In the last edition of the series, I mentioned Bob Graham, the ex-WMD Commission chairman who carved out a niche for himself as top salesman for the bioterror defense industry. Graham’s eternal message has been that apocalyptic bioterrorism is coming, so spend more now on bioterror defense.
Graham also fell into the role of professional committee chairman.
If a president has to put together a fig leaf commission to “research??? something, Graham is always picked. Because no one wants him for anything meaningful outside selling bioterror defense spending.
So life as a professional Washington chairman soaks up the rest of his time, along with publishing contracts for books no one who isn’t paid to would read.
Then it’s always back to selling the dread of bioterror …
Having dumped that load of well-earned steaming hot superciliousness one other thing needs to be added. In the ten years of the war on terror, Bob Graham has never been right about anything.
Graham’s lesser Siamese twin in this matter is ex-GOP Senator Jim Talent, whose only legislative contribution came during the Clinton administration as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On For America and its subsequent Welfare Reform Act.
Jim Talent’s signal contribution, bless his heart, was to make it harder for the poor to get food stamps. This made him a darling of the Heritage Foundation on the subject of entitlement.
Like Graham, Jim Talent is nothing but a shill for the bioterror defense industry. And in that role he recently contributed horrible, what amounts to virtually fraudulent testimony, to Congress.
Removing bioterrorism from the category of WMD will neither be quick nor easy, but it is vital to both America’s economic and national security. I would remind you that bin Laden had a background in construction. It shouldn’t be surprising that he chose to attack buildings in America, because he understood what damage could be wrought by flying fully-fueled, wide body airplanes into those structures. Al Qaeda’s new leader is just as determined to attack America. His formal training was in medicine and infectious disease—one more reason we worry about bioterrorism. But this is not just about al Qaeda.
If the FBI is correct in its assertion that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, then a single individual with no training or experience in weaponizing pathogens, and using equipment readily available for purchase on the Internet, was capable of producing high-quality, dry-powdered anthrax. The only difference between producing enough material for several envelopes and enough material to attack a city is just a matter of a few months production work in a laboratory, rather than the few hours of late night work cited by the FBI investigation.
The bottom line on the feasibility of bioterrorism is quite clear.
This is Jim Talent arguing with distinctly unusual illogic that Bruce Ivins, one of the nation’s foremost experts on anthrax, working in the nation’s foremost laboratory on biodefense, with the best access to gold standard anthrax spores in the world … proves that anyone — those completely without training — could do the same.
Here’s a fellow who has never had a single serious course in microbiology in his entire life, a man who wouldn’t know a Gram stain from a grass stain, as an “expert” on bioterrorism and how one makes diseases into weapons before Congress of the allegedly most advanced country in the world.
It’s flabbergasting in its audacity.
But it’s consistent with the bioterror defense industry lobby. Its people will say anything, twisting facts until they’re totally unrecognizable, just to further the message that more money needs to be sent to its clients.
Talent references his new organization, the private sector WMDCenter, here.
By lobbying standards, it’s a small and relatively insignificant shop. And although it pretends to be bipartisan, it’s not. There’s very little interest in anything it does on the left side of the aisle.
Compared to the Chamber, and other standard GOP-aligned lobbying groups, like KochPAC or AHIP, WMDCenter is very small beer.
Anyway, the website of the WMD Center is not particularly informative — this from a group allegedly about educating the public on the pressing danger of bioterrorism.
It publicizes only that it’s in the process of preparing a report card on the Obama administration’s progress in buttressing the nation against bioterror.
These report cards are rigged exercises, designed to give the government crappy grades. And they’ve done it before.
Last year, when Graham and Talent were still funded by the US government as part of the old WMD Commission, they gave the president an F on bioterror defense. Just before their funding from the US government ran out.
A mock “ricin” emergency drill in Taos, outside of the general procedural rules adopted for these kinds of white powder incidents, gets it all wrong on the nature of the hazard. For example, ricin intoxication, is not contagious so there is no need for quarantine.
