http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sandia-anthrax-mailing-investigation

headline:

September 19, 2008

Seven Years Later: Electrons Unlocked Post-9/11 Anthrax Mail Mystery

A key part of the FBI's early investigation was finding whether the
germ that killed five people in late 2001 was weaponized. Although
they found the answer, scientists had to keep mum until the agency
completed its inquiry
By Larry Greenemeier

When materials scientist Joseph Michael and his team at Sandia
National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., trained their high-powered
electron microscope on anthrax spore samples the FBI had sent them in
February 2002, they made two crucial discoveries: The first confirmed
previous findings that the Bacillus anthracis spores mailed to U.S.
Senate offices and various media outlets (shortly after the September
11 terrorist attacks) contained silicon, a substance used to turn
anthrax-causing spores into a biological weapon.

But it was Sandia's next discovery that marked a critical turning
point in the feds's probe of the mysterious mailings, which killed
five people, injured 17 and prompted thousands more who were
potentially exposed to the deadly spores to take potent antibiotics—in
particular, Ciprofloxacin (known to irritate the gastrointestinal
tract and cause joint swelling). Using highly sensitive transmission
electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning transmission electron
microscopy (STEM), the researchers came to a startling realization:
The silicon had grown organically inside the Bacillus anthracis
samples, nothing had been added to weaponize the spores. "The silicon
was not on the outside of the spore," says Michael, who headed up
Sandia's investigation, "but rather incorporated on the inside."

It was this key information that helped the FBI to rule out the
likelihood that a terrorist organization was behind the anthrax
mailings and prompted the agency to turn its attention to U.S.
government labs as the possible source of the anthrax. This move
eventually led the agency to conclude that Bruce Ivins, a scientist at
the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
(USAMRIID), a federal biodefense research laboratory at Fort Detrick,
Md., who initially assisted with the investigation, was the culprit.
Ivins, 62, two months ago committed suicide as prosecutors prepared to
charge him in connection with the mailings.

"chatnoir"  wrote ...

The silicon had grown organically inside the Bacillus anthracis
samples, nothing had been added to weaponize the spores. "The silicon
was not on the outside of the spore," says Michael, who headed up
Sandia's investigation, "but rather incorporated on the inside."

It was this key information that helped the FBI to rule out the
likelihood that a terrorist organization was behind the anthrax
mailings and prompted the agency to turn its attention to U.S.
government labs as the possible source of the anthrax.

=====

I don't follow how the fact that it wasn't weaponised meant it didn't come
from a terrorist organisation. That doesn't have any logic to it.

However, it's a lesson for the terrorists should they be sending out anthrax
in the future; don't weaponise it, send it out as is. It will have the
desired effect ( weaponised or not this anthrax killed and spread fear and
panic ) and the US will immediately discount who it came from and blame
someone within their own ranks.

On Sep 21, 4:38 am, "The Happy Hippy"
 wrote:
> "chatnoir"  wrote ...
>
> The silicon had grown organically inside the Bacillus anthracis
> samples, nothing had been added to weaponize the spores. "The silicon
> was not on the outside of the spore," says Michael, who headed up
> Sandia's investigation, "but rather incorporated on the inside."
>
> It was this key information that helped the FBI to rule out the
> likelihood that a terrorist organization was behind the anthrax
> mailings and prompted the agency to turn its attention to U.S.
> government labs as the possible source of the anthrax.
>
> =====
>
> I don't follow how the fact that it wasn't weaponised meant it didn't come
> from a terrorist organisation. That doesn't have any logic to it.
>
> However, it's a lesson for the terrorists should they be sending out anthrax
> in the future; don't weaponise it, send it out as is. It will have the
> desired effect ( weaponised or not this anthrax killed and spread fear and
> panic ) and the US will immediately discount who it came from and blame
> someone within their own ranks.

