Amerithrax experts debate FBI findings, insist Ivins was innocent

WASHINGTON -- The FBI may have closed its Amerithax case against Fort Detrick scientist Bruce Ivins nine months ago, but some experts are not willing to let the issue die quite so easily.

A group of about 25 scientists, professors, writers, terrorism experts and more convened Monday afternoon to discuss the particulars of the investigation and to debate who the real perpetrator may have been.

He was a diagnosed sociopath. That means he was very skillful at fooling people into thinking he was a nice guy when he was actually manipulating them to do what he wanted them to do.

First of all, if he was a diagnosed sociopath, he either would not have been granted access to the BSL3 labs, or it would have been pulled and he would have been sent packing. Getting access to a BSL3 or BSL4 lab is not a trivial matter. USAMRIID isn't exactly like the average university--you don't just get people walking in wanting to work there. Also, I don't know about you, but to me, sociopaths stand out as clearly as if they are wearing signs. I cannot tolerate being around them.

The FBI didn't zero in on Dr. Hatfill. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg got the media to focus in on Hatfill, and she got some staffers for some Senators to DEMAND that the FBI investigate Hatfill. Newspapers were accusing the FBI of covering up for Hatfill. It was only after eight months of that kind of pressure that the FBI finally did a search of Hatfill's apartment, and suddenly they were described in the media as being the cause of all of the interest in Hatfill and everyone forgot about what went on during the previous eight months.

And who was this Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, and how did someone from New York know a post-doctoral fellow at USAMRIID, or have a clue as to what kind of work he was doing for his post-doc? That whole explanation sounds fishy to me. He wasn't fingered by Rosenberg.

So, unless someone can show me that prior to 9-11-01, there was a lesion produced from R-1029 that dripped, then I am assuming that prior to 9-11 it could not have produced a dripping lesion.

The only dripping lesions were those from the mailed samples. And those mailed samples could have made their way into R-1029. Either on purpose or by accident.

Maybe on purpose to throw off the feds.

If R-1029 was the source, then there would have had to have been lesions that dripped prior to 9-11.

The lesions that have been reported dripping were Margano’s in GERMS by Judith Miller and the baby at ABC in the CDC reports. Also another postal worker named O’Donnall (sp?)and his dripped until his physician cut it off his neck.

The reason that I could not get the State Veterinary and the State Epidemiologist interested in my eyewitness account was this dripping. The sores I saw dripped and did so profusely. I saw these two sores in 1990.

This was three weeks after Rabbi Meir Kahane (the New York Jewish guy) was killed.

It's all connected, but leave out Malvo etc. Sorry, Saj.

No offense, but Marcia Chambers is not a credible witness, IMO.

Why would this institution quickly destroy what they knew the feds would eventually figure out that they needed to look at who had what?????

Come on...you know that administrators would be wanting to get rid of the stuff before 9/11 if they were more aware. And after 9/11, do you think anyone could have stood up to the push? Whose budget was going to absorb the security requirements and liability, all for the sake of having that excellent record? Sorry, but universities are businesses...science might get done there, but it doesn't drive the place.

I don't follow your latter points, but let me ask...are you suggesting that al-Qaeda terrorists launched an anthrax attack and then went out of their way to reduce casualties?

He was a diagnosed sociopath. That means he was very skillful at fooling people into thinking he was a nice guy when he was actually manipulating them to do what he wanted them to do.

First of all, if he was a diagnosed sociopath, he either would not have been granted access to the BSL3 labs, or it would have been pulled and he would have been sent packing. Getting access to a BSL3 or BSL4 lab is not a trivial matter. Ft. Detrick isn't exactly like the average university--people can't just come in and work. Also, I don't know about you, but to me, sociopaths stand out as clearly as if they are wearing signs. I cannot tolerate being around them.

The FBI didn't zero in on Dr. Hatfill. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg got the media to focus in on Hatfill, and she got some staffers for some Senators to DEMAND that the FBI investigate Hatfill.

Who was this Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, and since she was in New York, how could she know a fellow (one of many) at Ft. Detrick, or have a clue as to what kind of work he was doing for his fellowship? That whole explanation sounds fishy to me. He wasn't fingered by Rosenberg.

The three profs that destroyed it at ISU were there in 1990 when it was stolen.

In any lab situation there is an authority that licenses the work. Both state and federal authorities work on similar principles.

The lab can only operate and charge a fee if all of the guide lines are met. One is a pathogen free environment. If there is a contaminant, then the contaminant cannot be ruled out.

Our lab was state controlled and we were tested every 6 months. You could fail one test, but not two out of 5 or two consecutive tests.