If one cannot assume anything on the nature of the powder, then the only procedure to follow is to quarantine everyone. Which is obviously not done in these types of drills or in the many actual hoax white powder incidents around the country.
Ricin is a toxic protein present in the castor seed and you simply can’t purify enough of it to fashion into any even remotely effective WMD. DD put a stake through it back in 2004 at Globalsecurity.Org, a time when people seriously thought the procedure in the patent worked and complained that public access to it on the web was a serious threat.
Since then there have been no successful cases of ricin use as a WMD despite much wishful thinking on the subject. That’s in over a decade.
Therefore, blowing a small amount of castor seed powder out of an envelope is, practically speaking, no hazard although, since the war on terror, everyone must act like it’s so. The fear factor now associated with it, although virtually groundless, is real.
Continual exposure to castor seed powder — which never happens in the US anymore because there are no longer any castor mills — can result in allergy.
This is briefly described here at a network for physicians in the business of treating asthma and allergy.
Years ago it became pointless trying to explain any matter having to do with this to anyone in the government or national security industry.
Fact free hazard drills are now often simply the only way to do things.
The bioterror defense company Emergent BioSolutions, years ago known as BioPort, has had its boss, Fuad el-Hibri, appointed to the board of directors of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Emergent, which supplies the BioThrax anthrax vaccine to the US government, its only buyer, is a company that does two things: suck off the taxpayer teat and sue/dirty trick its competition in the bioterror defense industry.
“In 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined with Scholastic Books to distribute roughly 100,000 books about the potential perils of government fossil fuel regulation to classrooms across the country,” reads one paragraph on the organization at SourceWatch.
“[The US Chamber of Commerce] aims to convince people that [Obamacare] is fiscally reckless, [and] will ‘lead us down the road to total government control of our health …'” reads another.
“Throughout his career, Fuad El-Hibri [of Emergent] has successfully identified and expanded on business opportunities that contribute to creating jobs and growing the economy,” said U.S. Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue to the Washington Business Journal. “The Chamber will benefit from his vast experience in international business and partnering with the U.S. government.”
Posted in Bioterrorism at 10:07 am by George Smith
Mirage Man, David Willman’s book on Bruce Ivins and the anthrax murders, is now being fully pimped.
And it must chap editors at the Los Angeles Times, where Willman formerly worked, to see they have no exclusivity. While they published a book excerpt ago, Willman has delivered essentially the same goods to McClatchy and the Daily Beast this week. (Follow links for full stories.)
It’s a full court press book sale and written in such a way that I’d be willing to bet it’s almost certain Hollywood has already optioned Mirage Man for a dramatic movie treatment.
With Ivins reputation as a sorority stalking, panty-wearing, clown juggling, singing and keyboard playing Renaissance man — including the minor bit on becoming the most famous bioterrorist, one at the heart of the US bioterror defense industry, a movie is a lead pipe cinch.
The only question — who will get to play him? It’s a once in a lifetime role.
Creepy Bruce, the anthraxer and country music artist.
On Sunday, the LA Times published an excerpt from David Willman’s upcoming book, Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks and America’s Rush to War.
There’s nothing new here but it does personalize Ivins’ psychotic behavior with a special focus on his obsession with a national sorority, various revenge plots, and his ability to hide all this from his family and co-workers in the anthrax labs at Fort Detrick.
He roamed the University of Cincinnati campus with a loaded gun. When his rage overflowed, the brainy microbiology major would open fire inside empty buildings, visualizing a wall clock or other object as a person who had done him wrong … Several years earlier, a Cincinnati student had turned him down for a date. He had projected his anger onto the young woman’s sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. There was a Kappa house in Chapel Hill, N.C., and Ivins cased the building. One night when it was empty, he slipped in through a bathroom window and roamed the darkened floors with a penlight.
The story includes still another picture of Ivins singin’ and playin’ behind his beloved keyboards.
Ivins — [a psychiatric] panel concluded, should not have been hired by USAMRIID/Fort Detrick. He had a history of criminal and psychotic behavior dating back to his days as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina.