Well, I did not put continued at the bottom!  They had thought the
silica was on the outside!  That prevents clumping and makes the
spores more dangerous!  I:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sandia-anthrax-mailing-investigation&page=2

excerpt:

nvestigating the Investigators
Congress has called for an investigation of the FBI's work on the
anthrax case. One major misstep was revealed Tuesday, when the Los
Angeles Times reported that Peter Jahrling, a former senior civilian
scientist at the Fort Detrick facility, admitted that he had made an
"honest mistake" seven years ago when he told top FBI brass that he
believed anthrax spores he examined had been altered to make them more
deadly.

Worried that a terrorist organization or a country sympathetic to al
Qaeda might be involved, the U.S. Department of Justice in late 2001
commissioned a series of tests to determine whether the spores had
been coated with a substance that would prevent them from clumping
together, enabling them to hang in the air longer than they would
normally, thereby increasing the chance of  inhalation.

Early in the investigation, the FBI appeared to endorse the view that
only a sophisticated lab could have produced the material used in the
Senate attack, investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto wrote in the
November 2003 issue of Science. In fact, in May 2002 16 scientists and
physicians working for the government published a paper in JAMA The
Journal of the American Medical Association, describing the Senate
anthrax powder as "weapons-grade" and exceptional: "high spore
concentration, uniform particle size, low electrostatic charge,
treated to reduce clumping."

In addition, the August/October 2002 newsletter from the Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology (AFIP), a research organization that the
government often turns to for help analyzing potentially pathological
substances, reported that a mass spectrometry analysis found silica—a
staple in professionally engineered germ warfare powders for decades—
in the powder sent to Sen. Daschle. The silica was believed to be
there to prevent the anthrax spores from aggregating and make it
easier for them to disperse into the air, according to Matsumoto, who
added that any such weaponized form of anthrax is "more than 500 times
more lethal than untreated spores."

Finding the Right Technology
By the time the Sandia researchers began their work in February 2002,
"we had heard just like everyone else that the spores had been
weaponized," says Michael, who had proposed a study of the elemental
composition of any materials found growing outside the spores.

The first step was to find the silicon. Michael was aware that FBI
researchers had analyzed the samples with both scanning electron
microscopy (SEM), which scans surfaces with a high-energy beam of
electrons, and with energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS), which
analyzes x-rays emitted by a substance after it is hit with charged
electrons. But at that point, no one had studied them with a scanning
transmission electron microscope (STEM), which transmits a focused
beam of electrons through a small part of a specimen to form an image
and could provide compositional information by examining the spores a
few nanometers (one nanometer is 40 millionths of an inch) at a time,
a higher resolution than SEM could provide, Michael says.

This enabled Sandia researchers to not only detect the presence of a
foreign substance such as silica, but also to determine its location
on or inside the spore. "In the FBI's mind, it was important not only
that trace amount of elements were present, but also…[to determine]…
where those elements were located in the sample through
microanalysis," says Paul Kotula, a Sandia material scientist who
studied the samples with Michael.

The researchers could find no way that the silica could be placed
inside the spore without leaving a residue on the spore's outermost
layer. (They found none.) Instead, the researchers determined that the
silica formed inside the spore naturally. After only a month examining
the anthrax samples in March 2002, Michael and his team were
convinced, contrary to other reports, that the anthrax used in the
attacks had not been weaponized.

Some of the samples they worked with came from the USAMRIID,  which
employed both Ivins and Steve Hatfill, another government scientist
the FBI pursued but who ultimately turned out to be a dead end. (He
was vindicated in June when he won a $5.8 million settlement in June
against the Justice Department.) According to Michael, neither he nor
other Sandia researchers ever worked directly with any of the USAMRIID
researchers, instead obtaining all of the samples they tested through
the FBI. Nor did Sandia work with live anthrax; all of the samples
they received were first inactivated or irradiated by the FBI.

Michael says he was surprised to hear that the feds were closing in on
a scientist at USAMRIID (Ivins, who died of a prescription-drug
overdose), but that he was "not surprised the person who did this had
knowledge of microbiology."

