About Anthrax

by

Janette Rainwater, Ph.D.

Finally a leading Democrat has mentioned the elephant in the livingroom. On December 8^th Majority Leader Senator Tom Daschle said he believes it is a good bet that those letters laden with deadly anthrax spores were sent to him and Senator Leahy by someone "with military experience." By this time Ashcroft and Ridge had conceded that it was probably a domestic terrorist and not one of bin Laden's guys. Senator Daschle could have added (but it would have been most unwise politically to have done so) that, given the influential positions of the two Democratic recipients, the sender was most likely a right-wing Republican.

It's interesting that Attorney General Ashcroft has been so slow in sending his FBI to interview past and present military with experience in biological warfare and also past and present workers in microbiology labs. (He's had no problem doing a fishing expedition with immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, and that's a far less specific criterion.)

But as Clayton Lee Waagner, the confessed "anthrax" hoaxer who sent threatening letters containing a white powder to 550 abortion clinics in the last two months, said of Ashcroft, "I understand he's anti-abortion also. He's a good man."

The whole anthrax scare that was so hyped in October by the networks revealed an interesting class consciousness in this administration. Immediately after anthrax was discovered in the Daschle letter on October 15^th the area was quarantined, hundreds of people on Capitol Hill were tested, and at least 50 people put on a prophylactic dosage of Cipro for 60 days. The House of Representatives, with no known exposure, closed down for business on the 17th.

Only a week later, after two postal workers died of inhalation anthrax on the October 22, did authorities turn their attention to the postal service that had handled and delivered the letter. The thousands of postal workers who went to the District of Columbia General Hospital for anthrax testing on October 23rd were told that testing was not necessary and handed a ten days' supply of Cipro (this despite the warnings on TV that people should not take the antibiotic if they had not been exposed.)

With only five deaths so far, it is obvious that anthrax is a dud as a bioterrorism weapon of mass destruction (familiarly known on Capitol Hill as a WMD.) Where it is useful, of course, is in creating panic and, as in this case, providing a climate wherein legislation curtailing civil liberties can be passed. Since only Russia and the US have the capability of producing anthrax in the Daschle-Leahy form, the conspiracy theorists have been pointing their collective fingers at the CIA and/or military intelligence.

Now a Washington Post news story of December 16, 2001 reveals that the anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill have the identical genetic fingerprints as the anthrax stocks maintained by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland since 1980. Only four other labs have samples from the Fort Detrick stock: Dugway Proving Ground, a military research facility in Utah which has processed anthrax spores into the easily-inhaled powdery form; Lousiana State University, Northern Arizona University, and the Porton Down military lab in Britain.The spores used in the Daschle-Leahy letters had to have come from one of these five places. Now that should help narrow your search, Mr. Ashcroft.

Supposedly these labs (including the CIA which has also been experimenting with anthrax spores) were using the samples in an effort to develop vaccines against anthrax. But suspicious minds recall that the US has refused to sign on to the bioterrorism treaty as long as the treaty mandates international inspection of laboratories working with materials that could be used in bioterrorism.

February 19, 2002 update:  Evidently the FBI has had a major suspect since October. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons program of the Federation of American Scientists, said the suspect is a former government scientist.  "We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it's likely that he participated in the past in secret activiies that the government would not like to see disclosed. And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.... I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made that he just disappears from view." In answer to a question she further said, "The results of the anayses (of the letters and the anthrax in them) show that access to classified information was essential. And that rules out most of the people in the pharmaceutical industry.... We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the Washington, D.C. area. He had reason for travel to Florida, New Jersy and the United Kingdom..... There is also the likelihood the perpetrator made the anthrax himself. He grew it, probably on a solid medium and weaponized it at a private location where he had accumulated the equipment and the material.... The FBI has questioned this person more than once." Joseph Dee, Times of Trenton, New Jersey Online, 02/19/02--- www.nj.com/mercer/times/index.ssf?/mercer/times/02-19-IZAR1IUB.html

March 18, 2002 update:   Dr. Rosenberg further describes her candidate for the anthrax mailings in an article in The New Yorker. He is "a middle-aged man who had worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and who was familiar with the method of weaponizing anthrax devised by William Patrick III, the longtime head of bioweapons research at Fort Detrick. The perpetrator now works for a Washington-area subcontractor to the U.S. biological weapons program." Assessing him as "not a normal person," but someone with a "pattern of erratic behavior," she believes he may have had some sort of a setback to his career and decided to seek revenge with the anthax letters not only to demonstrate how good he is (and therefore misjudged by his superiors), but also to motivate the government to spend more money in bioweapons research. The anthrax, she believes, was prepared in the summer of 2001. With the September 11th attacks he had the opportunity to throw suspicion on the Muslims with an anonymous letter to the police casting suspicion on a former colleague from Fort Detrick who had been born in Egypt, Ayaad Assaad, and with Muslim slogans included in some of the letters.  Nicholas Lemann, "The Anthrax Culprit," The New Yorker, March 18, 2002.

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