While there he continued an obsession with a women’s sorority and one member of it. The obsession arose when Ivins was rejected by a girl from Kappa Kappa Gamma while at the University of Cincinnati, a rejection that seemed to have curdled his entire life.
In the case of one sorority girl, which the report refers to as KKG#2, Ivins went so far as to steal her lab research notebook, an act of sabotage aimed at screwing up her work toward a Ph.D.
The panel concluded Ivins compartmentalized his life, showing himself only to be a benign eccentric, an antic clown juggler at parties and keyboard player at church, to professional associates at Fort Detrick.
That panel concluded Ivins was most probably the anthrax mailer.
In related news, McClatchy officially became one of the news organs of anthrax denial earlier in the month when it published a long piece on the alleged use of silicon in the preparation of the mailed anthrax.
The silicon story — long pushed by a couple of fringe anthrax gumshoes and scientists — will probably never die. The FBI and a national lab made reasonable efforts to elucidate the silicon found in the anthrax spores but, in the end, none of it has made any difference due to the handling of the case and mythology which has grown around it.
Readers unaware of the fine details only need to know that it is used as part of an argument to exonerate Ivins. Ivins, the reasoning goes, could not have been the anthrax mailer because he knew nothing of the use of silicon in the weaponization of anthrax spores.
The government and other scientists have long maintained the spores were not weaponized and that anthrax spores, when effectively dried, are plenty dangerous, silicon or not.
The NRC report did put another spike through the heart of the idea that silicon was added to the mailings to Leahy and Daschle for purposes of weaponization and dispersion.
It won’t kill the crazies who continue to pursue the argument. But that’s more due to the nature of the people who cleave to it.
“Silicon was present in the letter powders but there was no evidence
of addition of dispersants,??? Gast said.
And the report reads:
“The bulk silicon content in the Leahy letter could be completely explained by the amount of silicon incorporated in the spores during growth …
“The inability of laboratory experiments to duplicate silicon characteristics of the latter samples is not surprising given the uptake mechanism (in the anthrax microbe).”
Because of the horrific nature of the anthrax mailings, the fumblings in the case, its long duration and conspiracy-theory thinking entrenched within broad parts of the American polity, efforts to dismiss the official judgment that Ivins was the anthrax mailer will probably continue for years.
Graham also fell into the role of professional committee chairman.
If a president has to put together a fig leaf commission to “research” something, Graham is always picked. Because no one wants him for anything meaningful outside selling bioterror defense spending.
So life as a professional Washington chairman soaks up the rest of his time, along with publishing contracts for books no one who isn’t paid to would read.
Then it’s always back to selling the dread of bioterror. And a book if the timing and placement is convenient. Did I mention that?
Having dumped that load of well-earned steaming hot superciliousness one other thing needs to be added. In the ten years of the war on terror, Bob Graham has never been right about anything. None of his predictions ever come true.
After almost 10 years of the most intensive and expensive manhunt in the history of the world, Osama bin Laden is dead. The inevitable questions: What do we do now? What are al-Qaeda’s capabilities to do us harm?
Graham, of course, is ready to answer his own question. We must worry anew about bioterror.
This type of cant is routine from Bob Graham. He repeats information and scripts he knows the years and historical record haven’t supported. He travels only on his name knowing that no one on the opinion pages will gainsay him. Graham, in other words, is a classic example of why argument from “authority” is often not to be trusted.
As promised, here’s the newly found recording career of Bruce Ivins, the USAMRIID scientist declared the anthrax mailer by the US government.
But Ivins, in addition to being the best bioterrorist US money could buy, was by all accounts a man of many talents. His fondness for entertaining with music and keyboard playing is documented in newspaper stories worldwide.
And so the founder of Bona Fide Records, Rick Noll of Pennsy, has discovered, recovered and brought to the attention of a fascinated country, the bioterror scientist’s 7-inch vinyl, recorded as Bruce Ivins and the Country Boys.
