Why couldn't the anthrax be replicated?

Ed Epstein ^ | 1/12/04 | Ed Epstein

[TrebleRebel]

In December 2002, to test its theory that a lone individual could have been responsible for the attack anthrax, the FBI asked Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to reverse engineer the lethal anthrax powder that had been mailed to Senator Patrick Leahy. The Army scientists, however, failed to replicate the attack anthrax. What is the property of the attack anthrax that could not be replicated-- and how does this failure effect the FBI’s loner theory?

The Army scientists could not replicate the critical property of aerosolize. Working with centrifuges, mesh filters, infrared dryers and other equipment that a lone scientist could conceivably assemble in a home lab, the Army scientists eventually succeeded in reducing the virulent Ames anthrax to uniform micron-sized particles, but instead of disbursing themselves in an airborne mist– as the Leahy attack anthrax did– these particles clung together at the bottom of the test tube in lumps too heavy to remain airborne. The Army-test anthrax lacked two elements found in the attack anthrax: an electrostatic charge and “polymerized glass” silica. To add these elements required a level of nanotechnology engineering that went far beyond the parameters of the experiment. Not only would each nanoparticle have to be electrostatically charged so that they would repel each other, but– even more scientifically challenging-- they would have to be coated with silica or another additive to keep them spaced apart. This nanotechnology engineering is beyond the capabilities of a lone individual operating out of a home lab but it is not beyond the capabilities of state-sponsored bioweapons laboratories. The unavoidable implication that proceeds from this experiment is that the anthrax powder used in the attacks was the product of state-sponsored bioweapons facility-- either stolen or otherwise obtained.

Corollary Question: What weapons laboratories-- domestic or foreign -- possess the nanotechnology capabilities to produce a silica-coated, electrostatically charges anthrax aerosol? http://edwardjayepstein.com/ReverseEngineeringAnthrax.htm

[TrebleRebel]

ping

[freedomcrusader]

It seems to me that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were making aersolizable anthrax long before the term "nanotechnology" was coined.

One way to apply an electrostatic charge was to use a particular kind of detergent, or so I thought.

[Gritty]

Too bad.

The FBI has zeroed in on Hatfill or a domestic terrorist and isn't letting go of their pet theory just because of pesky things like facts.

[genefromjersey]

This gives rise to some interesting observations:

1. The Iraqis had begun using the newer siliconizing technology at the time of the UN inspections (according to David Kay and Richard Spertzel).
2. Because of the defection of certain Iraqi scientists-or for some other reason (perhaps a desire to avoid more inspections),the Iraqis had forwarded documentation of their bio programs to the UN,which reportedly locked them away for safekeeping.
3. Kay and Spertzel's knowledge of their new methods may have come-in part-from a review of these documents.
4. Because members of the UN inspection team had to know what to look for,it seems reasonable to suggest the documents were viewed by many of the key team members-who were,by the way,drawn primarily from people having extensive knowledge of the subject.
5. As pointed out by Spertzel and Kay,getting the right mix of ingredients,and setting the correct temperatures on the spray dryers would take extensive experimentation in a professionally set up lab. (Spertzel estimated the lab would have to be about 20'x50' minimum); however:
6. If one already knew the correct temperatures,mixtures,etc. ( from consulting the Iraqi notes stored at the UN ), the process could be broken up into steps-performed at different locations: the individual steps,perhaps,requiring a smaller "footprint".

Let's try this scenario:

ps:This material has all been published openly elsewhere.

1. An "Ames-strain" sample is brought to "point A"-in Florida,or,perhaps Georgia,where it is cultivated.This requires vials of nutrient,a simple wire loop to transfer the samples into the vials,an "incubator" where the seeded vials can be kept overnight at approx. 98.6 degrees (F)-or until the vials turn cloudy.

2. If no one is around to interfere,the vials can then be centrifuged,excess liquid removed,and the resulting clay-like pellet covered with glycerol,so it can be frozen at -80 C. (If security is a problem,the centrifuging,etc. can be carried out at a second location.)

3. We're now ready for sporulation:The material from the vials is "streaked" onto a special growth agar.This is then incubated at 30 degrees C ( too cool for growth/reproduction)for a period of 7 days-at which time the anthrax has been converted to dormant spores.

4. We can now transport the material to point "B" or "C", where the spores-in slurry form-are combined with aerosil,and placed in a co-current spray dryer. This is a fairly pricey piece of gear,with a "footprint"-if a lab model-about the size of an office desk and single filing cabinet.

