Posted in Bioterrorism at 11:10 am by George Smith
An Ohio State University study estimates the cost of foodborne illness in the US at $77 billion/year. The study also breaks out which microorganisms cost the most and which are the most expensive per person.
Although the estimated annual toll of foodborne illnesses and deaths in the United States was revised sharply downward by federal officials in 2010, foodborne disease still costs the nation up to $77.7 billion a year, according to a new study in the Journal of Food Protection.
The study, by Robert L. Scharff of Ohio State University, is based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) December 2010 estimate that the nation has 48 million cases of foodborne illness with 3,000 deaths annually.
According to the [new] model, the most expensive foodborne diseases are associated with Salmonella, at $11.39 billion per year …
On a per-case basis, the most costly foodborne disease by far is Vibrio vulnificus infection, at $2.79 million, according to the enhanced model. Other highly expensive ones are Clostridium botulinum (botulism), $1.68 million, and L monocytogenes, $1.28 million …
Vibrio vulnficus, with which I am personally familiar, is costly because it is catastrophic. It takes an extraordinary effort to save people, if they can be, when a systemic infection takes hold. When people aren’t killed by it, or just acquire it fishing or in shellfish handling, they are maimed in some ugly way, left with disease-caused injury that must be coped with forever.
“Collagenolytic activity of Vibrio vulnificus: potential contribution to its invasiveness.” Nice title, if I do say so myself. Perfectly descriptive.
However, American science can be very shortsighted. In 1982 there was virtually no interest in Vibrio vulnificus even though now it has a much higher profile in the nation’s consciousness.
When I left Lehigh University there was no opportunity to work on further characterization of the microbe’s protein chemistry anywhere.
There was no funding for it. And so I wound up doing someone else’s uninteresting basic vanity science, at — paradoxically — Penn State’s medical school in Hershey, PA.
Since the war on terror the samizdat literature of America’s neo-Nazi/survivalist extreme right has meant collateral damage in surprising places.
From just before the holidays, an old tale from Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook (printed by the defunct American publisher of notoriously repugnant crap, Loompanics) built around a bit of fact about rosary peas, inconvenienced a tourist attraction in Cornwall, England, called the Eden Project. Bad publicity and embarrassment was the immediate symptom, as it always is with anything even remotely connected to America’s special brand of paranoid underground literature on how to strike your enemies down and overthrow the government.
An alert has gone out for the recall of thousands of beaded bracelets sold in tourist attractions after it emerged they are made from a highly toxic seed.
The Eden Project in Cornwall, which sold 2,800 in a year, is one of 36 retailers urging customers to return the red and black wrist charms.
They are made from the Jequirity bean – a deadly seed of the plant abrus precatorious which contains the toxin abrin, a controlled substance under the Terrorism Act.
Rosary peas have been around forever. And despite fear in the US and UK security apparati, they have inconveniently declined to kill anyone in the last decade. Even though they are routinely sold on eBay.
However, because of The Poisoner’s Handbook, rosary peas — and the small amount of abrin inside their very hard shell, have been treated like castor seeds.
In other words: Ahhhhh, danger!
The Daily Mail reported that the Eden Project had been selling the wristlets made of jequirity beans for a year. With no known intoxications.
Now, if readers turn to page 8 in The Poisoner’s Handbook:
The phytotoxin from precatory beans, also known as jequirity beans, is very similar to ricin and and the extraction process listed … may be used for both …
Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads …
If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can be easily modified to kill.
Obtain, if possible, some acupuncture needles or grind down regular needles as thin as possible while still being strong enough to puncture the jequirity bean coating. Wearing leather gloves, very carefully about a dozen minute holes in each bean on a rosary. When you are finished, spray the string of beads with DMSO … which will dissolve and carry the abrin, and allow to dry.
As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin; the worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse, etc.
These items make wonderful presents for the more religious target.
We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.
Marvelous stuff, that.
Keep in mind that the only stupid people here are those who believe anything in Hutchkinson’s book, having secured it or copies of its ‘information’ for edification and/or training. And over the years there have been hundreds, even tens of thousands of such people, many — surprisingly — in government and national security work.
As with ricin, which is listed next in this thin volume, one sees the obsession — carried into the neo-Nazi/survivalist far right — with the idiotic idea that dimethyl sulfoxide can make ricin, and by extension — abrin from rosary peas, into a contact poison.
Which is rubbish.
