet defector, has gone over to the official government position, as have others for reasons not hard to fathom. Reading Matsumoto's Science article with care reveals the unstated political pressures that were applied to the scientists committed to the truth with the hard data on the Daschle-Leahy anthrax, but I shall not elaborate that here. There is not one example given of a scientist who changed his mind on the crucial issue of whether the Senate anthrax could have been done by a loner for solid scientific reasons. These political pressures are the source of the "schism."
That "schism" was formalized by FBI scientist Douglas J. Beecher, who published a technical paper on the dispersion of anthrax spores through the postal facilities and buildings in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, p. 5304-5310, Vol. 72, No. 8. In that paper, unrelated to its content and, as a letter to the editor pointed out, wholly unsupported by scientific research, Beecher simply asserted in the second quoted sentence, ipse dixit, "Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents (6). However, a widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production." Kay A. Mereish, an official at the United Nations, wrote:
In a meeting I attended in September 2006, a presentation was made by a scientist who had worked on samples of anthrax collected from letters involved in the same incident in October 2001; that scientist described the anthrax spore as uncoated but said that it contained an additive that affected the spore's electrical charges (D. Small, CBRN Counter-Proliferation and Response, Paris, France, 18-20 September 2006; organized by SMi [www.smi-online.co.uk]).
We would like but cannot obtain the details of why D. Small thought the spores he/she examined were uncoated, but Lois R. Ember interviewed two scientists who claimed to have examined the electron micrographs of the Senate anthrax and observed no silica or other additive. She wrote of and quoted one of them December 2006 in Chemical and Engineering News, "If the spores had been coated with silica, they would have looked like doughnuts with large sugar particles on them, he says. Instead, 'the Daschle spores were clean doughnut holes with no sugars.' " http://tinyurl.com/69tytc It is important not to distract ourselves with the task of resolving exactly what attributes the Senate anthrax spores had -- attributes that the FBI has deliberately kept secret and muddled through confusing and contradictory press leaks and releases. It is wiser to rely on the obvious inference that if the FBI had a simple, straightforward, true and compelling story to tell about how Ivins could have made such a deadly powder in a few brief spates at night, they would have told it. They did not tell it because they did not have it.
Elders gives us powerful details of the efforts of the U.S. Army's biodefense center at Dugway Proving Grounds to reverse engineer the anthrax using the assumption that no special additives were involved. Quoting Milton Leitenberg, a University of Maryland arms control expert:
Leitenberg says a well-connected former military scientist told him that Dugway was only able to produce preparations containing "one-fifth the number of spores found in the Leahy powder." This same military source also told Leitenberg that Battelle Memorial Institute was also asked to back engineer the Leahy powder.
The failure by both Dugway and Batelle to produce a comparable product was the basis for the public announcement in the fall of 2003 by Michael A. Mason, then assistant director of the FBI Washington field office to admit that after more than a year of efforts by two full scale out-in-the-open bioweapons research teams, the FBI had failed to make a comparably powerful product. This failure, and the failure to explain how Ivins could have done so alone in a few hours of night-time lab work, remains the hippopotamus in the living room from which the FBI and the DOJ have worked so hard to distract the public with its long tale about the DNA match between the Senate anthrax and the RMR-1029 strain in Ivins's possession, to which so very very many others had access over the years.
I am not going to discuss the rest of the DOJ case against Ivins because it rests on the slimmest of hunch and speculation, distortion and innuendo, legerdemain and suppression of relevant fact, especially the central fact that has been our focus here. The DOJ-FBI case is interesting, and in the absence of much of the actual evidence of this case that the FBI has been so busy suppressing, would be fruitful for further investigation of Ivins, but nothing more. In the face of the actual facts, the single-minded pursuit of Ivins as the lone perpetrator is a full-blown cover-up whether or not Ivins had any involvement in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Others, especially Glenn Greenwald of salon.com have done a fine job of pointing out problems with the legal case against Ivins. In one especially powerful post, Greenwald notes:
The FBI's total failure to point to a shred of evidence placing Ivins in New Jersey on either of the two days the anthrax letters were sent is a very conspicuous deficiency in its case. It's possible that Ivins was able to travel to Princeton on two occasions in three weeks without leaving the slightest trace of having done so (not a credit card purchase, ATM withdrawal, unusual gas purchases, nothing), but that relies on a depiction of Ivins as a cunning and extremely foresightful criminal, an image squarely at odds with most of the FBI's circumstantial evidence that suggests Ivins was actually quite careless, even reckless, in how he perpetrated this crime (spending unusual amounts of time in his lab before the attacks despite knowing that there would be a paper trail; taking an "administrative leave" from work to go mail the anthrax letters rather than just doing it on the weekend when no paper trail of his absence would be created; using his own anthrax strain rather than any of the other strains to which he had access at Fort Detrick; keeping that strain in its same molecular form for years rather than altering it, etc.). http://tinyurl.com/6lt4fr
In that same post, Greenwald -- who apparently has knowledge of the postal pick-up times from September-October 2001 of the Princeton, N.J. mailbox from which the letters were sent -- notes that the FBI has presented an impossible theory of how Ivins could have mailed the letters in September 2001 and the FBI presents as damning evidence against Ivins what in fact exculpates him (assuming that the Washington Post has accurately reported its facts). Again, this modus operandi is Warren Commission redux: the blue ribbon authority asserts the opposite of what its evidence reveals. Nonetheless, Greenwald continues to suffer from the illusion that the FBI acted in good faith, preventing him from thinking, let alone saying plainly, that Ivins is the patsy chosen to protect the real conspirators, and that as in the Downey Street memorandum, "the facts were being fixed around the policy."
There are a lot of suspects in the 2001 anthrax attacks, but they are all state or corporate-state agents who were implementing neocon foreign policy and domestic repression, and hence are being protected by the FBI. That the FBI is operating under orders from on high congenial to its institutional purposes is the only reasonable explanation of this clumsy frame-up of Ivins. Demonstrating the deliberate frame-up and thus exposing the motive of protecting the guilty is relatively simple provided one can follow the facts and reason clearly; solving the crime by showing just which people and institutions did just which deeds is much more difficult and much more dangerous.
As I opined originally, Hatfill proved a "formidable" opponent whereas Ivins "has been chosen as the most vulnerable individual to serve as a patsy." And so Ivins has been. Ivins's funeral was attended by 250-300 professional colleagues who offered their warm support, something they were not likely to have done had they believed the DOJ-FBI case against him, and they were in a position to know how strong it was, or was not. These colleagues for the most part will imagine that the FBI has made some terrible mistake; the seemingly small step required to appreciate that no mistake was made is far too difficult for most to make, for when followed to its proper conclusions, the ground gives way beneath one.
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