Courtesy of Noll, DD has the music now posted here for your listening.
Noll informs the single was found in Abbottstown, PA, about forty miles northeast of Frederick (and USAMRIID’s Fort Detrick), Maryland, up Rte. 15.
[The scan shows] a white label vinyl 7-inch single produced by Nashville Recordings, a record-making facility that “did a lot of small pressings in the 70s and 80s, with a NR # for their records they pressed,??? Noll tells me. “Most likely a couple hundred or so were done …???
“The 45 is a hoot,??? he says. “It has to be the same guy.???
Maybe so. We don’t know for sure. Perhaps it’s all phlogiston, Bruce Ivins and the Country Boys another Bruce Ivins — not the Bruce Ivins at the center of the anthrax case. It’s all just a coincidence, what Klaatu was to the Beatles, sort of. It’s just one more mysterious embellishment contributing to the fascination over lore connected to the nation’s most famous bioterrorist. Like the FBI/DoJ case against Ivins, the evidence is circumstantial yet still compelling.
“Pass Me By” with a B-side of “All Shook Up” sounds just fine. And it could easily be Ivins as a one-man band. Whether or not the drummer is a real person on both tunes is difficult to tell. The A-side sounds like the former. In any case, by description Ivins was adept with his multi-faceted keyboard. The guitar line, for instance, is a keyboard simming it.
Bruce Ivins, the best bioterrorist US taxpayer money could buy, was by all descriptions a resourceful man of many talents. Newspaper articles on him told of his fondness for playing keyboards at church and composing little humorous songs for departing colleagues at Fort Detrick/USAMRIID.
So it’s perhaps not a surprise that Bruce Ivins was also an independent recording artist.
Rick Noll, founder of the great but small independent label Bonafide Records, is a devoted scourer of the used records bins of the back country, from eastern Pennsylvania through to Maryland. He is particularly adept at finding old obscure vinyl treasures in the vicinity between York, PA and Frederick, Maryland.
It was Noll who reunited DD with an old Professor Schnitzel record from his Pennsy Dutch stomping grounds.
And it is Noll who has tipped DD to the recording career of Bruce Ivins.
Here is a scan of a white label vinyl 7-inch single produced by Nashville Recordings, a record-making facility that “did a lot of small pressings in the 70s and 80s, with a NR # for their records they pressed,” Noll tells me. “Most likely a couple hundred or so were done.”
The A-side is Bruce Ivins and the Country Boys’ rendition of Johnny Rodriguez’s lugubrious “Pass Me By (If You’re Only Passing Through.)” I’ve put this to press prior to getting mp3’s for it.)
The single’s vanity label displays a droll sense of humor. “Poplar Records.” Geddit?
“It’s novel in its one man band approach with tinges of ineptitude — an educated, somewhat accomplished, Hasil Adkins with chops!” exclaimed Noll. “Lots of crazy people put out records like this, but I think this one has a dark and ominous sound, [perhaps] hinting at a budding criminal mastermind!”
Noll estimates the recording could be from the 70’s or 80’s. It features what he believes to be a Casio and drum machine rhythm track, probably furnished by the keyboard, and simulated guitar also from the keyboard. This probably, but not assuredly, places it in the Eighties.
“Pass Me By [has] too many keyboards, including a guitar-like one,” says Noll. “All Shook Up, the B-side, is real fast and pretty good, mostly keyboards and drum machine.”
It was the only single in a crate-load of 1,000 records Noll wanted, he told me.
“The 45 is a hoot,” he says. “It has to be the same guy.”
Maybe so. We don’t know for sure. Perhaps it’s all phlogiston, Bruce Ivins and the Country Boys another Bruce Ivins — not the Bruce Ivins at the center of the anthrax case. It’s all just a coincidence, what Klaatu was to the Beatles, sort of. It’s just one more mysterious embellishment contributing to the fascination over lore connected to the nation’s most famous bioterrorist. Like the FBI/DoJ case against Ivins, the evidence is circumstantial yet still compelling.
Maybe time will sort it out.
