Viral Murkening
I try to keep the tinfoil off my head (it’s scratchy) regarding the anthrax case, but corners of the case keep coming untucked around the edges. For instance, in today’s Washington Post, the team of Carrie Johnson, Joby Warrick and Marilyn W. Thompson tell us that
Bruce E. Ivins, the government’s leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores, according to sources briefed on the case.
Ivins’s possession of the drying device, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations.
But a paragraph later, they mention
He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.
Oh I see. So his possession of the drying device may have been perfectly legitimate. It’s possible that he used it for the legit work, then got the idea that he could dry spores with it and conduct germ warfare because . . . whyever. It’s also possible that he had the bad luck to borrow the machine around the time someone was sending anthrax around.
Then the reporters allow that
. . . colleagues and friends say government officials fixed on the wrong man in a race to close a seven-year investigation rife with dead ends and missteps. They also note that other U.S. scientists had access to some of the same material and equipment that authorities apparently used to focus on Ivins.
What’s more, it turns out
- You can dry anthrax “with equipment no more complicated than a kitchen oven.”
- The early batches of anthrax were overly coarse. Subsequent batches were more skillfully cooked.
The thing is, at some point Ivins is using the lyopholizer for legitimate work. Was that work specifically anthrax-related? (Scientists apparently use lyopholozers for a variety of drying tasks. Hey Thoreau, you know anything about these machines??) Whatever that project was, did it happen before or during the attack period in early Fall 2001? The reporting is so incomplete we can’t make any conclusions.
I would add that the FBI has forfeited its benefit of the doubt in this case too, but really, law enforcement generally never earned it in the first place. For instance, thanks to prime muckraking by my man Radley Balko, Mississippi has finally kicked their clownish Medical Examiner Steven Hayne out of the state’s Jalopy O’ Justice. But as Kerry Howley writes
I found the most disturbing part of Radley’s original story to be the fact that many people–state prosecutors, law enforcement, fellow examiners, and others–knew that this man was lying well before Radley starting mucking around.
Thanks to Hayne, untold numbers of innocent people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, and almost as many guilty people are going free. (There are cases where Hayne imagined the crime in the first place. In the rest, convicting the wrong guy means the right guy won’t be caught and punished.) That’s most of law enforcement throughout most of history. That’s why people felt the need to push for jury trials with the presumption of innocence, due process for search and seizure, prohibitions on requiring people to witness against themselves including as a result of torture.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 6, 2008 @ 1:50 am
I had never heard of a lyopholizer before this case, but being a theoretical physicist it’s not like I spend much time hands-on with the bio equipment. Although I do work on bio projects, I just do the calculations.
It appears to be a freeze drying apparatus, and it seems to be used in a range of biological studies. It doesn’t sound like the most sinister thing in the world. I’m not sure what else it would be used for in Ivins’ work, but I really don’t know a lot about this.
My guess is that freeze-dried spores would be a lot easier to pulverize into powders with fine grain sizes. Making really fine powders (fine by microscopic standards, not just to the naked eye) is actually really, really hard. (One reason why I don’t sweat too much over dirty bombs.) It wouldn’t surprise me if you can dry anthrax in an oven, but I don’t know what it would take to make really fine powders of the dried stuff.
I’m trying to notch down the paranoia on this case, but even when I do that we’re still left with the very strong possibility that the FBI got the wrong guy because they were sloppy. And then there are the darker possibilities….
Comment by Thoreau —
August 6, 2008 @ 2:01 am
One more thing, regarding your point about the credibility of law enforcement:
Whenever a cop is caught doing something bad, they always assure us that he was just “a bad apple” or “an isolated incident.” So now they come out and say “Yes, one of our guys took the stuff that we were paying him to work on and he did something bad with it….well, it was bad for a lot of you, but it worked out OK for our boss’s agenda. Anyway, yeah, one of our guys did something, but he was working alone, a bad apple, just an isolated incident. We swear!”
It’s not like we’ve never heard this before. It may very well be true this time, but it’s a fairly common explanation with a history of being false.
Comment by B —
August 6, 2008 @ 9:20 am
I’ve used a lyopholizer many times. You find them in all sorts of biology and chemistry labs. They are NOT exotic or unusual pieces of equipment.
Comment by Nell —
August 6, 2008 @ 10:21 am
I’m not going to give much weight to anything that comes out now, during this period of trial-by-leaks.
But it’s still amazing to me, though I guess it shouldn’t be, how much sheer crap reporters are willing to pass on without demanding to see the documents on which the assertions are based or checking out the background. Some idea of how low standards are is that the Post has been better than most of the other outlets since the story broke.
And that may only be because they pushed Hatfill stories harder than others…
Comment by Jim's Dramatic Awakening —
August 6, 2008 @ 9:35 pm
The US gov’t would never have a plot to kill US citizens . . . or would they?
Comment by Idi Amin's Last Meal —
August 7, 2008 @ 6:48 pm
Whenever a cop is caught doing something bad, they always assure us that he was just “a bad apple†or “an isolated incident.†So now they come out and say “Yes, one of our guys took the stuff that we were paying him to work on and he did something bad with it….well, it was bad for a lot of you, but it worked out OK for our boss’s agenda. Anyway, yeah, one of our guys did something, but he was working alone, a bad apple, just an isolated incident. We swear!â€
Then they put ‘em on Internal Affairs, just like if Bill Clinton decided to take up marriage-counselling in his post-presidency. (Maybe he still can, & can get Anne Hathaway back together with her Vatican-embezzling boyfriend.)
Comment by Robert Waldmann —
August 7, 2008 @ 7:01 pm
a lyopholizer or freeze dryer is a pretty standard bit of equipment for microbiologists (and Ivins definitely used one in legitimate work — it is mentioned in his publications (I think a patent application)). Reminds me of a biology grad student christmas show. The budget was roughly zero so much imagination was needed. At the very beginning the mc said “imagine a (… I forget..) closed his eyes and said “concentrate concentrate” someone in the audience shouted “lyopholize” and got a big laugh. No one seems to have had trouble understanding the joke.