It’s hardly a distortion of the facts. How could they identify a previously unidenfiable substance unless it already had been seen?
Demon in the Freezer states in very plain English that they SAW an additive - and the next day they took the sample over to AFIP and identified this ALREADY SEEN additive as silica.
Your attempts to pretend these words don’t exist appear to expose an agenda of some kind. The AFIP announcement seems to truly terrify you.
Ed,
Can you quote this new book CRUSH THE CELL (2008), which according to the flap, is “Written by a man who is arguably the country’s most authoritative voice on counterterrorism...”
He writes at page 203:
“In my opinion, this attack was conducted by someone with experience in biological weapons programs and access to military grade anthrax spores. It wasn’t al Qaeda, because bin Laden’s MO is to kill without warning. This theory is shared by most analysts in NYPD (and we had our own hunches about who was involved). The terrorist sent a letter with the spores to warn the recipients, knowing that if caught early, anthrax is often treatable with antibiotics. However, the attacker didn’t anticipate all the consequences of his treacherous warning, and innocent people died. The attack was probably staged as a post-911 attack warning that the country was vulnerable to biological attack.” (p. 203)
It is by Michael A. Sheehan. You might link and his biography at NYPD and DOS in counterterrorism.
As I've told you a hundred times, Richard Preston's book "The Demon In The Freezer" makes the answer to that question absolutely clear.
When Tom Geisbert did his first examination of the Daschle spores under a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), he had killed the spores by dipping them in CHEMICALS. The process is described step by step in Preston's book, and I repeat much of it in Chapter 15 of my book.
Because Geisbert killed the spores with CHEMICALS, under high magnification the electron beam heated the spores and caused the spores to ooze some mysterious "goop" out from inside the spores. It is also described as "fried egg gunk" and "splatty stuff" when it bursts out of the spores..
From page 139 and 140 of my book (things in quotes are also from Preston's book):
Under the TEM, “The view was wall to wall spores” - “The material seemed to be absolutely pure spores”.
With ten thousand times the magnification of a standard microscope which uses glass lenses and a beam of light to image a sample, the TEM uses electromagnetic lenses and a thin beam of electrons. (Unlike a scanning electron microscope (SEM) which can only see the outer surface of an object, the TEM can also penetrate objects to view the internal structure - much like an X-ray machine. But that only works if the specimen is thin enough, less than 100 nanometers. The spores were 10 times that thick, so Geisbert was using a TEM to look at the outside of the spores.)
Geisbert turned a knob and zoomed in, searching for smallpox viruses which are a fifth the size of an anthrax spore. As he searched, he didn’t find any smallpox, but he began to notice something else. “He noticed some kind of goop clinging to the spores”, according to Preston. “It was a kind of splatty stuff.”
Geisbert then turned up the power to get a closer look and crisper image. “As he did, he saw the goop begin to spread out of the spores. Those spores were sweating something.”
Peter Jahrling came in to see how things were going, and Geisbert demonstrated the phenomenon for him. “Watch,” he told Jahrling. He then turned the power knob, there was a hum, and “The spores began to ooze.”
According to Preston:
“Whoa,” Jahrling muttered, hunched over the eyepieces. Something was boiling off the spores. “This is clearly bad stuff,” he said. This was not your mother’s anthrax. The spores had something in them, an additive, perhaps. Could this material have come from a national bioweapons program? From Iraq? Did al-Qaeda have anthrax capability that was this good.”
There is the "UNIDENTIFIED SUBSTANCE" they went to AFIP to identify. They believed that an "additive" was oozing out of the spores under high magnification. They needed the EDX at AFIP to figure out what that "additive" was.
How can you not see that?! It is absolutely clear beyond any doubt.
And it is equally certain that the "goop" was the chemicals Geisbert used to kill the spores. It is presposterous to believe that some kind of silica was INSIDE the spores and oozed out under high power!