It is my belief that ISU destroyed their collection because they had failed two consecutive tests. The two tests were 6 months apart and only a year after 1990. In order to keep operating, a lab must file a “problem solving solution”. It has another name that escapes me tonight. So on April 15, 1992 ISU requested the use of paraformaldehyde “to decontaminate a high containment area” for a pathogen “ a dreaded disease of both livestock and man”.

When I remembered some of what had happened in 1990, I contacted the EPA and was told that the Section 18 which was granted on June 15, 1992, 60 days after the application, was still in effect. And that they had used over 110 pounds of the stuff that is supposed to be reported in grams. They had tried to wipe it out.

But!!! this stuff is to weak to wipe it out. The next step up is chlorine gas which requires evacuation of adjacent areas. Too much.

My belief is that ISU knew or thought that had been compromised, but weren't sure. They had discovered a problem of contamination but had no idea who or when.

I often wondered why they destroyed all of the samples and not just what had been stolen, but they may not have known what was stolen, maybe multiples. Easier to get rid of it all.

The EPA was a telephone conversation and I'll think of her name in the middle of the night. I'm sure her number is in my note somewhere. She told me there were different places that were approved for treatment, one used.....grams and the other......grams. So there were two places that had some contamination.

I remember driving by the USDA facility which was actually on my way home, north of the main campus, by the railroad tracks out by itself. It was a concrete block building with one door in the front, no windows or doors on the east side and only one block glass window, the kind that wouldn't implode or get smashed on the west side. I never saw the back of the place, but that was where the fences led, so I assume that the animals that were kept in small pens on the west side were funneled around the back and were allowed in the north side.

I've tried to find that building on Google Earth and can't. Might not be there now. But it was where they actually did the experiments on animals.

I was always intrigued by the contraptions on the flat roof. Huge boxes, tubes, coils, funnels and lots of stainless steel. Today I feel that was a negative air flow system so that no spores could get out.

That supposedly had its own collection or supply of anthrax. That was not destroyed.

Now the vet school was and still in right on the south edge almost on top of I-80. Back then it was not the sprawling collection of buildings that it is today. Then there was a long driveway leading to it from the main turn-off. Now I think the whole thing is built up and lots of parking lots.

I know they said there was no overall inventory, so are they admitting that their stewardship of this pathogen was compromised early on?

There was a report early on that the cabinet wasn't lock during the day, but was locked at night. But what does this stuff look like? Could you uncork it and take a spore or two? Was it sealed?

I have to assume that it was not sealed when it was sent to the contact, but the innocent student got it by mistake. The innocent student and her husband both had lesions. She did say she opened the package, she did not say if she opened a vial, or how it was packaged. She just said it looked like seeds.

http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/chemicals/paraformaldehyde_factsheet.htm

Note the four places that were granted the use of this.

For the uninitiated: A Section 18 is granted when the FIFRA label does not include the specific use. P. is not labeled for use on anthrax, so in order to use it you have to get a Section 18, which is like a permission slip to use it this way. The reason that P. is not labeled for use on anthrax is that the manufacturer doesn’t want to go through the process of proving that it works or that it doesn’t work. If they only had 4 sales in this area, it would not pay to have it labeled for this.

Now the EPA lady did say, that after 9-11-01 that ISU came back and requested that the place where the anthrax was stored, the canisters were separately listed as a site.

As for ISU knowing what or which one or if something had been taken, other than the contamination.......

Let’s take ten cookie jars and put 100 cookies in each jar. Now it is your turn to get us some cookies. How are you going to do it?

Come on.....I know you can figure this one out.

The reason that P. is not labeled for use on anthrax is that the manufacturer doesn’t want to go through the process of proving that it works or that it doesn’t work.

Flat-out wrong.

From your source:

Paraformaldehyde is a white, crystalline powder with the odor of formaldehyde that has been used for more than 30 years to decontaminate laboratory facilities and to disinfect sickrooms, clothing, linen, and sickroom utensils.

[...]

Until 1991, paraformaldehyde was also registered for control decontamination of laboratories and experimental animal facilities. However, all registrations for this use and many of the other uses described above were canceled due to nonpayment of registration maintenance fees by the manufacturer.

If they only had 4 sales in this area, it would not pay to have it labeled for this.

Okay...so there's no big secret here as to what's going on! It didn't require any exemption application until after 1991 cancellation...so of course that's when the applications start!

Note also, the quarantine use is separate from the Section 18 emergency use. You're seeming to conflate them.

Let’s take ten cookie jars and put 100 cookies in each jar. Now it is your turn to get us some cookies. How are you going to do it?

Huh?