Hutchkinson’s book was turned into digital copy and distributed in anarchy files on underground bulletin board systems in the US. They were part of what was considered a forbidden lore. In that world, having access to it meant you were special and clever, when — in reality — just the opposite, you were a fucked-up anti-social dullard, was a more accurate assessment.
Later, these files were migrated to the Internet.
In this way Hutchkinson’s poison book, torn into fragments, traveled around the world. Eventually, its poison recipes also found their way into al Qaeda/jihadi documents, just in time for the War on Terror.
If you’re found with recipes from the book in the US, along with a few castor seeds or, perhaps, the makings of a silencer or pipe bomb, they’re part of the evidence that will send you to the pen.
In England, jihadi documents containing items bowdlerized from Hutchkinson’s notes are treated as things deemed likely to be of use in terrorism. As such, they’re considered seditious and, again, if you’re caught in the wrong circumstances or religion, enough to have you imprisoned.
“In Trinidad in the West Indies the brightly coloured seeds are strung into bracelets and worn around the wrist or ankle to ward off jumbies or evil spirits,” reads the Daily Mail newspaper.
Today’s top news item, a whoopie cushion expose in which the lousiest national leadership in national history, the GWB administration, believed it was exposed to botulinum toxin.
Why is it so bad? Well, our leaders — so benighted and fixated on the war on terror — were obviously too stupid to pick up the phone and get someone who would have told them right away that a detection was a false positive with absolute certainty.
Why with absolute certainty?
First — because bioterrorism detectors really don’t work very well. And they didn’t work at all reliably when this actually happened.
Second — there was no intelligence or evidence anywhere in the world that indicated al Qaeda or anyone, besides the United States biodefense industry, could make botulinum toxin into the potential weapon which the alleged attack would have represented. (In fact, there was only one company that leaked botulinum toxin during the height of the war on terror and it was here and on the inside of the homeland security industry. But the details aren’t important to get into for this post.)
The story reveals the absolute meretriciousness of so much American threat assessment. Identification of threats, not by way of any evidence, but by errant and lousy technology and potentials dreamed up by “advisors” and “experts” on what they think WE could do with all our resources.
It was just a few weeks after September 11, 2001 when Condoleezza Rice accompanied the president on a trip to China for the APEC summit. In Shanghai Vice President Cheney appeared on a secure video conference line and delivered President George W. Bush this message:
“The Vice President came on the screen and said that the White House detectors have detected botulinum toxin, and we were all– those of who exposed were going to die,” Rice told me.
He said that?
“Yes, he said that. And I remember everybody just sort of freezing, and the President saying, ‘What was that? What was that, Dick?’” Rice, who was the National Security Advisor at the time, said.
Botulinum toxin is, according to the Center for Biosecurity, the “most poisonous substance known” and “extremely potent and lethal.”
The exposure time meant that she and those on the trip — Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Chief of Staff Andy Card — were all at risk, Rice told me.
The next day, the poisoning was confirmed as a false alarm by whatever great national lab had been employed to find out. No test mice breathing cups of White House air had died.
Folks, this is nothing but pure proof of epic fail in leadership, a tale of our self-absorbed leaders who believed in nothing but their own idiotic ghost stories and the machine that supported them in that.
These were the kind of people you’d laugh at on the SyFy Channel if they were the poorly dressed moron freak show reality actors on Ghost Hunters, stumbling through old houses with their Radio Shack cameras and night vision goggles, wondering if the cold draft just felt or creak heard from a dark corner was evidence of something from beyond.
What’s the big difference between the Ghost Hunters crew and our old national leaders? Not a trick question. Answer: The Ghost Hunters didn’t have the power to wreck the country.
This story, if you’re asking, is apparently courtesy of Condoleeza Rice’s new book, something called “No Higher Honor.” No higher joke.
If you had a class at Stanford with this person you’d be moved to throw things.
Another sad part is that most journalists simply don’t know enough about such details from the war on terror to get they’ve been fed still another worthless but demoralizing turd wrapped in the shiny paper of a new book announcement.
Today, a press release, one of a steady stream from the homeland security industry.
This one on a DHS contract for ricin detection to small business that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for taxpayer money.
Keep in mind the only market for ricin detection is the artificial one created by the rise of powder hoaxing as hobby for the disgruntled white survivalist nut or felon in the United States. And, primarily, that owes much of its existence due to the explosive growth of the homeland security complex, one which has spent the last ten years loudly telling everyone that ricin is easy to make.