If,from review of the Iraqi material at the UN,or from other specific instructions forwarded to us,we know the exact combinations and setting to use,we'll have weapons-grade Ames-strain anthrax coming out of the spout...very possibly,with no one around us the wiser.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest there were 3 locations where the work was done; that 2 of the hijackers were exposed to dermal anthrax when they transported the "cloudy liquid" to the lab where sporulation was to be carried out;and that they used part of the last day of their lives to hand off the sporulated product to someone in Maine who had access to the rest of the required equipment,AND a safety lab in which the finished material could be placed in the envelopes.

[FourtySeven]

This deserves a big time bump! Very educational, at least to me.

Who is Ed Epstein? Never heard of him. Fortunately though, he does base his conclusions on a Science article; for those who don't know, Science is a well respected scientific journal.

I'm going to have to get this at home, for my home "files". hehe

Thanks again!

[Shermy]

Why couldn't the anthrax be replicated?

(Repeating myself...)

Because nobody tried to replicate it.

From what I read, Dugway tried to create a weapon somebody thought a person with Hatfill's talents could make. Interesting research I suppose, but not germane to figuring out how the actual Senate anthrax was made.

Another question is if this non-replication activity was posed as germane, what agenda did this false information serve?

[Calpernia]

thanks for the ping Shermy. Sean, I did ping the other anthrax followers to that thread; but maybe you want to post it again here.

[Calpernia]

Adding Sean's post here (ping for when you are back):

You would be amazed at what a measely $100,000 would buy these days.

Check this out...
CRITICAL: Who Is Syed Athar Abbas? And What Was He Doing with a $100,000 'Fine Particulate Mixer' in the Summer of 2001?

Comment:
The appended article was brought to my attention by Sean Osborne-Lomax – whose activities include, but which are not limited to, being an intelligence analyst with the Northeast Intelligence Network.

Sean has also been in regular communication with me since the September 11th attacks and works tirelessly for the cause of freedom, justice and liberty.

Please read the appended article carefully and please remember that actions by individual citizens can make an enormous amount of difference. Don’t depend on the FBI to solve the anthrax cases – unless private citizens first give them direction. The FBI needs help.

– Dr. Koontz
December 7, 2003


From the Weekly Standard article linked to below:

Who Is Syed Athar Abbas?
And what was he doing with a $100,000 "fine particulate mixer" last summer?
by David Tell
07/17/2002 10:00:00 AM

BACK IN APRIL, having marinated myself in a decade‘s worth of published microbiology research and whatnot, I wrote a longish story for the Standard expressing near total bewilderment about the FBI‘s investigation of last fall‘s anthrax terrorism. Specifically, I couldn‘t understand why the Bureau seemed so strongly inclined to the view that its suspect was a lone American scientist--and so little inclined to take seriously the possibility that those mail-borne murders might somehow have been connected with the hijackings of September 11.

Well, three months have gone by now, and even though solid evidence seems ever more elusive the FBI says it still prefers the domestic terrorism scenario--far and away--over any and all competitors. And while I still have (all) my doubts, I feel obliged to note that the trend of opinion in the community of outside anthrax investigation kibbitzers is running hard against me.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists, the influential conspiracy theorist whom I cuffed around sarcastically in my April piece, has grown increasingly confident--and precise and personal--in her speculations about "the" American perpetrator. Other such internet-based anthrax sleuths have gone further, fingering Rosenberg‘s current top suspect by name: He is a former staff scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, one Dr. Steven Hatfill. Indeed, so appealing is the idea of Hatfill‘s guilt, apparently, that no less an eminence than Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has twice published columns (here and here) describing him in exhaustive detail--thinly disguised as "Mr. Z"--and wondering aloud why the FBI hasn‘t long since busted the guy.

Seems to me the Times‘ libel attorneys must be mighty relieved that Kristof has chickened out with that "Mr. Z" business. Seems to me the case against Hatfill is based entirely (and torturously) on the circumstantial overlap of his biography with an arbitrary suspect profile. Seems to me that if the Bureau does wind up running him in--they‘ve already searched his apartment while tipped off news crews from local Frederick, Maryland TV stations hovered overhead in helicopters--we could well have another Richard Jewell situation on our hands. Seems to me that the anthrax conspiracy junkies are excited by Hatfill for the same perfectly understandable but not especially persuasive reason that they are unexcited by any number of other possible culprits: Human nature makes us want to bend and improve reality the better to fit our preconceptions.

Me, though, I like to think I don‘t have any preconceptions about the anthrax case. Could be the bad guy was an American, I figure. On the other hand, could be someone from, say . . . Pakistan.

