IP: F.B.I. Queries Expert Who Sees Federal Lab Tie in Anthrax Cases

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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> Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 11:53:25 -0500
> To: dave () farber net
> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah () shipwright com>
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> From: Denny <bdlpcc () ix netcom com>
> Subject: I-P: F.B.I. Queries Expert Who Sees Federal Lab Tie in Anthrax Cases
> Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 09:55:00 -0500
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> December 14, 2001
>
>
> F.B.I. Queries Expert Who Sees Federal Lab Tie in Anthrax Cases
>
>
> By WILLIAM J. BROAD
>
>
> F.B.I. agents yesterday questioned a leading proponent of the theory that
> the anthrax attacks were the work of someone linked to a federal laboratory
> or contractor, asking her about possible clues to the culprit's identity.
>
> "They wanted to know whether I had ideas about who did it," said the
> expert, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State
> University of New York at Purchase and chairwoman of a biological weapons
> panel at the Federation of American Scientists.
>
> Dr. Rosenberg said that in response she had given the agents detailed
> information about ideas that she had sketched out in a paper posted on the
> federation's Web site.
>
> She said the agents had also repeatedly asked her whether she agreed that
> the perpetrator would have known that anthrax spores would seep through
> envelopes in which they were mailed. But "I kept disagreeing," she said.
>
> In her paper, Dr. Rosenberg said she believed that the culprit's motive was
> not necessarily to kill but to stir public fear and so highlight the
> importance of building up defenses against germ attack.
>
> As the F.B.I. agents consulted Dr. Rosenberg yesterday, a disagreement
> between federal experts and a former government germ scientist over one
> narrow issue  how much powdered anthrax was made in 1998 by an Army
> laboratory at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah  appeared to be resolved.
>
> Dugway officials had claimed that the amount was small  just grams, or a
> tiny fraction of a pound. But the scientist, William C. Patrick III, who
> taught Dugway scientists a secret way to turn wet anthrax into powder, had
> told military officers that Dugway had made about a pound.
>
> In an interview yesterday, Mr. Patrick said he had meant to say that "we
> could have produced a pound, not that we did." Quantities of a pound that
> were made, he added, were not anthrax but Bacillus subtilis, a benign germ
> sometimes used to simulate anthrax.
>
> Pounds of anthrax, Mr. Patrick said, far exceed what the installation might
> have needed to test germ defenses, the reason cited by Dugway for making
> small amounts of anthrax powder.
>
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