The press release, from PositiveID Corporation:
PositiveID Corporation (”PositiveID” or “Company”) PSID
+32.14% , a developer of medical technologies for
diabetes management, clinical diagnostics and bio-threat detection, announced that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (”DHS”) Science and Technologies (”S&T”) division has directed and funded the development of the Company’s immunodetection assay for the identification of Ricin toxin to meet the specific needs that DHS has in securing the nation against biological threats. Ricin, a chemical warfare agent, is derived from the seeds of the castor oil plant Ricinus communis and has become a tool of terrorist groups across the world due to its effortless production and high toxicity.
Over the last decade the overwhelming majority of incidences of ricin in the news come from stories about powder hoaxes or cases where white American loners (and the occasional British neo-Nazi) have decided to grind castor seeds into a mush.
These are the facts. Amply documented in the Ricin Kooks tab at right, over many years.
Consider this: The country can lay off public sector workers en masse — 250,000 teachers. But no expenses have ever been spared for research and development of detection for a “threat” that has killed absolutely no one in the last ten years.
One can now think of this as something of a Ponzi scheme, entitlement spending, or a small but still significant Keynsian jobs program akin to paying people to dig holes and fill them back in the next day. For years.
The United States remains largely unprepared for a large-scale bioterrorism attack or deadly disease outbreak, according to the WMD Terrorism Research Center.
The finding are in a report card released Wednesday, which gave the country 15 failing grades in categories ranging from detection to medical countermeasures.
The report card gave 15 F’s,15 D’s and no A’s in its assessment of current bio-defense capabilities in the United States.
The bipartisan center, headed by former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, and former Sen. Jim Talent, R-Missouri, did find improvements since the 9-11 2001 attacks, but its analysis suggests the nation’s readiness to respond to various levels of biological disasters remains a work in progress.
Longtime readers know the Graham-Talent lobby for biodefense has regularly issued reports on the US government’s (read the Obama administration’s) readiness for bioterror. And they always give out bad grades for the sake of repeating publicity stunts.
Then they proceed to opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers and write the same script they have always written: Calamity is coming if we don’t spend more of bioterror defense. And anyone can make biological weapons. Easy.
The report points out “advances in biotechnology have now enabled a small team of individuals with college-level training to create biological weapons.”
Since the Graham-Talent sock puppet lobby never varies in its presentation, simply cutting and pasting the same old stuff into whatever new publicity campaign it has lined up, DD feels no regret in simply cutting-and-pasting from old blog posts on them.
Their greatest hits:
Ex-famous politician Graham remade himself as a fugleman for increasing spending on bioterror defense, mostly by planting the same opinion pieces over and over in the nation’s press over the last decade.
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.
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.
Compared to [big lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce], and other standard GOP-aligned [agencies], like KochPAC or AHIP, WMD Center 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.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby is upset because the Obama administration wants to spend money on the middle class. It wants to use two billion dollars from Project Bioshield to save middle class jobs in this very bad economy.
During 2008-09 the Graham-Talent Commission acted as an instrument of Tara O’Toole’s biodefense shop, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
Writing here in December, we summarize:
More accurately, [the commission's public faces] — Bob Graham and Jim Talent — are little more than fuglemen for the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a small consortium of biodefense firms called the Alliance for Biosecurity. And the ‘commission’s’ top two staffers are indistinguishable from the Center for Biosecurity.
The special interest group known as the Graham-Talent commission, though, does have a script it efficiently delivers.
It’s an apocalyptic one, a dire and extreme claim delivered free of correspondingly extreme or convincing evidence in support of it. It lives on the idea that if enough people can be rounded up to repeat it in press, it will be taken as fact by others who should perhaps know better.
And that script, delivered through the end of 2009 for the purposes of bonking the Obama administration over the head on the nation’s unpreparedness for bioterrorism was this, as taken from an example in USA Today:
“[Anthrax spores] released by a crop-duster could ‘kill more Americans than died in World War II’ and the economic impact could exceed $1.8 trillion in cleanup and other costs.”
An anthrax attack, in other words, would make World War II and the economic collapse seem like walks on a sunny day.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby regularly astro-turfed this substance-free meme into the mainstream press.
Synopsis: In 2009 the Obama administration kicked Bob Graham and Jim Talent’s group of biodefense lobbymen off the government payroll. They saw it coming and came up with a report to give the administration an F. Ever since, they’ve been generating more F-rated reports as payback.