The cookies aren't all the same recipe, so there are approximately 100 cookies, but it's unknown how many of each kind.

So tell me... how many were taken, if you don't know how many there were to start?

Come on.....I know you can figure this one out.

One can't, logically.

So what did the original documentation say from your FOIA, where you say it was 100 pounds, I think.

So why send it TO the mysterious Pakistani at Iowa State, if the stuff was already AT Iowa State?! Where was it supposedly from? Are you saying they stole it from the collection, put it onto dry ice, and mailed it locally?!?

And after going through the mail and being shattered, the remaining dry ice wouldn't fit into the container?

Hmmm...fishy... Maybe Reba and her husband were your mysterious thieves.

I remember driving by the USDA facility which was actually on my way home, north of the main campus, by the railroad tracks out by itself.

Are you talking about the building that was just north of Industrial Education II, taken down in the late 1990s?

I know they said there was no overall inventory, so are they admitting that their stewardship of this pathogen was compromised early on?

That's how I took it...that there was nobody using it actively, so it was a pure liability from the administrative standpoint.

Is this pretty much Reba's anthrax sore you described? It's not weeping a lot, but there's some, I think.

It was round and a series of concentric rings on the inside of her right forearm. It was black, burned black, like burned brownies in the middle, the next ring was yellow pus, hard formed peaks, like cool whip. Next was a thin wall of cells covering an obvious liquid underneath. You could look through the thin layer of cells and see what looked like the ocean floor with nodules floating back and forth in the broth. The nodules were brown, yellow and reddish and appeared to be tethered to the surface beneath them.

The next ring was a white raised circle, flat on top but you could see capillaries coming near the surface making it look like a vat of milk with purple, red and brown snakes frozen tight.

The next ring appeared to be normal skin, but it was quite narrow and on the level with the normal skin. This narrow band was surrounded by what appeared to be a bruise.

exDemMom wrote: "First of all, if he was a diagnosed sociopath, he either would not have been granted access to the BSL3 labs, or it would have been pulled and he would have been sent packing. Getting access to a BSL3 or BSL4 lab is not a trivial matter."

According to court records, Ivins had a "history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans" and Ivins' psychiatrist, Dr. David S, Irwin called him "homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions."

In 2001, USAMRIID was incredibly lax in many areas of security. FBI records show that everyone at USAMRIID knew that security was lax. The military people were constantly complaining about how lax the civilian scientists were. They even let Ivins work with dangerous pathogens alone and unsupervised in his BSL-3 lab at night and on weekends. Hopefully, new procedures will keep such mentally unstable people away from dangerous pathogens.

"I don't know about you, but to me, sociopaths stand out as clearly as if they are wearing signs. I cannot tolerate being around them."

They give me the creeps, too. But, you usually have to get them talking about other people or one of their obsessions before you can tell that they're sociopaths.

"Who was this Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, and since she was in New York, how could she know a fellow (one of many) at Ft. Detrick, or have a clue as to what kind of work he was doing for his fellowship? That whole explanation sounds fishy to me. He wasn't fingered by Rosenberg."

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg was a science adviser to President Clinton. She was a bioterrorism expert for the Federation of American Scientists. She's also an activist opposed to U.S. Government work on bioweapons. She attended Biological and Toxic Weapons Conventions in Geneva. At the one in July of 2001, she was enraged when the U.S. refused to allow outsider inspections of U.S. government labs. At the one in November of 2001 she was already pointing the finger at Hatfill (without naming him) and claiming that the U.S. government was behind the anthrax attacks.

She never met Dr. Hatfill. She only learned of him by contacting others in a search for the person at Ft. Detrick who would most likely be a rogue scientist or a CIA operative helping the government to cover up some illegal bioweapons manufacturing facility. In one newspaper interview, she described how Hatfill's name came up. As I recall, it was during an exchange of emails with other people she knew.

Rosenberg's activities are documented, step by step, as she campaigned for eight monthsto get Dr. Hatfill investigated by the FBI. Click HERE for the timeline of her campaign, showing all the newspaper articles describing here campaign. Click HERE for a detailed description of her campaign using the Federation of American Scientists' web site to express her beliefs.

I've talked 5 times on the phone with Dr. Hatfill. And I've communicated many time with his lawyer. If the newspaper articles and FAS postings aren't enough, you can also look at the court records in Hatfill's lawsuit against the New York Times. Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times helped Rosenberg by writing columns pointing the finger at Hatfill.

Ed at www.anthraxinvestigation.com

"One of those labs that was thought to have this strain was Iowa State University."

The only people who thought ISU had the strain are misinformed people in the media.

