Dear Mensa Wanna-Be / bonehead racist:
washingtonpost.com
Additive Made Spores Deadlier
By Rick Weiss and Dan Eggen
The anthrax spores that contaminated the air in Senate Majority Leader Thomas A.
Daschle's office had been treated with a chemical additive so sophisticated that
only three nations are thought to have been capable of making it, sources said
yesterday.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only three nations
known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to
remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled and therefore more
deadly, experts said yesterday. Each nation used a different technique,
suggesting that ongoing microscopic and chemical analyses may reveal more about
the spores' provenance than did their genetic analysis, which is largely
complete but reportedly has done little to narrow the field.
A government official with direct knowledge of the investigation said yesterday
that the totality of the evidence in hand suggests that it is unlikely that the
spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq.
Even identifying the kind of coating may not solve the crucial question of who
is perpetrating the terror, because little is known about how secure the stores
of the three countries' stocks have been during the past few years.
Nonetheless, the conclusion that the spores were produced with military quality
differs considerably from public comments made recently by officials close to
the investigation, who have said the spores were not "weaponized" and were
"garden variety." Those descriptions may be technically true, depending on how
one defines those terms, several experts said. But they obscure the basic and
more important truth that the spores were treated with a sophisticated process,
meaning the original source was almost certainly a state-sponsored laboratory.
The finding strongly suggests that the anthrax spores in the U.S. mail attacks
were not produced in a university or makeshift laboratory or simply gathered
from natural sources. But it does not answer the question of whether a
state-sponsored laboratory supplied the anthrax spores directly to terrorists or
simply lost control of some stocks in recent years.
The presence of the high-grade additive was confirmed for the first time
yesterday by a government source familiar with the ongoing studies, which are
being conducted by scientists at the Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick. Four other experts in anthrax
weapons said they had no doubt that such an additive was present based on the
high dispersal rate from the letter to Daschle (D-S.D.).
"The evidence is patent on its face," said Alan Zelicoff, a senior scientist at
Sandia National Laboratories' Center for National Security and Arms Control.
"The amount of energy needed to disperse the spores [by merely opening an
envelope] was trivial, which is virtually diagnostic of achieving the
appropriate coating."
David Franz, formerly of USAMRIID and now at the Southern Research Institute in
Birmingham, said, "In order for a formulation to do what the one in Daschle's
office appears to have done -- be easily airborne -- it would require special
treatment."
Genetic testing of the spores found in Daschle's office, at NBC offices in New
York and in Florida found that the three samples were indistinguishable.
The ongoing USAMRIID studies on the spores used in the U.S. attacks involve
examinations using conventional microscopes and scanning electron microscopes,
along with complex chemical analyses that are difficult to conduct even when the
bacteria in question are not dangerous. The analyses are far more difficult in
this case, experts said, because anthrax spores must be studied in specially
sealed laboratory enclosures to ensure that they do not escape.
Results of those tests have not been made public beyond a simple description of
how small the spore particles were in the Daschle letter. That particle size, 1
1/2 to 3 microns in diameter, said Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), is extremely small
-- a first requirement for making "weapons grade" anthrax spores for warfare or
terrorism.
But more than that is needed to get anthrax spores to drift easily in the air
and spread widely without settling quickly to the ground. That is because tiny
particles tend to have electrostatic charges -- the static electricity that can
cause hair to extend skyward when it is rubbed against a balloon. Those charges
make the tiniest particles clump together into heavier ones, which then settle
to the ground.
One of the primary goals of bioweapons engineers since the 1960s was to figure
out how to treat those tiny particles in ways that would neutralize the
problematic charges. Properly processed, the tiny particles will remain
separated from one another and fly up and outward with virtually no effort. An
imperceptible wisp of a breeze can send them across a room.
In the United States, that problem was solved by Bill Patrick, who developed the
process at Fort Detrick as part of the U.S. biological weapons program that
ended in 1969. The process is protected by at least five secret patents held by
Patrick. It involved freeze drying and chemical processing and was achieved
without having to grow vast quantities of spores or mill them to terribly small
dimensions, Patrick and other experts said.
Spores were mass-produced at a Pine Bluff, Ark., facility, Patrick said.
Production stocks were destroyed, but he said he did not know whether "seed
stocks" from which new batches could be grown had also been destroyed. Under the
terms of an international treaty banning biological weapons, to which the United
States is a signatory, small amounts of biological weapons can be produced to
conduct defensive research.
The Russian program, which has been described in detail by Ken Alibek, who ran
it for many years before moving to the United States to do biological research,
required the production of much larger quantities of spores that were more
heavily milled than the U.S. spores and used a different kind of freezing and
coating process.
The Iraqi technique, uncovered by U.N. inspectors, was a novel one-step process
that involved drying spores in the presence of aluminum-based clays or silica
powders, said Richard Spertzel, who was part of the U.N. Special Commission
(UNSCOM) team that was to uncover and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
program after the Gulf War. UNSCOM was ultimately frustrated in its attempt to
account for all of Iraq's biological weapons.
"If [U.S. investigators] can get a clue as to how the material in the Daschle
letter was prepared, that might narrow the field," Spertzel said. "It may not
pinpoint it, but it may narrow it."
White House officials and some lawmakers have said they suspect a connection
between the anthrax letters and the al Qaeda terrorist organization, whose
leader, Osama bin Laden, has been blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New
York and Washington.
President Bush suggested again yesterday that it is his working assumption that
al Qaeda is involved. "I have no direct evidence, but there are some links"
between Sept. 11 and the anthrax mailings, Bush said in a speech in Anne Arundel
County. "Both series of actions are motivated by evil and hate. Both series of
actions are meant to disrupt Americans' way of life. Both series of actions are
an attack on our homeland. And both series of actions will not stand."
FBI investigators say they have no evidence connecting the anthrax cases with
the bin Laden network, although they are operating under the presumption that
there could be a link. The three letters recovered include references to Allah
and vows of death to Israel and the United States, but many investigators
suspect the language is purposeful misdirection.
Some within the administration and on Capitol Hill have also pointed a finger at
Iraq, and some officials have expressed a desire to punish Iraq if it were found
to have been involved.
Also yesterday, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said authorities continue to
receive a high number of terrorist threats after the Sept. 11 assaults, and he
warned that more attacks are a "distinct possibility."
"I must tell you that the threat level remains very high," Mueller said at a
meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington. "More attempts and
possible attacks are a distinct possibility. This possibility requires all of us
to continue walking the fine line of staying alert on the one hand without
causing undo alarm on the other hand."
<em>Staff writers Eric Pianin and Mike Allen contributed to this report.</em>
So much for your Zionist plot. Eat feces and expire. |