As far as peer-reviewed science publication goes it’s pretty slim pickings. Readers can view the current issue as an example and decide for themselves.
This is not Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Bacteriology or even Infection & Immunity.
It is not any American Society for Microbiology publication.
And at least two of the paper in question’s three authors are lifers in the mythos of anthrax denial.
The short version: Hatfill’s life was turned upside down. He sued the FBI and, after years, won remuneration and was exonerated.
Kristof, for his part, recanted, saying: “I owe an apology to Dr. Hatfill … the job of the news media is supposed to be to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted.”
Mostly, Rosenberg was never heard from again. Until now. When perhaps it is deemed safe to emerge from the hole for an obscure journal, or something.
Another author of the paper, Stuart Jacobsen, has long pursued the idea that the anthrax was weaponized.
Years ago, he used to upload into the comment section at DD blog whenever something on the anthrax case was published.
The central idea here — that since the anthrax was weaponized Ivins could not have made it — has been worked for years. A decade, it seems. And it will never go away.
Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated.
One can view this as a re-laundering the same old Ivins-didn’t-do-it argument.
When this, too, fails to move the down marker the same people will go back to working it until another publication can be found to air something slightly different and allegedly eye-opening.
And the cycle will repeat.
Clearing Ivins and changing the official version on the anthrax case will require extraordinary material well beyond arguments in off market journals. And that is something no one has yet produced.
In addition to the philosophical differences with encouraging government funding for private companies, critics say the Department of Energy gave Solyndra favorable treatment in the loan approval process due to its tight relationship with administration officials.
They point out that one of the company’s main financial backers, billionaire George Kaiser, is also a big Democratic campaign donor.
Now the company’s bankruptcy has become a case study on an issue likely to gain increasing attention: Should the government be investing taxpayer dollars in promising — but risky — startup companies?
All of the mainstream media will play dumb. Propping up crappy firms with taxpayer dough! Heresy!
Lots of people will stupidly act like it’s rare, or should be.
They will conveniently ignore that one of the primary functions of the Department of Homeland Security, over the past decade, was to do the same thing. And for most of the time we were under GOP rule.
The taxpayer propped up hundreds, maybe thousands, of small businesses promising technology to fight the war on terror. Most of it either totally flopped or has never paid off in any big way.
WASHINGTON — A $36 million anti-terrorism program designed to detect bombs on airline passengers by shooting air blasts to dislodge explosive particles is being scuttled because the machines proved unreliable at airports.
The “puffer” machines — glass portals that passengers enter for checkpoint screening — are being removed after the Transportation Security Administration spent $6.2 million on maintenance since 2005. Removing them will cost nearly $1 million, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said.
Problems emerged after the TSA bought 207 puffers for $30 million starting in 2004. Ninety-four were installed in 37 airports. The other 113 machines stayed in storage.
Dirt and humidity in airports led to frequent breakdowns, Payne said. The TSA has removed 60 puffers and will pull the rest but has no deadline. The puffers, costing $160,000 each, attempted to identify bomb residue on clothing. They were used as added screening on passengers who had gone through metal detectors.
Some of the machines had trouble detecting bombs, said Hasbrouck Miller, a vice president of puffer manufacturer Smiths Detection. “It was a torturous four years,” Miller said, describing repair efforts …
One can make the argument the only reason the company hasn’t gone out of business is because of continuous taxpayer funding courtesy of multiple federal agencies.
And dead Jack Murtha’s career was virtually defined by it during the big years of the war on terror. When he died, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity lost its government fixer and its effort to get a big bioterror defense vaccine production center slowly collapsed.
Posted in Bioterrorism at 12:43 pm by George Smith
The bioterror defense lobby dynamic duo, Jim Talent and Bob Graham, are about to try and coattail/carpetbag the Contagion movie, using it to push for more spending.
It was not a success. And this push will undoubtedly flop, too. Although the lobbyists will probably be successful in getting a couple opinion pieces planted in the nation’s newspapers.
The publicity push will fail to gain traction because of a simple question.
How many people want to see a movie where masses of people die horribly, along with the threat of worldwide collapse eight now? Yep, Hollywood has sure guessed the public mood right again.
Everyone is just dieing to see a doomsday plague movie! (Just prior to the beginning of the sick season.)
