1) Reference is made to a single flask of RMR-1029. It would be very unusual to maintain a single container or any particular strain or sample, especially an important one. The more usual practice is to have multiple small samples, aliquots, of important strains in storage. This is done to for a number of reasons including prevention of contamination. If only one container of a particular strain exists and it inadvertantly becomes contaminated, then that strain is lost.

2) Specimens are not stored in ‘flasks’ or ‘beakers’, they would be stored in small sealable tubes specifically designed for the purpose.

3) The manufacture of anthrax spore powder is a very complicated and time consuming process. If one were to start with spores, they must first be grown in culture medium to a certain density, then they are removed from the growth medium and placed in a special nutrient deficient medium that stresses them and induces the formation of spores. Then this spore containing medium must be put through a clean up process and then freeze dried. Doing all of these tasks would necessarily consume a notable quantity of supplies, two types of medium, culture flasks, pipettes, protective clothing etc. and would also take quite a bit of time and effort. This would be a quite notable departure from routine maintenance activities and unless some extra material was made in the course of normal laboratory activities, it would almost certainly been noticed by co-workers.

4) Given the amount of work involved in making spore powder, and the timing of the suspect laboratory use, it would have been very difficult to start work on a project of this type, successfully produce two or three batches of powder, and then mail them over the few days that the suspect access events occurred. While it could have been done, it would have taken a nearly full time effort which would have been noticed. In the alternative, some spore powder could have been prepared and stored and only packaged in the suspect time period, but again, laboratory audits of sample storage would likely have shown extra or unusual quantities of material.

5) Nothing is reported on identification of any spores or traces of the final powders from the letters that were recovered during the search warrants.

6) Silicon is listed as being identified in some of the delivered letters. There is technology using silica as a non-clumping/dispersion aid for powdered bioweapons, but not silicon or silicone.

7) The search warrants make reference to isotopic studies identifying the water used as having come from the northeast. Laboratory work of this nature does not make use of tap water supplies. The water would have come from one of three sources, first commercially produced bottled ultra high purity water prepared for cell culture work. The second source would be derived from municipal supplies that would have been subjected to several exhaustive purification steps in the laboratory to produce water of the purity necessary to do this type of work. The third source would be commercially available medical grade water for injection. All of these processed grades of water will have particular contaminant profiles and oxygen isotope ratios. Ivins certainly would not have used raw tap water. But critically there would be few if any other signatures present as the purpose of purification is to remove them.

8) The critical need is to examine the data from all of the laboratory work the FBI commissioned.

9) As others have noted, what about all of the other people and institutions that had samples of this particular culture?

Lesser known fact: the Madrid bombings (done by a terrorist group not associated with Al Qaeda) occurred 912 days after the New York attack. It *would have been* 911 days afterward, except for the leap year of 2004 – so whoever calculated the date of the bombings didn’t take the leap year into account.

The following “911 days later”, September 8, 2006, did not feature any terrorist attack that I know of.

David Cyrus: thank you for this highly relevant piece of information. I knew that even after extensive purification, isotope signatures remain, (although the FBI did not refer to isotope signatures). Very interesting to hear that even isotope signatures can not zero in specifically on Ft. Detrick, MD.

Interesting, but not surprising, as there is no evidence against Ivins that would hold up in court, please see my and Barry Kissin’s article from August of last year at:

http://www.sheilacasey.com/2008/08/fbi-tries-to-sweep-anthrax-under-the-rug.html#more

Actually, distilled water does not always suffice in purity (i.e. for cultures or PCR reactions), hence the use of ultrapure (type 1) water.
As for the ‘elemental and chemical properties’ , the analysis likely referred to measuring the isotope ratios of oxygen and hydrogen, which can be geo-specific (see Ehleringer et al. PNAS in Feb 26, 2008) and is not affected by any filtering or distillation technique…

The New York Times is a propaganda rag which has been at Ground Zero of every major Right-Wing, establishmentarian atrocity of the past 2 decades. The Times and Post “reporting” on “Whitewater” and other “get Clinton” campaigns were so horrendous, that Conason & Lyons use 25 pages, of mostly single-line citations, to detail them, in their book, “The Hunting of the President”. Some of the more glaring editorial double-standards of the Times and Post include making the Clinton’s overnight guest list into the so-called “LINCOLN BEDROOM ‘SCANDAL’!”, and the even more horrendous “White House Trashing scandal” without a SINGLE PHOTO OF EVIDENCE! Which faux-”scandal” served to legitimize the Bush-Cheney theft of election 2000. Which was made possible by the Times (and Post) relentlessly focusing on VP Al Gore’s alleged “serial exaggerations” in the long campaign summer of 2000, while giving Texas Governor George W. Bush a FREE PASS for his – long history of scandals, including going AWOL from Texas ANG during the Vietnam War; including then Gov. Bush using Harriett Miers to award the Texas Lottery contract, overriding the winning bidder to hand the contract to a company connected with a Bush crony; and of course the Times & Post giving Bush a free pass for busting Texas budget surplus, left to him by previous, Democratic Gov. Ann Richards.
Once Bush & Cheney stole the White House, the Times gave them a free-pass for: flying bin Laden family out of America after 9-11; for doing NOTHING to head off the 9-11 hijacks despite repeated and persistent FBI & CIA warnings; doing NOTHING to bring Al Qaida to justice for the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole; first obstructing, then whitewashing the 9-11 commission; ALLOWING Osama bin Laden to flee from Afghanistan to Pakistan (and then giving him 5 years of bliss in his new sanctuary); supporting and TRUMPETING Cheney’s Lies-to-War from the front pages of the Times & Post, including of course JUDITH MILLER acting as Cheney’s megaphone from the front pages of the Times; then helping the White House WHITEWASH and OBSTRUCT the Valerie Plame “outing” – not just of Ms. Plame, but of her ENTIRE CIA UNDERCOVER organization, as a means of political retribution on her husband, and outspoken lies-to-war whistleblower;
The Times WHITEWASHED the military Chain-of-Command’s role in the “abuse” of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, while TRUMPETING KANGAROO COURT trials of female, volunteer privates – accused ONLY of “abuse’ – WHILE Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were loudly, publicly, and repeatedly DEMANDING and insisting on the ‘right’ to TORTURE prisoners, to death, at their sole discretion, with NO oversight from anyone, ever! –
And of course the Times and Post WHITEWASHED the way Vice President Cheney BOUGHT HIMSELF A WAR in Georgia, bribing and arming Georgia’s Dictator, Saakashvili, to attack South Ossetia, and when that war blew up in Saakashvili’s face, VP Cheney flew to Georgia to hand Mr. Saakashvili ANOTHER BILLION DOLLARS of no-questions asked or answered US taxpayer dollars (to continue smashing heads of his political opponents and arresting them for “treason’) –

AT EVERY STEP of the sad, sordid way, the New York Times has been “in” on every atrocity and democracy-crushing agenda item of the Bush-Cheney agenda and its neo-con, PNAC foreign policy crew (and economy-gutting neo-con economics crew).

http://www.dallasnews.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=48

http://www.forums.signonsandiego.com/showthread.php?t=59139

google these words together

nichols potts trentadue

http://www.anthraxvaccine.org

Also the lead FBI agent investigating the anthrax attack in 2002 , Tom Carey,
quit his job at the FBI and took a job running the campus police at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Bates college was the host of 11 National Conferences investigating crimes committed by FBI agents held from 1990-2001.
After FBI agent took the job at Bates College the conference was no longer held at Bates.