I've researched the entire ISU fiasco, and it appears that some reporter at NBC made a mistake. It appears that the reporter contacted USAMRIID to find out where the Ames strain came from, and USAMRIID told them it came from the USDA in Ames, Iowa. The reporter probably called the USDA and the USDA told them they never heard of the Ames strain.

There's no way to be sure exactly what happened next, but on Wednesday, October 10, 2001, Tom Brokaw reported on NBC's Nightly News that the Ames strain came from The Department of Energy's lab in Ames, Iowa. Not the USDA's lab, the DOE's lab.

The DOE's lab is run by Iowa State University. And that same evening and the next day (October 11), hundreds of reporters descended upon and called people at ISU to learn more about the source of the Ames strain.

The people at ISU didn't know anything about any Ames strain, but since so many reporters seemed to believe it came from ISU, people started speculating that it may have been something from the 1950's. And, it all just became more preposterous from there.

My research is available on my web site by clicking HERE.

ISU never had the Ames strain. ISU was just a victim of a screwball mistake by the media.

Ed at www.anthraxinvestigation.com

I had a conversation with a vet who was involved in the procurement of the original sample. He referred me to a William Broad article of January 30, 2002. It has been reprinted in various locations.

He said that was about as close to the truth that was published.

Also the researcher at USAMRIID who received the sample had kept the wrapping label in the filing cabinet. It had an Ames, Iowa return address label and an Ames, Iowa postmark.

It is true, however, that USAMRIID, thought that the sample had originated in Ames or at least in Iowa. That was mistakenly reported down through the ages and that is why it is called Ames. When in reality I think it is genotype 62 according to Keim. There were other things inappropriately called Ames thought the years because Ames Iowa had a facility to test anthrax. That was the purpose of the whole building that I used to drive me on my way home. The truth is that the original sample came from Texas out of a Beefmaster heifer that died under the windmill. It was sent to College Station Texas diagnostic lab and from there was sent to Ames, Iowa. Now the question was, why did College Station send it to Ames, Iowa? It had already been diagnosed as anthrax and in those days anthrax was just anthrax. I am assuming here that the people who work on anthrax all sort of know each other and it was professional courtesy to give them a samplel of a new isolate for their COLLECTION.

Battle Axe asked, "Now the question was, why did College Station send it to Ames, Iowa?

They never sent it to Ames, Iowa. They sent it ONLY to USAMRIID.

In late 1980, Dr. Gregory B. Knudson, a biologist working at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., was searching for new anthrax strains to use in tests of the military's vaccine. In December 1980, he wrote Texas A&M to see if they had any new anthrax strains. They didn't have anything at the time, but in early 1981, they received a sample of anthrax that had been extracted from a cow that had recently died. So, Texas A&M forwarded a portion of that sample to Ft. Detrick.

However, because Texas A&M frequently sent such samples to the USDA in Iowa, they had postage-paid labels from the USDA and they used one of the USDA labels, simply pasting the Ft. Detrick address over the USDA address. (It was evidently a way of saving a few dollars for Texas A&M.) And, when the sample arrived at Ft. Detrick, Dr. Knudson called it "The Ames Strain" because the mailing label indicated the sample had come from Ames, Iowa.

The Ames strain never went to Iowa - much less to ISU.

Ed at www.anthraxinvestigation.com

Ed Lake said:

“According to court records, Ivins had a “history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans” and Ivins’ psychiatrist, Dr. David S, Irwin called him “homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions.”

-JEAN DULEY

The media has been characterizing Dr. Ivins as being a “homicidal sociopath”, yet every bad thing we’re hearing about the man is coming from only two sources: a “therapist” and a brother he hadn’t spoken to in more than 20 years.

Let’s start with the therapist, a woman with a long police record including multiple recent DUIs.
Look at the affidavit she filed. Let’s see what she says....”

http://www.hereinreality.com/anthrax/whoisjeanduley.html

“Until 1991, paraformaldehyde was also registered for control decontamination of laboratories and experimental animal facilities. However, all registrations for this use and many of the other uses described above were canceled due to nonpayment of registration maintenance fees by the manufacturer.

Subsequently, only two products remain registered. Since the laboratory use of paraformaldehyde has not been registered since 1991 and no alternatives are available, EPA has also issued several quarantine exemptions (and usually renews them every three years) to continue this use for specific federal agencies:

a.United States Department of Agriculture ( USDA) for use of paraformaldehyde in a poultry health laboratory in Arkansas;
b.U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for laboratory decontamination; and
c.USDA to decontaminate high-containment microbiological laboratories at Plum Island, NY, and Ames, IA.”

And what kind of “scientist” are you exactly, if I may ask?

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