“In ‘Contagion,’ which opens next weekend with a cast that includes Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne, health professionals around the world combat a deadly airborne virus of mysterious origin. The action thriller depicts mass suffering and panic.
“Hoping to capitalize on the movie, Talent and former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., the chair of the WMD commission, plan to release a new report that reiterates the threat of biological attack ..”
The bioterror defense lobby is also suffering from a bit of the blues brought on by the economic collapse and austerity politics now in play. The debt talks and political climate have made it nervous.
If there’s a place that actually can be cut without much screaming, it’s in bioterror defense.
And this explains the slant of some articles now emerging on the subject, hooked to hit the tenth commemoration of 9/11.
Again, from the wire:
The Homeland Security Department is the government’s lead agency when it comes to protecting against biological weapons. Part of that task is developing technologies that can quickly trace the source of an outbreak, a critical step in determining mass treatment.
Yet the House proposed a budget this year for Homeland Security that would have cut research and development by 81 percent, a cut that Dr. Tara O’Toole, the agency’s undersecretary for science and technology, said would have been devastating.
“It would be have basically shut down science and technology here,” O’Toole said in an interview.
The federal budget remains uncertain for the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1, making it hard to plan for long-range projects that don’t immediately bear fruit, she said.
“The work we’re doing in biodefense won’t get done unless we do it,” she said. “The notion of a bioattack sounds outlandish and farfetched to some people, but it’s really not. It’s easier to imagine that happening than a nuclear attack orchestrated by terrorists.”
Making that case in the climate of cutting is a challenge.
Earlier in the year the economic collapse accidentally and pleasantly intervened to kill a bioterror defense project that looked like all but a done deal a couple years ago.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, long a force in expanding government funding for bioterror defense, has shockingly seen plans for a bioterror vaccine facility collapse …
This is the project that Tara O’Toole, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity and now at the Dept. of Homeland Security, tried to build.
Slight victories in these matters are good things. If the bioterror defense industry is hurt a little bit in these times, fine. It exploded post-anthrax and continued unrestrained and unregulated growth through the entire decade.
And to see Tara O’Toole expressing even the slightest alarm re its future is, from this perspective, a sign that something is going in the right direction. If only minutely and by accident/coincidental events changing its trajectory.
The wire story quoted, originally from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, continues the long tradition of mainstream media stories which quote only from the bioterror defense lobby.
Subsequently, it is written to convey the impression that there is a consensus on the level of bioterror defense spending which is appropriate. And that there are no critics of the industry.
The bioterror defense lobby is easy to view with scorn. It works hard to earn it.
A reader of DD blog points out an ugly matter if you follow how people within the Beltway use world events to push their personal and professional hobby horses.
On Tuesay, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius used Anders Breivik’s Norwegian slaughter to pimp a report having to do with chemical and bioterrorism, a pamphlet issued by Richard Danzig and a lot of et al at the Center for New American Security.
But Friday’s attack in Oslo by Anders Behring Breivik teaches some broader lessons, too: There are homicidal cults all over the world — some in Muslim countries and some in the heart of Europe. Some attackers will be found insane by courts, but others will have a diabolical logic and lucidity — and the world has to be ready for all of them.
Most important, the next time the weapons of choice may not be a bomb and a semiautomatic rifle, as in the case of the Oslo attacker who killed 76 people. Lunatics and sane plotters alike may have access to chemical and biological weapons that could kill thousands.
As in so many terrorist cases — and with al-Qaeda itself — this latest extremist didn’t sneak up on the world. He all but announced his anti-immigrant views on the Internet.
To understand the dangers posed by these borderline extremists, I recommend a new report by Richard Danzig and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security. It’s a case study of the only terrorist group that has successfully used chemical and biological weapons on a mass scale — the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. It poisoned the Tokyo subway system with sarin, a deadly nerve gas, in 1995, causing 13 deaths and an astounding 6,252 injuries.
One can imagine this bit of opportunism just as it happened.
The Norway case is used as a convenient hook to carpetbag a report from the Center for New American Security into the news, a paper that under standard circumstances virtually nobody except some field experts and members of the bioterror defense lobby would read.
It’s transparently cynical, not only for what has been already mentioned, but for using the old Japanese attack by the Aum Shinrikyo group as an argument for stoking the usual fears as if these apply only to us.
