One of the things I've noticed about news sources lately is how helpful it is to have access to a lot of them. For example, if I could only have access to one cable news station, it would be CNN. Even though I like to watch Fox better, CNN gets the scoop most reliably. MSNBC is doing very well, too, at night and on the weekends. I wish we had the BBC station, we just get a little bit of BBC on a local PBS station nightly at 7:00 p.m., and it's great. I've made a little "cheat sheet" with the numbers for all the news stations, and cycle through them when something is happening.
Similarly on the net - the first thing I check is freerepublic.com, then Drudge Report, then Yahoo. I've got dozens of news sites for different purposes.
The question on my mind this morning is "floaty" anthrax spores. Excite is reporting that the FBI won't open the Leahy letter until they figure out a way to de-ionize the spores, because the spores in the Daschle letter "literally jumped off the slide" when scientists tried to look at them.
news.excite.com
I found a pretty good commentary on the Village Voice, of all places, written back when everyone was talking about bentonite (remember?):
(snip)>>They're wiseguys who have taken taxpayer dollars and come up with little information, unless one counts the Ft. Detrick achievement of using microscopes and the naked eyeball to distinguish between "Purina Dog Chow" anthrax, a coarse powder, and "floaty," "non-electrostatic" anthrax, a smooth powder, helpful to the public.
The mainstream news treated the distinction between the two samples of anthrax as if it was informative treasure, the conceit being that our military bio-terror experts at Ft. Detrick or elsewhere were going to be able to use it as part of a key in forensically pinning the anthrax mailings on an enemy nation and thereby try to muster our enthusiasm for a good carpet-bombing.
The New York Times revealed in hushed tone that one unnamed expert said the floaty anthrax spores were surrounded by a brown ring, observable by microscope. The tell-tale brown ring, it was said, could be a "substance called bentonite." Bentonite was remarkable because Iraq was alleged to have it used it in mixing its anthrax.
Other news sources jumped on the bentonite bandwagon without noticing it is a common material used to absorb moisture in mixed powders. It is, for one thing, found in a variety of cat litters, and therefore cannot be said to be exclusively the biochemical domain of national bioweapons programs. However, by Monday, even the ace bioweapons experts at Ft. Detrick ruled out bentonite as an adulterant of the floaty anthrax. Silica, another extremely common material, was identified as a component of the anthrax dust. Bentonite, nay? Silica, yay?
To understand part of why bentonite was seized upon with such zeal, one must understand that the lore of bioweaponry is as much about myth-making as it is about technology. And one of its best legends is that the secret science of it, as practiced by the United States and Russian bioweapons programs, was brilliant work when just the opposite might have been the case. It asks one to accept the canard that our ex-bioweaponeers (or Soviet defector ex-bioweaponeers, like Ken Alibek) were the acme of scientific know-how. And that the methods developed by a Bill Patrick, the Dr. StrangeBug of U.S. bioweaponry during the early Cold War, to make anthrax into a strategic weapon were innovative enough to require secret patenting. Thus patented, the applications were thought to bare an intellectually unique stamp. This logic was also applied to Soviet and, much later, Iraqi anthrax, leading to the media's notion that all nation-state secret anthrax programs might be indirectly identifiable through quirks in tradecraft. But recent events seem to prove that the contemptible technology of making floaty anthrax, while not strictly elementary, is far from impossible to duplicate. Its various formulations appear to have proliferated to a degree that even the experts cannot assess.
In American bio-war/bio-defense TEGWAR, the fruit of the tax dollar also continues to result in spectacle. Bio-defense warriors are nothing if not publicity hogs, lending themselves profusely in these worrisome times to whizbang journalism on patents from Hell while delivering noisome trivia on the amount of poisonous powders needed to bring about lethality.<< (snip)
villagevoice.com
Heavy on the sarcasm, but fair commentary, IMO.
So we've known for weeks that the damn stuff is incredibly pure, and electrostatically charged in such a way that it is repelled by whatever it touches - and that tells us exactly what?
My guess is that the technology is something we developed right here in the good old USA, because if it wasn't, they'd be pointing the finger right now, and they are curiously silent, aren't they?
And the larger point raised in the Village Voice article is one I happen to agree with. What the hell were we doing, developing this technology, or something like it? Were we really planning on using it? And if so, on whom, and why? |