Speaking of which--and trusting that the discussion will not spoil my status as a down-the-line anthrax-case agnostic--let me here introduce you to a Pakistani gentleman named Syed Athar Abbas.

The Newark, New Jersey office of local U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie has kindly provided me a fax copy of the April 23, 2002 plea agreement--signed by Mr. Abbas on June 10--according to which said Pakistani gentleman now waives his right to prosecution by indictment and agrees, instead, to acknowledge guilt in connection with a one-count felony "information" alleging his participation in an elaborate check-kiting scheme. Abbas, it appears, "from on or about June 7, 2001, through on or about July 10, 2001," defrauded two banks, a Wells Fargo branch in Woodland Hills, California and a Fleet Bank branch in Fort Lee, New Jersey, of slightly more than $100,000--by manipulating three checking accounts he‘d opened for a bogus Fort Lee business alternately known as "Dot Com Computer" and "Cards.Com."

None of which by itself makes Abbas particularly noteworthy or ties him, even inferentially, to the anthrax letters or any other form of terrorism. True, it turns out that the FBI, pursuing some thus far undisclosed lead, originally went looking for Abbas--in the first few days after September 11--at his presumed address on the top floor of a commercial building in Fort Lee. And Fort Lee is thought to have been home at some point to Nawaq and Salem Alhamzi, both of whom helped fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the side of the Pentagon. And the FBI could not locate Abbas at first because, so says his former landlord, the man had suddenly abandoned his Fort Lee lease more than a month before--and had disappeared without a trace.

But Abbas wasn‘t really on the lam, reports his court-appointed lawyer; he‘d merely flown home to Pakistan to care for his dying father. And in (nearly) every other respect, Abbas is indistinguishable from hundreds of other Middle Eastern immigrants swept up--in Fort Lee and other such communities--by the FBI‘s post-9/11 dragnet. Most have been questioned and released. A few dozen of them have been lengthily detained, pending deportation, for minor immigration violations. And a handful, like Abbas, have been subject to other criminal charges, like bank fraud, that carry no explicit whiff of terrorism. Syed Athar Abbas is not that big a deal, you would think. In fact, Syed Athar Abbas is someone you and I would otherwise never have heard of, because so far as I can tell, in the entire world of internet journalism--and legitimate journalism, too--no one has ever before so much as mentioned his name . . .

Except for a single reporter named Rocco Parascandola, who covers law enforcement and the courts for Newsday in New York. Only Rocco Parascandola--in two short dispatches for his paper, one this past December 27 and one just this week, on Monday--has noticed something interesting about Mr. Abbas. Rocco Parascandola has noticed, because his "law enforcement sources" have told him as much, that when the FBI first sought to interview Abbas back in September, they did not discover that he was a run-of-the-mill check-kiting scam artist who nevertheless loved his father like every good boy should. No, what the FBI discovered, instead, was that Syed Athar Abbas was an abruptly vanished fugitive who, using an alias, had recently "arranged to pay $100,000 in cash"--roughly the amount he‘d stolen from Wells Fargo and Fleet--for the purchase and shipment of a "fine-food particulate mixer," a "sophisticated machine used commercially" to do various things you wouldn‘t expect an outfit called "Computers Dot Com" to do. Like "mix chemicals," for example.

Oh.

Mr. Parascandola reports that it‘s been established Abbas did take possession of this machine at the "Computers Dot Com" offices in Fort Lee last summer, but had the thing "immediately transported elsewhere" before taking off himself for Pakistan. Federal investigators, Parascandola adds, "have not been able to locate the industrial food mixer" in question, which problem continues to be of some "concern." All the more so because, despite his guilty plea and promise of restitution to the banks he bilked, Abbas has "refused to cooperate with investigators trying to find out more about his accomplices or the mixer."

Oh.

The $100,000 particulate mixer Parascandola describes, incidentally, is the exact same technology commonly employed by major food and pharmaceutical manufacturers to process fluid-form organic and inorganic compounds into powder: first to dry those compounds; next to grind the resulting mixture into tiny specks of dust, as small as a single micron in diameter; then to coat those dust specks with a chemical additive, if necessary, to maximize their motility or "floatiness"; and finally to aerate the stuff for end-use packaging. In other words, this is how you‘d put Aunt Jemima pancake mix in its box. Or place concentrations of individual anthrax spores into letters addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

Oh.