“Ivins was a much more many-sided, social, and in this sense normal person than FBI’s Summary would lead one to believe,” reads one of the many news stories on the scientist. “He played the piano in church, played and sang in a Celtic band, composed songs for departing colleagues, was an expert juggler …”
And here is a large photo of Ivins playing keyboard in a band called Celtic Live from Bushwaller’s Irish American bar in Frederick from 2006. Readers will note it’s one of the popular keyboards which will now furnish everything from rhythm tracks to simulated instrument lines. It is most probably not the model on the single but does show Ivins was totally at ease with the type of instrument and its capabilities.
Posted in Bioterrorism at 11:39 pm by George Smith
News broke Tuesday of a psychiatric report commissioned to evaluate Bruce Ivins’ mental health and medical records.
The report confirms Ivins was a creepy, mentally unbalanced man fond of harassing a national girls’ sorority. These qualities fit the circumstantial case the FBI built against him as the perpetrator of the most famous bioterror attack in this country’s history.
Noted by the FBI here, a redacted form of the executive summary of the “Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel” is here.
Curiously, while the mainstream media broke the story — the Los Angeles Times had it first — every major news article dealing with it obscured where it could be found.
This only underlined the media’s eternally grasping need to be the only official purveyors of all information.
Moving along, Ivins — the panel concluded, should not have been hired by USAMRIID/Fort Detrick. He had a history of criminal and psychotic behavior dating back to his days as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina.
While there he continued an obsession with a women’s sorority and one member of it. The obsession arose when Ivins was rejected by a girl from Kappa Kappa Gamma while at the University of Cincinnati, a rejection that seemed to have curdled his entire life.
In the case of one sorority girl, which the report refers to as KKG#2, Ivins went so far as to steal her lab research notebook, an act of sabotage aimed at screwing up her work toward a Ph.D.
The panel concluded Ivins compartmentalized his life, showing himself only to be a benign eccentric, an antic clown juggler at parties and keyboard player at church, to his professional associates at Fort Detrick.
Hidden was his dark side, obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority to the point of engaging in criminal break-ins of sorority houses so that he could steal papers from the women. And a campaign of harassment through the mail which included forging a letter to the editor from one of the women he was fixated on, subsequently published in the newspaper, in order to publicly embarrass her.
This event “demonstrated Dr. Ivins’ deviousness and willingness to use others, as well as the United States Postal Service, to accomplish his stealthy retribution.”
So enraged with the KKG sorority was Ivins, reads the report, he chose to mail anthrax letters from a mailbox 175 feet from its office at Princeton in New Jersey as a symbolic gesture.
The psychiatric panel also concluded Ivins had “a specific plan” to shoot people in order to go out in a “blaze of glory” as the FBI investigation closed in. At this time, just prior to his suicide, his involuntary commitment to a mental ward “likely prevented a mass shooting.”
If you read the summary you’re left with the conclusion Ivins was indeed a vile and very troubled man, totally capable of being the nation’s, ahem, finest bioterrorist.
And, directly, it’s another indictment of the culture of complacency at USAMRIID/Fort Detrick. It also calls out the obvious — whether any personal reliability programs the US bioterrorism research industry, massively built up since the anthrax mailings, actually work at all.
Again, the executive summary of the psychiatric analysis, is here.
Much of the material in the executive summary is derived from the details in a large FBI file on Ivins here.
Posted in Bioterrorism at 11:09 am by George Smith
The National Research Council’s report today on the science of the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation upheld the value of careful rigorous work.
It stopped well short of condemning any of the FBI’s work on the case and did not particularly lend itself to cries for the exoneration of Bruce Ivins. It also generated enough confusion and furrowed brows among attending journalists to guarantee the mists swirling around the case would probably continue in subsequent stories.
The scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary.
And it left the reporters who’d covered the story from the beginning with a dilemma.
New York Times reporter Scott Shane was the voice of it when, at one point, he essentially asked Gast and her colleague David Relman, to put forward a conclusion that would be more distinct to non-scientists.