Unfortunately, this tragedy is Norway’s and as for finger-pointing and lesson taking, and there has been some, parts of the twisted trail do not indicate much like the peculiar cult run by Shoko Asahara.
Instead, we have other novel peculiarities, like the fascination with the Knights Templar, the writings of American right wing bloggers and one famous US woodsman terrorist fond of inside-the-shack-made bombs.
The reports to read, then, on understanding extremist terrorism were not by Richard Danzig et al and the Center for New American Security at all.
When looking at the Breivik slaughter, Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo aren’t the best match. There are no particular lessons here unless one takes the broadest strokes, that crazy and violent people sometimes but not often succeed spectacularly and that Aum Shinrikyo operated for a long time with Japanese authorities failing to act.
Neither of these are unique in the annals of terrorism. Really bad stuff happens and not very often. But when it does people are invariably taken by surprise even if in post-analysis it looks like they shouldn’t have been. To err is part of the human condition. Nothing can change it.
By the end of day [of Shinrikyo's second attack], 15 subway stations in the world’s busiest subway system had been affected. Of these, stations along the Hbiya line were the most heavily affected, some with as many as 300 to 400 persons involved. The number injured in the attacks was just under 3,800. Of those, nearly 1,000 actually required hospitalization—some for no more than a few hours, some for many days. A very few are still hospitalized. And 12 people were dead.
Instead of using the Norway attack, instant worldwide news, as a convenience, the parties involved might have shown the good grace not to work it so.
As it stands, the Ignatius piece is noticeable for being flinch-worthy in its audacity. And for being a minor example/lesson on how people parked at national security think tanks view stuff.
An idle mind is the devil’s playground. That’s a flip way to describe the recent intersection of stupid Dept. of Justice lawyers and the continuing mainstream media interest in anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins. Throw in the mythology surrounding the dead man’s case. It will never die. Stir vigorously.
So the latest new skin mole with hair growing out of it comes courtesy of civil case lawyers at the Dept. of Justice, legal men apparently not really up on the fine details of what the FBI’s arguments were against the man. But dead set on trying to find a reason to explain why the US government not be found liable in the death of Robert Stevens, the first anthrax victim.
Once they had botched their case by filing materials in it incongruent with the FBI’s findings, they “rushed to correct [these things],” reported Scott Shane of the New York Times.
Lawyers for the department’s civil division wrote in the July 15 filing that the Army’s biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md., “did not have the specialized equipment in a containment laboratory that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.”
But on Tuesday, the department sent the court a list of corrections to its documents in the Florida lawsuit, filed by the family of Robert Stevens, a tabloid photo editor and one of five people killed in the anthrax attacks. What the filing should have said, the department wrote, was that while the Army lab did not have a lyophilizer, a freeze-drying machine, in the space where Dr. Ivins usually worked, there was a lyophilizer and other equipment in the building that he could have used to dry the anthrax into powder.
This news set off the cult of anthrax denial, a small but rather loud and partially effective group of conspiracy theorists working continuously to exonerate Ivins.
A month ago, it was weaponization and the alleged use of silicon in mailed anthrax preparations. This, it was said, proved Ivins could not have done it. All picked up by the McClatchy new service.
And, again via McClatchy, the current news of stumblebum DoJ lawyers who readers can presume were quite loudly read the riot act behind closed doors over their initial filing in the Stevens imbroglio. In addition to having thrown away the case through professional incompetence, they may have also quietly flushed their jobs down the toilet once this particular moment is over.
In the mainstream press, the news post-Ivins suicide now revolves around publicizing what are minor mistakes and inconsistencies in the FBI case. They rely on a well-earned suspicion of the government and the simple fact that editors and lay readers now simply can’t remember all the fine details of the FBI’s lay out against Ivins.
The arguments spring from the fertile earth of paranoid assumption that everyone at the FBI was incompetent. And that various small holes and misinterpretations of difficult to understand science found because the case was not 100 percent air tight forensically exonerate the man.
Except it never quite happens. Is there some blockbuster item as yet unpublished that will destroy the FBI’s case? Perhaps, but I doubt it.
Anyway, it has not yet been unearthed. In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The FBI largely appeared to fill that requirement. The critics of it, as of yet, haven’t really.
And no amount of publishing in the mainstream press, essentially just nibbling around the edges, will re-open the case barring that.
The mythology will continue. And the next item bubbling under is that some consultant who furnished psychological testimony on Ivins to the FBI relied on a person now being painted as a crackpot.
