Freeze drying anthrax and the weird case of the US domestic anthrax attacks in 2001
There has been a set of good Sb posts on the recent developments in the anthrax mailing terrorist attacks in 2001, after the FBI revealed they had a new suspect, Dr Ivins, who was a researcher at Ft Detrick USAMRIID
Greg has a timeline and link to Greenwald
Mike lays out the open questions
There are two additional bizarro evidentiary leaks that came out today, that make the whole story even stranger: the letter were mailed from Princeton NJ, and Ivins has no obvious connections to NJ.
The Associate Press has been running a story that Ivins was obsessed with a sorority, Κ Κ Γ - except, as AP later notes, Princeton does not have sorority houses as such... so he was obsessing about the chapter's store room down the street?
There's a perfectly fine chapter at Johns Hopkins, much closer and just as anonymous.
This is, to put it politely, stretching things.
The FBI are much cleverer than that on TV.
Secondly, a key piece of evidence is that Ivins checked out a lyopholizer - a small one apparently. But that he was not working on a project requiring such a device.
(A lyopholizer, I gather, is a jazzed up freezer-dryer, costs in the $10-100k depending on size. Even more interestingly, Rattan apparently makes swords as well as lyopholizers).
Pretty damning, if as conjectured, the different anthrax samples sent at different times represented Ivins experimenting with freeze drying anthrax spores and getting better at making consistent high dispersion fine grain batches.
Except that he was possibly working on a DARPA project that did require a lyopholizer.
Should be easy to check: 1) check the lab books for when the lyopholizer was used and what for; and 2) find the particular lyopholizer and check it for anthrax contamination.
Not holding my breath on this. Too many people who should be looking hard at this whole scenario just want it to go away.
Maybe it will show up as a particularly good "Cold Case" late one night on TNT...
But, I always did want to do a post about lyopholizers - I'm a theorist, I just can't help it.
UPDATE: more by dday at kos, including pointer to Greenwald on Ivins' use of lyopholizers in published research
Interestingly, Ivins 2002 US patent for making anthrax vaccine uses lyophilization at the final stages
PPS: am I being too subtle?
The Washington Post article that got me started on this talks about a lyopholizer.
Generally people would be using lyophilizers for such things, although the product sold by Rattan seems perfectly adequate, judging from their web site...
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If I understand Greenwald correctly, someone is actively leaking information, including false information, to blacken Ivins reputation. No matter what happens yes, he's guilty in the mind of the public right now, and he obviously cannot defend himself, being dead.
If you're innocent, why kill yourself? Seems like a really silly thing to go and do. Especially after you've known that they're been following you for over a year.
If you're innocent, why kill yourself? Seems like a really silly thing to go and do. Especially after you've known that they're been following you for over a year.
Although this is true, I doubt that this is the sort of reasoning at work in the minds of the suicidal. It also seems similar to the reasoning "why would someone [confess/plead guilty] to a crime they didn't commit?" which has been rather thoroughly debunked (although perhaps not in the minds of the general public so much).
Not that I claim the fact of the suicide particularly suggests innocence. My point is merely that I don't see it as particularly suggestive of guilt. It seems easily consistent with either scenario.
Also, I believe this is obligatory and someone has to do it:
"Lyophilizer!? I hardly even knew 'er!..."
People kill themselves all the time without being guilty of terrorism.
In this case, a catholic family man was about to have the world be told that he, allegedly, had a private mailbox to receive hard core porn, so he must be a mass murdered. QED.
Ivins may have done it, but the leaks implicating him are not conclusive or even very suggestive when they are probed.
Oh, and WaPo should learn to spell lyophilizer, if they're going to run a front page story on it. And national reporters should learn to spend 10 minutes to find out if Ivins DID in fact use lyophilizers in his research, as opposed to rely on hearsay from anonymous sources.
They can even do it for free with Google Scholar nowadays, no need for expensive access to scientific databases.
Hullabaloo hat-tip to ya!
Has the FBI ever been known to leak information to blacken the reputation of a suspect who later turned out to be innocent? Why, yes, it has. Take, for one example, the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, where the FBI regularly smeared the late Richard Jewell and pretty much ruined his life. Only problem, it turned out it was Eric Rudolph that did the bombing.
Hear, hear, Sigurdsson !
Ivins suicide (and his position as an anthrax researcher) makes him look guilty.
But hard-to-verify accusations from anonymous sources are even worse than trial-by-blog.
A man is innocent until proven guilty. In this case, there will never be a trial.
We might learn how the FBI investigated him, and why they failed to bring an indictment, while the White House administration used the anthrax attack as a reason to invade Iraq.
An anthrax attack by a non-muslim scientist from an US Army lab wouldn't had any propaganda value to justify conquering Mesopotamia.
He was in the hospital for two days before he died, and there was no autopsy. I thought that a homicide, even when it's a suicide requires an autopsy. A lot of stuff can happen in two days.