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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.

The standard, end of the story explanation is that wrong avenues were pursued in the past.

Yesterday or so NPR had an expert on the record who said Ivins would have needed another piece of equipment other than the lyo-whatever. Here, we have another expert, on the record, who knew Ivins, worked with him, and supervised him, says he couldn’t have made it and doesn’t think Ivins could either.

That’s far enough in my book to think Ivins as innocent, for now.

From the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/washington/08scientist.html

...Jeffrey Adamovicz, who was Dr. Ivins’s supervisor at the time, remembers the day the scientists opened that envelope, placed in a double-sealed bag inside a protective hood designed to deal with dangerous pathogens.

“The anthrax was floating around inside the bag,” Mr. Adamovicz said. “It was very scary.”

He said he turned to Dr. Ivins and said, “That stuff is amazing.”

“Yes, it is unbelievable,” he recalled Dr. Ivins replying. “I have never seen anything like that.”

....

He was particularly struck by the airborne nature of the deadly strain of anthrax found in the letters. Ellen Byrne, the wife of Dr. Byrne, remembers Dr. Ivins explaining how crafty the perpetrator had been to get the anthrax to be so finely ground that it was almost as light as air.

At a party, Dr. Ivins leaned over and, with his long, bony fingers, illustrated how the powder just sort of floated.

“He was just astonished,” Mrs. Byrne said. “Flabbergasted.”

“This was something that none of us ever dreamed of,” she remembered him saying. “It just could not be weighed. It could not be measured. It just hovered.”