- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But
there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient
explanation for failure.
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- www.monbiot.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/anthrax/story/0,1520,719367,00.html
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