In the end, it was at Sandia where scientists cracked the mystery
behind the mailings. The problem was, says Michael, that he had to
keep mum on his findings—which might have calmed a jittery nation
still reeling from the 9/11 terror attack—until the FBI wrapped up its
investigation. "That's been one of the really frustrating things for
Paul and me," Michael says. "We knew the answers but couldn't tell
anyone"

----------

And if not weaponized!  Hey!:

http://nov55.com/athr.html

excerpts:


It is not 100% lethal as often claimed. Wool sorters inhale anthrax
spores in small quantities continually (150-700 per hour, or 510 per 8-
hour shift), and only if they get a large dose does an infection get
started. ...

Cellular Limitations
Anthrax is what's called a "gram positive" bacterium. This means it
has the type of cell walls which are harmless, unlike the cell walls
of "gram negative" bacteria, which attack tissue. Therefore, anthrax
can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes.
One cell or spore does not produce enough toxin to start an infection.

Studies have apparently determined that, typically, ten thousand
anthrax spores must be inhaled to start an infection. That number
might be someone's guess, but it is in line with the biology of the
disease. It is the number which the military uses, and only the
military has significantly researched such questions. It uses gas
chambers for animal tests.

Anthrax normally attacks the lungs, because it must lodge in
vulnerable tissue. It can invade through other routes such as cuts or
undercooked meat, but it only does so under third world conditions,
and those routes are not relevant to biowarfare.

Livestock eat from the ground, so they have their faces in the ground
where the spores are, and they can inhale ten thousand spores. How
does anyone get ten thousand spores into the lungs of humans?

Technical Obstacles to Weaponizing

The first requirement would be to aerosolize the spores. The spores
would have to be converted to a dry powder, because a liquid would
create globs which would fall to the ground rather than staying
suspended in the air.

To create a powder, the spores would first have to be washed several
times in an array of very large and expensive centrifuges. Then a
drying apparatus would have to be used; and it would require spraying
a mist into a vacuum, which is how powders are created from liquids.
Otherwise, everything globs up into hard rocks.

How do workers clean the equipment without getting spores everywhere?
A likely procedure would be to enclose the equipment in a pressure
chamber and steam sterilize it for several days. Such an operation
costs hundreds of millions of dollars, considering related facilities
and development. Only countries do that, not radical groups, and not
in five gallon buckets.

It won't stay in the Air

Even in powder form, the spores would fall to the ground rapidly in
the absence of wind. Anthrax is not adapted for airborne
dissemination. It needs to stay on the ground until inhaled by
livestock. So it would not stay in the air like mold spores but would
fall out easily, about like flour. In the presence of wind, the spores
would be carried away rapidly and would not stay in one place long
enough for anyone to get more than a few inhaled.

Once the spores were on the ground, they would not affect humans
significantly, because they would not come up from the ground in large
enough quantities. ...

The Anthrax Attack
Numerous persons have asked me how I interpret the anthrax attacks
after 9-11. I think the incident verifies the points that I made.
About a dozen persons were stricken by anthrax instead of the millions
which authorities were predicting upon a terrorist attack. It shows
that anthrax is almost impossible to use effectively.
The terrorists may have succeeded in creating a lot of fear, but for
casualties, guns would have been more effective.
The incident does not show that terrorists can weaponize anthrax. The
weaponized powder came from the US weapons labs, as demonstrated by a
chemical which was on it. See News Article. The article was archived
for limited access, but you can search Google for key words such as
"Additive Made Spores Deadlier" or "3 Nations Known to Be Able to Make
Sophisticated Coating".
You can say that killing a few people and creating a lot of expense
and fear is terrorism, but persons defined as terrorists can’t do it,
only two countries can.

Links to recent events including false claims are found Here. ...

On Sep 21, 4:38 am, "The Happy Hippy"
 wrote:
> "chatnoir"  wrote ...
>
> The silicon had grown organically inside the Bacillus anthracis
> samples, nothing had been added to weaponize the spores. "The silicon
> was not on the outside of the spore," says Michael, who headed up
> Sandia's investigation, "but rather incorporated on the inside."
>
> It was this key information that helped the FBI to rule out the
> likelihood that a terrorist organization was behind the anthrax
> mailings and prompted the agency to turn its attention to U.S.
> government labs as the possible source of the anthrax.
>
> =====
>
> I don't follow how the fact that it wasn't weaponised meant it didn't come
> from a terrorist organisation. That doesn't have any logic to it.
>
> However, it's a lesson for the terrorists should they be sending out anthrax
> in the future; don't weaponise it, send it out as is. It will have the
> desired effect ( weaponised or not this anthrax killed and spread fear and
> panic ) and the US will immediately discount who it came from and blame
> someone within their own ranks.

