* The FBI’s anthrax expert made dried powder for DARPA-funded researchers who were examining the effect of corona plasma discharge on the Ames spores
Posted by DXer on April 25, 2010
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The FBI’s case against Dr. Ivins is bogus: no evidence, no witnesses, an impossible timeline, science that proves innocence instead of guilt. So what really happened? And why? The “fictional” scenario in my novel CASE CLOSED has been judged by many readers, including a highly respected official in the U.S. Intelligence Community, as “quite plausible.”
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CASE CLOSED ... what really happened in the 2001 anthrax attacks? 
DXer said
What Does Your City Smell Like? DARPA Wants to Know
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/11/12/what-does-your-city-smell-like-darpa-wants-to-know/
DXer said
So who is responsible for delaying production of the emails that Dr. Bruce Ivins gave the FBI in March 2003 “regarding request to find out if USAMRIID made dried, powdered anthrax Ba spores”? Source 12/12/03 302 interview statement.
Who made the decision not to include them in the February 2010 production by the Department of Justice?
Who has interfered with and delayed USAMRIID’s production of the same emails?
Who is so inexperienced in government to realize that it always the cover-up, not the crime, that gets a government official in trouble.
Dr. Majidi? Dr. Burans? Dr. Bannan? Dr. Beecher? Dr. Ezzell? John Peterson? The USAMRIID Colonel?
Why does the FBI expect anyone to care about its new web form when it has willfully for 2 years withheld the emails that Dr. Ivins gave the FBI about dried powdered anthrax at USAMRIID? (by the FBI’s anthrax expert no less).
If it had just been disclosed at the time, it would have just been a factual item — a footnote — barely worth including in most narratives.
But because of the DOJ/FBI’s embarrassment on the issue, it has been kept secret in a highly compartmentalized investigation where all of USAMRIID is subject to a gag order — thus undermining analysis about who had access to what as part of the DARPA-funded research that included a former Zawahiri associate.
Everyone more concerned with CYA should get a boot in the ass so that there can be compliance with the Freedom of Information Act without further ado.
DXer said
According to an email to a colleague, Bruce Ivins thought it was an “incredible coverup” that he was not allowed to swab the Diagnostic Services Division at the same time he swabbed his lab and offices. He wanted the FBI to know of the form that he and a colleague had signed so that they could retrieve data before it mysteriously disappeared or was destroyed. Who in the Diagnostic Services Division did he think was trying to throw the blame from themselves to the Bacteriology Division?
DXer said
Shouldn’t everyone at the FBI and DOJ who was responsible for delaying production of this email for 2 years be fired today?
DXer said
Was sonication or corona plasma discharge done after the powder was inserted in the envelope? Is this what made loading the envelopes possible?
DXer said
The same researchers using Ames from Flask 1029 examined the effect of both corona plasma discharge and sonication on Ames spores. Short of disruption, is sonication also commonly used in nanotechnology for evenly dispersing nanoparticles in liquids? And so if the probe tip is put in a plastic vial containing 100 µl of the Ames spore suspension, does it lead to individual particles within the spore suspension? If the powder is then dried, does its performance parameters differ than absent sonication (in terms of agglomeration)? Did any of the DARPA-funded or JH-APL researchers use sonication with Ames spores for the purpose of evenly dispersing nanoparticles in liquids?
Rapid Characterization of Spores of Bacillus cereus Group Bacteria by Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption-Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry
Victor Ryzhov, Yetrib Hathout, and Catherine Fenselau*
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742
Received 22 March 2000/Accepted 5 July 2000
In general, spores were suspended in acetonitrile-0.1% trifluoroacetic acid (70:30 [vol/vol]) at a concentration of 5 mg/ml and analyzed immediately by MALDI. Some samples were allowed to stand at room temperature for 3 days in the suspension solvent before MALDI analysis.
(i) CPD. A high-frequency high-voltage generator, model BD-20A (MesoSystems Technology, Richland, Wash.) was used for CPD experiments. The original electrode was placed about 3 mm above each well in the sample slide in air to provide low-current CPD pulses with repetition rates of 120 pulses/s. About 0.3 µl of spore suspension was placed in each well. The duration of CPD treatment was about 3 s. The treated sample was then covered with 0.3 µl of the matrix solution and analyzed by MALDI.
(ii) Sonication. Disruption of spores by sonication was achieved by placing a probe tip of a sonicator-cell disruptor (model W 185F; Heat Systems—Ultrasonics, Inc., Plainview, N.Y.) into a plastic vial containing 100 µl of the spore suspension (0.5 to 5 mg/ml in acetonitrile-0.1% trifluoroacetic acid at 70:30 [vol/vol]). The sonicator was operated at 20 kHz for between 30 s and 2 min at a maximum power setting for the microtip. An aliquot of 0.1 µl of sonicated suspension was used for MALDI-MS analysis.
DXer said
See generally
Shipley M, Jaissle J, Ulrich M. Sonication methods for disrupting Bacillus anthracis sterne and ames spores. Abstracts of the 107th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. 2007: p192
Melanie Ulrich was Bruce Ivins assistant for 6 years. Did Dr. Ivins have access to a sonicator and familiarity with it for the purpose of separating particles in a liquid suspension?
Melanie Ulrich, a USAMRIID scientist until 2007, says the FBI’s case against Ivins does not add up and their description of him does not match the person she worked with for six years. For instance, she said that shortly after 9/11, an intensive, all-encompassing psychological review was conducted of all USAMRIID employees with access to dangerous biological agents, and it does not make sense that some as supposedly as unstable as Ivins could have remained employed for years of such scrutiny. The FBI claims that an anthrax flask in Ivins’s custody was the “parent” of a certain anthrax strain, but Ulrich says different anthrax samples were genetically identical so any one sample can not be more of a “parent” than any other. The FBI suggests Ivins used a lyophilizer to make powdered anthrax, but Ulrich says Ivins signed out a SpeedVac, but not a lyophilizer, which is too large to fit in the secure protective area Ivins used at the time. Furthermore, a SpeedVac operates slowly and it would have been impossible for Ivins to use it to dry the amount of anthrax used in the letters in the time frame the FBI says he did. [Herald-Mail, 8/8/2008]
Did Dr. Ivins use a sonicator in connection to his work?
DXer said
Dr. Ezzell, for example, had long used a sonicator to achieve a smooth suspension.
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:iTbIRppfqtQJ:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC259287/pdf/iai00074-0065.pdf+sonicator+%22Bruce+Ivins%22&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us