How do officials believe Ivins made the anthrax? The FBI says Ivins used his lab to convert anthrax spores into powdered anthrax, but no proof has been presented that he had the equipment or the expertise to do so.
“I’m waiting for it to be shown that the quantity and the quality of the powders in the anthrax letters could have been produced in those suites” at Fort Detrick, said W. Russell Byrne, who retired from Fort Detrick in 2003 and was Ivins’ supervisor from 1998 to 2000. “I don’t know how to make the stuff,” he said.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-anthrax0807,0,4430001.story?track=rss
The FBI are today claiming that Ivins created the powder over a few evenings of work. How does that explain the FBI’s admitted failure to re-create the powder 18 months after Director Mueller announced they were going to begin to try this?
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/fbisecretlyrecreate.html
FBI Secretly Trying to Re-Create Anthrax From Mail Attacks
By Dan Eggen and Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writers
FBI investigators and federal scientists have been secretly working for months to replicate the type of anthrax used in last year’s deadly mail attacks, as part of a previously undisclosed strategy designed to determine precisely how the spores were manufactured, officials said yesterday.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who revealed the experiments in remarks to reporters here, said that using such “reverse engineering” could help investigators narrow the list of possible suspects.
“We’re replicating the way or ways it might be manufactured, but it is not an easy task,” Mueller said. “We are going into new territory in some areas.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-29-anthrax_x.htm
FBI fails to re-create anthrax production
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Two years after the nation’s deadly anthrax attacks, the FBI still has not been able to re-create the process the killer used to produce the substance sent through the U.S. mail, a top FBI official said Monday.
Post #56 says it all.
Before this case can be considered closed
(which I doubt ever will happen)
the FBI will have to reveal the location of BL4 lab
where it was produced
and the equipment used to make it.