From foodconsumer.org
FBI Widens Dragnet for 2001 Anthrax Attacks
By Kathy Jones
Sep 25, 2006, 14:58
25 Sep, (foodconsumer.org) - The anthrax attacks that killed five people in the US did not use military grade anthrax powder, the FBI has decided. The Washington Post reports that the agency is now widening its investigations five years after the attacks, which also sickened 17 people.
The results of the FBI's internal investigations, which involved testing the anthrax power sent through the mail, throw water on the widely held theory that the attacks were the work of a government scientist or someone with access to a U.S. biodefense lab, The Post said.
Law enforcement officials had initially called the anthrax powder as near biological weapons grade. But after being subjected to countless scientific tests, officials said the powder did not show any signs of having an additive or being specially processed for acting as a biological weapon.
Anthrax is considered as a possible bioterror weapon ever since the unexplained postal attacks in New York and New Jersey in 2001. Overall 22 cases of infection were reported and five people died from the disease. The person or people responsible for that attack have not yet been apprehended.
In May this year there was concern when an inventory at a Trenton laboratory reported that two anthrax vials of the variety used in the 2001 attacks were unaccounted for. The samples were taken between 2001 and 2004 from the Trenton Postal Processing and Distribution Center in Hamilton. Earlier inventories had pegged the count at 352, but only 350 anthrax vials were found.
The FBI and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control had been apprised of the situation, but officials believed that those "missing" vials never existed.
Because the access to anthrax is limited, the FBI investigated government scientists initially. After no success in that area, the agency is now spreading the dragnet. However the FBI is now in a catch-22 situation since it will have to examine a long list of suspects housed in many countries globally.
Douglas J. Beecher, a scientist in the FBI laboratory's Hazardous Materials Response Unit wrote an article in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, in which he made it clear that the powder used in the 2001 attacks did not have any additives.
Additives are substances that are added to anthrax bacteria to make them deadlier. If additives had been discovered in the 2001 anthrax powder, then it could have been safely assumed that whoever perpetrated the attacks has access to "weaponization recipes."
However Beecher nixed that theory. "A widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapons production," Beecher wrote in the journal's August edition. "The idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone."
Beecher was not allowed by the FBI to expand on his thought, but various scientists told the Washington Post that they agreed with his assessment. Whoever created the powder cleaned it and made it pure, but did not use the many methods, which would have made it lethal.
In a meeting with the Post's editors this month, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff did not reveal if the FBI is still tracking any special person.
"I'm not telling you that right now the bureau is focused on someone or not focused on someone," said Chertoff. "There are in my experience a lot of instances where we might know or have a good reason to believe who committed a criminal act, but we may not be able to prove it. So when you say something is not solved, you should not assume from the fact that there is no criminal prosecution we don't have a good idea of what we think happened."
Anthrax is an acute infectious disease, which is caused by a bacterium called Bacillus anthracis. The disease occurs mostly in cattle, sheep, goats and camels. Human infection occurs when they are exposed to infected tissues of the animals. Since, the anthrax bacterium is spore forming, it can survive in the soil for a long time.
People handling infected animals or even eating undercooked meat from infected animals develop anthrax. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed three types of anthrax; skin or cutaneous anthrax, lung or inhalation anthrax and digestive o gastro-intestinal anthrax.
The FBI's handling of the issue has been severely criticized. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said the FBI must take urgent steps to inform the public if the case has gone cold, "I'm concerned that the FBI may have spent too much time focusing [on] one theory of what happened and too little effort on the other possibilities."
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