Check out this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49502-2001Dec15.html Does this rule out Iraq as the mastermind behind the anthrax scare? Or does it mean that there is a traitor in the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease? Thoughts??
...Those matching samples are at Fort Detrick; the Dugway Proving Ground military research facility in Utah; a British military lab called Porton Down; and microbial depositories at Louisiana State University (LSU) and Northern Arizona University. Northern Arizona University received its sample from LSU, which received its sample from Porton Down. Dugway and Porton Down got their samples directly from USAMRIID... Other experts were cautious, noting that it is possible that the exact subtype of the Ames strain could have originated elsewhere -- perhaps even isolated from animals or soil in the wild. "It's an important finding but it's not one of those things that says, 'Aha!' " said Richard Spertzel, a former director of the U.N. biological weapons team in Iraq... The CIA's biowarfare program, which was designed to find ways to defend against bioterrorists, involved the use of small amounts of Ames strain, an agency spokesman said yesterday. The CIA declined to say where its Ames strain material came from. The spokesman said, however, that the CIA's anthrax was not milled into the volatile power form found in the letters and that none of it is missing. This is not a smoking gun, but it certainly doesn't look good... It could have come from the Porton Down (UK) lab, it could have been collected from a natural source (Ames is fairly common) and then been milled, it could have come from Iraq (they do have Ames, I believe), or it could have come from a traitor in USAMRIID. Those are about the only four possibilities that are realistic, but if the sender was an American, I still don't see why they mailed two anthrax letters to Pakistan...
Fort Detrick obtained anthrax from an Agriculture Department laboratory at Ames, Iowa, in 1980, and then shared it with the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, two research labs in Canada and Britain, an Ohio research institute and the University of New Mexico. The Ames strain is relatively common and is used in numerous American labs. Researchers have concluded that all the mailed spores were of the Ames strain. USAMRIID uses the liquid strain in research, not the dry form that was used as a terrorist weapon, Dasey said. ``The point is we don't have the technology to make that fine dry powder which was in the letters,'' he said. http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=ATTACKS-ANTHRAX