And Remember!:

http://nov55.com/athfr.html

excerpt:

One of the persistent frauds of this subject is the pretense that
single persons can do complex tasks in a bioweapons laboratory. Even
without lethal pathogens, there is an extreme amount of work in
preparing, testing and cleaning in dealing with microbes. Setting up
conditions takes days or weeks, not hours. Testing has to be repeated
over and over to work out the flaws in procedures, let alone make
discoveries. Yet Bruce Ivins supposedly did the same thing a group of
bioweapons researchers spent several years and millions of dollars to
accomplish—during off hours.

Why did the taxpayers spend millions of dollars to weaponize anthrax,
if someone could do the exact same thing in their spare time? It’s
like saying someone hired a construction crew to build a five story
building which took two years and cost $10 million dollars, and then a
terrorist did the same thing in the desert in his spare time without a
blueprint in one week.

If someone proves unequivocally that one and one equals three, it
doesn‘t mean one and one equals three; it means they prove themselves
to be liars. The investigators claimed unequivocal proof on the basis
that the DNA in question had a segment reversed, which could not be
confused with any other sample or misread by the measurements (4). The
absoluteness of their claims proves them to be liars. So now they are
back-tacking a little and saying maybe the tests weren’t so accurate.

The spores in the envelopes mailed by the terrorists had the same
chemical coating as secretly patented by the bioweapons laboratory
(3). How could a scientist in the vaccine laboratory do the same thing
with the same chemical, which he was not supposed to know about? It
didn't happen.

Investigators claim they tested more than a thousand samples of
anthrax from around the world and traced the spores to a flask of
anthrax bacteria in the vaccine laboratory which Bruce Ivins worked
in, and he had control over that flask. It didn't happen. They are
lying about their results.

What it means is that the investigators are not just making errors,
they are contriving results which did not occur and focusing on the
wrong laboratory as a method of protecting the real perpetrators. The
real perpetrators were obviously using a false flag terror attack for
the purpose of justifying the war on terrorism as described by Glenn
Greenwald and Paul Craig Roberts in the articles below. ... (cont)

"chatnoir"  wrote in message
news:b2a75a38-e81b-47fd-aaee-8f4909d71d0b@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
On Sep 21, 4:38 am, "The Happy Hippy"
 wrote:
> "chatnoir"  wrote ...
>
> The silicon had grown organically inside the Bacillus anthracis
> samples, nothing had been added to weaponize the spores. "The silicon
> was not on the outside of the spore," says Michael, who headed up
> Sandia's investigation, "but rather incorporated on the inside."
>
> It was this key information that helped the FBI to rule out the
> likelihood that a terrorist organization was behind the anthrax
> mailings and prompted the agency to turn its attention to U.S.
> government labs as the possible source of the anthrax.
>
> =====
>
> I don't follow how the fact that it wasn't weaponised meant it didn't come
> from a terrorist organisation. That doesn't have any logic to it.
>
> However, it's a lesson for the terrorists should they be sending out
anthrax
> in the future; don't weaponise it, send it out as is. It will have the
> desired effect ( weaponised or not this anthrax killed and spread fear and
> panic ) and the US will immediately discount who it came from and blame
> someone within their own ranks.

Well, I did not put continued at the bottom!  They had thought the
silica was on the outside!  That prevents clumping and makes the
spores more dangerous!  I:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sandia-anthrax-mailing-investigation&pag
e=2

=====

Thanks for the links ( both posts ). That makes me even more suspicious of
the FBI claims than I already was. There sure is something fishy going on.
It does look more and more like they've got a convenient dead scientists to
hang everything on and wrap up the case.