Norm Covert went to Chaplain School, not to MIT. He's a media guy. Do you really believe media people know more about science than scientists? If so, then you would undoubtedly accept the nonsense that a journalist wrote in Science magazine over what scientists say about that nonsense.
Re: ‘Gary Matsumoto’
Quotable Quotes:
“Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass.”
“In the weeks immediately prior to the attacks, Dr. Ivins became aware that an investigative journalist who worked for NBC News had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on USAMRIID seeking detailed information from Dr. Ivins’s laboratory notebooks as they related to the AVA vaccine and the use of adjuvants. On August 28, 2001, Dr. Ivins appeared angry about the request providing the following response in an e-mail:
“Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass. We’ve got better things to do than shine his shoes and pee on command. He’s gotten everything from me he will get.”
Bruce Ivins
Matsumoto
Matsumoto: “Ivins created Gulf War Syndrome” - then, “Iraq’s anthrax has bentonite”
The lead search warrant affidavit deepens the questions about Matsumoto. Matsumoto fingered Ivins as the one who created
“Gulf War Syndrome”, which had Ivins very angry just three weeks before the anthrax attacks began. Within 60 days, Matsumoto is claming that Iraq’s anthrax has bentonite. What gives?
Before the warrant, here’s some of the public evidence:
1. Ivins was described by Dr. Nass in her 1999 report to Congress as “the leading anthrax vaccine researcher” at Fort Detrick.
2. Matsumoto blamed Ivins for causing Gulf War Syndrome with his work on the anthrax vaccine in the period prior to 2001.
3. After the anthrax attacks, Matsumoto joined ABC News’ Brian Ross and others in the bentonite story blaming Iraq on October 26.
4. Matsumoto backed off this story only slightly in another story on November 1, but continues to emphasize the Iraq connection.
5. During the run-up to war in October 2002, Matsumoto continued to point squarely at Iraq in his Washington Post article, while shifting from bentonite to silica as the additive in his Washington Post article.
6. In late 2003, Matsumoto wrote a big article for Science Magazine - still looking at Iraq - and claiming that the spores were coated with silica, which proved military engineering from an “industrial source”.
7. Ed Lake seriously criticized Matsumoto for ignoring the findings of Professor Matthew Meselson and former “bioweaponeer” Ken Alibek, who looked at the Daschle anthrax and said that there was NO coating of the spores.
8. Matsumoto didn’t consider what Meselson and Alibek had seen, relying solely on a graph from a spectrograph.
9. FBI forensic scientist Beecher’s article in 2006 named Matsumoto as the man who had it wrong that there was any coating with silica. This would indicate that almost any microbiologist could have done it, rather than military engineering by either Iraq or Dugway or Battelle. This marked a big shift in the FBI’s handling of the case, and I believe new chief investigators came into play at about the same time. (I do realize that Beecher was later criticized in the same journal for not adequately sourcing his statement). I’m still waiting to see real evidence of “coating”.
Now, the search warrant affidavit shows that Matsumoto was working with NBC in August, 2001, and that Ivins was furious at Matsumotio in August 28, 2001 for attempting to ferret out details about his vaccine work. Keep in mind that both ABC and NBC were two of the five media outlets known to have received anthrax in the first wave of mailings dated Sept. 18, 2001:
“Beginning shortly after the first Gulf War and through 2001, USAMRIID and Dr. Ivins was the focus of public criticism concerning their introduction of a squalene adjuvant (or additive) to the AVA anthrax vaccine, which was blamed for the Gulf War Syndrome. In 2000 and 2001, as evident by the e-mails above, that same anthrax vaccine was having problems in the production phase at Bioport, a private company in Michigan responsible for manufacturing the vaccine. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had suspended further production of Bioport, and the U.S. government, specifically the Department of Defense, was running out of approved lots of the vaccine. The situation placed pressure on select staff members at USAMRIID, including Dr. Ivins, who were part of the Anthrax Potency Integrated Product Team (IPT). The purpose of the IPT was to assist in the resolution of technical issues that was plaguing Bioport’s production of approved lots of the vaccines.
“In the weeks immediately prior to the attacks, Dr. Ivins became aware that an investigative journalist who worked for NBC News had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on USAMRIID seeking detailed information from Dr. Ivins’s laboratory notebooks as they related to the AVA vaccine and the use of adjuvants. On August 28, 2001, Dr. Ivins appeared angry about the request providing the following response in an e-mail: “Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass. We’ve got better things to do than hsine his shoes and pee on command. He’s gotten everything from me he will get.”
In early 2002, shortly after the anthrax letter attacks, the FDA re-approved the AVA vaccine for human use, production at Bioport resumed, and anthrax research at USAMRIID continued without interruption. As mentioned previously, one of the anthrax letters postmarked on September 18, 2001 was addressed to Tom Brokaw, NBC News in New York. Dr. Ivins thereafter received “the highest honor given to Defense Department civilians at a Pentagon ceremony on March 14, 2003” for his work in “getting the anthrax vaccine back into production”.
Someone should get Matsumoto’s side of these stories - that date both before and after the crucial events of late 2001. You can see my analysis and sources (and my call to support Glenn) at my article in Truthout http://www.truthout.org/article/the-anthrax-attacks-sunlight-is-best-disinfectant
What about the “schism” that developed amongst scientists familiar with the Daschle-Leahy anthrax samples? Well, Matsumoto is an establishment journalist, which means that he is not permitted to think aloud in public. So he is careful to separate the John Ashcroft designation of Steven Hatfill in August 2002 as a “person of interest” from what follows way below in the article, and careful not to integrate the two facts into a coherent narrative, but to his full credit he does all that he can with a picture that is worth a thousand words. Hatfill is grimacing in fury, not the furtive guilt of a trapped perpetrator:
About-face
By the fall of 2002, the awe-inspiring anthrax of the previous spring had morphed into something decidedly less fearsome. According to sources on Capitol Hill, FBI scientists now reported that there was “no additive” in the Senate anthrax at all. Alibek said he examined electron micrographs of the anthrax spores sent to Senator Daschle and saw no silica. “But I couldn’t be absolutely sure,” Alibek says, “because I only saw three to five of these electron micrographs.” Even the astonishingly uniform particle size of 1.5 to 3 micrometers, mentioned in 2001 by Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), now included whopping 100-micrometer agglomerates, according to the new FBI description recounted by Capitol Hill aides. The reversal was so extreme that the former chief biological weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission, Richard Spertzel, found it hard to accept. “No silica, big particles, manual milling,” he says: “That’s what they’re saying now, and that radically contradicts everything we were told during the first year of this investigation.”
Glassy finish
More revealing than the electrostatic charge, some experts say, was a technique used to anchor silica nanoparticles to the surface of spores. About a year and a half ago, a laboratory analyzing the Senate anthrax spores for the FBI reported the discovery of what appeared to be a chemical additive that improved the bond between the silica and the spores. U.S. intelligence officers informed foreign biodefense officials that this additive was “polymerized glass.” The officials who received this briefing—biowarfare specialists who work for the governments of two NATO countries—said they had never heard of polymerized glass before. This was not surprising. “Coupling agents” such as polymerized glass are not part of the usual tool kit of scientists and engineers making powders designed for human inhalation. Also known as “sol gel” or “spin-on-glass,” polymerized glass is “a silane or siloxane compound that’s been dissolved in an alcohol-based solvent like ethanol,” says Jacobsen. It leaves a thin glassy coating that helps bind the silica to particle surfaces.