Were laymen to believe the NRC had concluded that it was not likely the mailed anthrax came from RMR-1029, the mother flask at Fort Detrick/USAMRIID maintained by Bruce Ivins? Or might it have been the other way around, that the FBI/DoJ conclusion was the best one to make.
“Do you think the FBI has done a good job?” he asked.
When it came up, DD laughed. Careful science would not furnish that answer.
As it stood, Gast and Relman explained repeatedly, the forensic science on the anthrax mailings, RMR-1029 and the FBI’s sample repository was an evolving process. Science was developed in conjunction with the investigation. And that science, while good (my opinion), could not alone furnish the definitive answer given the nature of it and the existence of another fermentation — produced at Dugway at a much earlier date, which was morphotypically the same. As far as could be determined. By the science.
David Relman explained further by discussing the 1029 flask at USAMRIID.
Roughly, the NRC concluded that the source flask was complex and heterogeneous. And every time one dipped into it one was not bringing out the same material, or leaving it perfectly as it was.
This meant that there would, of necessity, be error in the assays used to examine it and the FBI’s samples and that such lab work would not provide consistent results every time.
That being said, the NRC did not discredit the conclusions brought by the FBI.
When asked what it thought of the FBI/DoJ’s closing of the case, Relman replied:
We note the closing of the case with due interest.
The NRC report did put another spike through the heart of the idea that silicon was added to the mailings to Leahy and Daschle for purposes of weaponization and dispersion.
It won’t kill the crazies who continue to pursue the argument. But that’s more due to the nature of the people who cleave to it.
“Silicon was present in the letter powders but there was no evidence
of addition of dispersants,” Gast said.
And the report reads:
The bulk silicon content in the Leahy letter could be completely explained by the amount of silicon incorporated in the spores during growth …
The inability of laboratory experiments to duplicate silicon characteristics of the latter samples is not surprising given the uptake mechanism (in the anthrax microbe).
The NRC determined the anthrax could be dried in a number of ways and that the equipment and materials for doing so was available. Additionally, the time frame, or window, for such activity was variable enough that it could fit FBI conclusions. In other words, Ivins could have done it in the time frame outlined by the FBI and Department of Justice.
The report comments:
There are several methods for drying spore suspensions to produce powders like those found in the letters: these include chemical desiccation, air drying and freeze drying, any of which could require several hours to several days. Drying of surrogate spore preparations using various methods produced particle size distributions similar to those found in letter samples …
Further:
The committee finds no scientific basis on which to accurately assess the amount of time or skill set needed to prepare the spore material in the letters. The time might vary from as little as 2 to 3 days to as much as several months.
Arguments on the skill set required to make the anthrax have been commonly employed to argue that Ivins could not have done it.
Near the end of the conference one reporter asked about a Fort Detrick scientist who last year had gone before the committee to advise it on the science and techniques involved in producing the attack material.
This was probably a reference to Henry S. Heine, a supervisor of Ivins’ who had attempted to clear the suspect. I discussed it here, noting that the story had only been publicized at ProPublica by one of the journalists deeply involved in anthrax conspiracy promotion, Gary Matsumoto.
Relman averred that the committee had considered the information, disassociated it from the source, and that there was nothing more to be said.
Other items of interest which came to light in the NTC briefing:
1. The government examined the ruins and remains of Flight 193 for anthrax. No other information was provided.
2. The US government made three missions to unnamed foreign sites, looking for anthrax. Polymerase chain reaction assays determined samples to be positive from two of these sites but that no live bacteria could be produced from them. The third mission provided negative results.
These missions were shrouded in secrecy, although it was stated that intelligence agencies were involved. The NRC was kept from knowing much about them and the classification got in the way of any conclusions which could have been drawn.
Alice Gast said that, as a result, the National Research Council made a recommendation to review the classified materials.
The National Research Council’s conference at the National Academies of Science is on-line here.
The full report is here. A .pdf can be purchased or it can be read, for free, online through the website’s set up viewer.
