From the Comment Section of the newspaper

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4417654,00.html

Riddle of the spores

Why has the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks
stalled? The evidence points one way

George Monbiot
Guardian

Tuesday May 21, 2002

The more a government emphasises its commitment to defence,
the less it seems to care about the survival of its people.
Perhaps it is because its attention may be focused on more
distant prospects: the establishment and maintenance of
empire, for example, or the dynastic succession of its leaders.
Whatever the explanation for the neglect of their security may
be, the people of America have discovered that casual is the
precursor of casualty.

But while we should be asking what George Bush and his
cabinet knew and failed to respond to before September 11, we
should also be exploring another, related, question: what do
they know now and yet still refuse to act upon? Another way of
asking the question is this: whatever happened to the anthrax
investigation?

After five letters containing anthrax spores had been posted, in
the autumn, to addresses in the United States, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation promised that it would examine "every bit
of information [and] every bit of evidence". But now the
investigation appears to have stalled. Microbiologists in the US
are beginning to wonder aloud whether the FBI's problem is not
that it knows too little, but that it knows too much.

Reducing the number of suspects would not, one might have
imagined, have been too much to ask of the biggest domestic
detective agency on earth. While some of the anthrax the
terrorist sent was spoiled during delivery, one sample appears to
have come through intact. The letter received by Senator Tom
Daschle contained one trillion anthrax spores per gram: a
concentration which only a very few US government scientists,
using a secret and strictly controlled technique, know how to
achieve. It must, moreover, have been developed in a
professional laboratory, containing rare and sophisticated
"weaponisation" equipment. There is only a tiny number of
facilities - all of them in the US - in which it could have been
produced.

The anthrax the terrorist sent belongs to the "Ames" strain of
the bacterium, which was extracted from an infected cow in
Texas in 1981. In December, the Washington Post reported that
genetic tests showed that the variety used by the terrorist was a
sub-strain cultivated by scientists at the US army's medical
research institute for infectious diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort
Detrick, Maryland. That finding was publicly confirmed two
weeks ago, when the test results were published in the journal
Science. New Scientist magazine notes that the anthrax the
terrorist used appears to have emerged from Fort Detrick only
recently, as the researchers found that samples which have
been separated from each other for three years acquire
"substantial genetic differences".

The Ames strain was distributed by USAMRIID to around 20
other laboratories in the US. Of these, according to research
conducted by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who runs the
Federation of American Scientists' biological weapons
monitoring programme, only four possess the equipment and
expertise required for the weaponisation of the anthrax sent to
Senator Daschle. Three of them are US military laboratories, the
fourth is a government contractor. While security in all these
places has been lax, the terrorist could not have stolen all the
anthrax (around 10 grams) which found its way into the postal
system. He must have used the equipment to manufacture it.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has produced a profile of the likely
perpetrator. He is an American working within the US biodefense
industry, with a doctoral degree in the relevant branch of
microbiology. He is skilled and experienced at handling the
weapon without contaminating his surroundings. He has full
security clearance and access to classified information. He is
among the tiny number of Americans who had received anthrax
vaccinations before September 2001. Only a handful of people fit
this description. Rosenberg has told the internet magazine
Salon.com that three senior scientists have identified the same
man - a former USAMRIID scientist - as the likely suspect. She,
and they, have told the FBI, but it seems that all the bureau has
done in response is to denounce her.

Instead, it has launched the kind of "investigation" which might
have been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a
person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the
likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full
of holes over the entire population.

In January, three months after the first anthrax attack and at
least a month after it knew that the sub-strain used by the
attacker came from Fort Detrick, the FBI announced a reward of
$2.5m for information leading to his capture. It circulated
500,000 fliers, and sent letters to all 40,000 members of the
American Society for Microbiology, asking them whether they
knew someone who might have done it.

Yet, while it trawled the empty waters, the bureau failed to cast
its hook into the only ponds in which the perpetrator could have
been lurking. In February, the Wall Street Journal revealed that
the FBI had yet to subpoena the personnel records of the labs
which had been working with the Ames strain. Four months after
the investigation began, in other words, it had not bothered to
find out who had been working in the places from which the
anthrax must have come. It was not until March, after Barbara
Hatch Rosenberg had released her findings, that the bureau
started asking laboratories for samples of their anthrax and the
records relating to them.

To date, it appears to have analysed only those specimens
which already happened to be in the hands of its researchers or
which had been offered, without compulsion, by laboratories. A
fortnight ago, the New York Times reported that "government
experts investigating the anthrax strikes are still at sea". The
FBI claimed that the problem "is a lack of advisers skilled in the
subtleties of germ weapons".

Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence
was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? "The
investigation is continuing," the spokesman replied. "Has it gone
cold because it has led you to a government office?" I asked. He
put down the phone.

Had he stayed on the line, I would have asked him about a few
other offences the FBI might wish to consider. The army's
development of weaponised anthrax, for example, directly
contravenes both the biological weapons convention and
domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in "aerosol
chambers" at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in
Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified
fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria
for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as
the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to
be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research
programmes which the US government has secretly funded.
Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's
investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might
have expected because the federal authorities have something
to hide.

The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there
is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an
insufficient explanation for failure.