Again, mind you, I know of no hard evidence to suggest that Syed Athar Abbas is "the" anthrax terrorist--or any kind of anthrax terrorist, for that matter. My only point is this: Nicholas Kristof and the rest of them have no hard evidence that poor Steven "Mr. Z" Hatfill is "the" anthrax terrorist, either, and yet they‘re all but calling him guilty anyway. Why? Mostly because he fits their preexisting suspect profile, that‘s why: Hatfill is a native-born American citizen with a scientific background in toxic organisms. Were Hatfill instead a Pakistani immigrant who‘d recently completed a suspicious purchase of the expensive machinery necessary to weaponize toxic organisms, well . . . how much you want to bet he‘d have gone completely ignored? The way Mr. Abbas has been ignored?

David Tell is opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.


Link to the above:

http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages_03/6532.html


All, please tell me something. Having read the above in its entireity, just exactly and to what level is your mind currently boggled?

Now you know how I felt a month ago or so when I discovered this information. Now you know why I became P.O.'d deluxe with the staus quo of our nations intelligence services.

You are part of the solution and are actively seeking it,

- or -

you are a part of the problem.

And you need to be fixed.

Period.


9,711 posted on 01/13/2004 12:00:51 PM EST by Sean Osborne Lomax (http://www.HomelandSecurityUS.com)

[Sean Osborne Lomax]

I emailed Rocco Parascandola about his article on this Abbas character not too long ago. I have yet to recieve a reply. I think I can understand his reasoning for silence on the matter.

I am surprised this article from The Evening Standard about the many exploits of Syed Athar Abbas is still seeing the light of day. I am also in awe of the fact he does not appear on the FBI Top Most Wanted terrorists list.

[Wolfstar]

Your analysis is very interesting. Perhaps it's not too far off the truth, although I'm beginning to think the government will never solve this case, which means we'll never learn the truth.

It just frosts me that the media continues to indulge its obsession with celebrity legal cases, and the horse-race aspect of the presidential election, and the silly Plame leak, and on, and on, while something as critical as the first bioweapons attack on American soil is already ancient history to them.

[muawiyah]

Let's add one more thing to the mix ~ noting that the USPS Brentwood facility was thoroughly contaminated with anthrax ~ someone on the inside who went about making sure the main postal facility serving the Nation's Capital was thoroughly contaminated.

The letters were a feint!

[genefromjersey]

You know,when it first came to light,that was one of my suspicions: not that someobody had deliberately contaminated the facility,but that somebody had popped open one or two "promising-looking" envelopes,thinking there might be cash inside.

Given the way this stuff was able to "leak",however,that might not have been the case. As I understand it,the pores in the envelopes are about 20 microns ,and weaponized anthrax particles are small enough to pass right through.

Also,given the way the machinery ( I believe you're quite knowledgeable on this,if I remember your earlier posts)"grabs" the mail,I think it would tend to shake quite a bit of anthrax out. (Leonard Cole's book "The Anthrax Letters" says-rightly or wrongly- a lot of the material was found on machine surfaces,and that when one of the workers used compressed air to blow dust out of the machine,he probably spread anthrax like crazy. )

Again: you seem to have an insider's knowledge of typical mail-handling practices, and there could be quite a bit to what you say.

[genefromjersey]

By the way,Richard Spertzel (who is one of the experts who made the Iraqi connection )admitted to Leonard Cole (author of The Anthrax Letters)he couldn't quite figure out how the anthrax mailer got the stuff into the envelopes in the first place. Weapons grade practically floats,and it is like trying to pour a teaspoon of smoke into (the tri-folded paper that is inserted into ) the envelope.

It's crossed my mind the specific type of copy paper used for the messages might have been chosen for its coating ; ie: perhaps certain brands of copy paper are of very low porosity,or have some special quality that permitted the mailer to just chunk the stuff inside.

Anybody ??

[Sean Osborne Lomax]

I agree with much of what you're saying, and I heard every syllable Laurie spoke on that program.

If the $100,000 dollar machine was a ruse, then why has it not been found? It was delivered to the Ft. Lee NJ address and disappeared immediately along with Mr. Abbas.

This is concurrent to the information of Mohammed Atta meeting in the Czech Republic with al-Ani and taking possession of the vacuum sealed flask of anthrax as reported by Czech and Israeli intel agencies.

All this needs (at a minimum) to be collated with what is known about the not-so-mysterious 'Waly Samar'.

Aditionally the machine is known to have been in proximity, a significant geo-location to the point of origin of the mailed anthrax biological acts of war.

That the Iraqi al-Mukhbarat was involved is not a question for me either.
They absolutely were. Now their agents who remain in this country are rogues since the demise of Saddam's regime.