Thoughts
and Comments
by Ed Lake
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 22, 2012, thru Saturday, January 28,
2012
January 27, 2012 - Just when it
seemed like no one was going to be writing any more news articles about
the anthrax attacks of 2001, today The Washington Post published an
article titled "Justice
Dept. takes on itself in probe of 2001 anthrax attacks." It's
basically just a rehash of all the McClatchy/ProPublica nonsense
printed back in July of 2011, when it turned out that Justice
Department lawyers arguing in the Stevens vs USA lawsuit mistated a few
things about the case. As a result, McClatchy newspapers and
others jumped all over it, declaring the government was arguing with
itself. And now, a "reporter" from the Washington Post has
re-discovered it. Plus, he rehashes the old, old debate over the
government's investigation of Steven Hatfill, ignoring the role the
media (and specifically The Washington Post) played in that fiasco.
Who does the Post quote in support of their "story"? They quote
conspiracy theorist Dr. Meryl Nass, Stevens' lawyer Richard Schuler,
Ivins' lawer Paul Kemp, Ivins' friends William Russell
Byrne and Gerard P. Andrews, and some law professor who had nothing to
do with the case but makes quotable comments. The article says
this about Byrne and Andrews:
Prosecutors and FBI
officials disputed the contentions of the two scientists, saying in
interviews that they were biased because they supervised Ivins and
could have missed signs of his guilt. Though Byrne and Andrews were
listed as government witnesses in the civil case, officials said they
would never have been certified by a judge as experts under the
stricter rules in the criminal system, which does not allow speculation.
Right. Byrne
and Andrews were speculating,
and the FBI had solid facts showing that their speculation had little
to do with reality. And the errors made in the Stevens' case were
just mistakes. But, The Washington Post rehashes it all anyway.
It must be a slow news day.
January 25, 2012 - Some Anthrax
Truthers have evidently concluded that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta
wrote the
anthrax letters,
in spite of the fact that the evidence clearly says otherwise.
When examining Atta's handwriting, one very unusual trait of his that
is NOT in
the anthrax letters is the unusual way Atta drew the number
one.
Here are some samples from "Pilot Profile" forms Atta filled out on
July 31, 2000 and September
18, 2000 ( boxed in red):
Notice how his 1's look like droopy 7's. If it wasn't for the
European way he draws 7's with the horizontal bar, the first date would
look like 7-37-2000. And his birth date would appear to be
09.07.7968, if that wasn't obviously wrong. The prefix on his
phone number would almost certainly be interpreted to be 947. And
his address (not shown) would be interpreted as 576 W. Laurel Rd.
instead of 516.
It's also important to note that Atta wrote those 1's as a single
stroke, first going up and then down, which is totally different from the anthrax letter writer's
method of drawing 1's with THREE separate strokes. (Images of all
the anthrax letters and envelopes can be found on the
original front page for this web site.)
When comparing Atta's handwriting to another writing sample, any expert
would look for such unusual and fairly unique
characteristics. The writing of the number 9 as a
continuous loop and his open 4's would be other unique characteristics. And, both are very different from the writing on
the anthrax letters and envelopes.
I find it incredible that Anthrax Truthers
can be arguing that the anthrax handwriting matches that of Mohamed
Atta ten years after the
attacks. It should have been clear in an instant the first time they were
compared that they do NOT match.
January 23, 2012 (B) - Hmm.
There were seven emails in my
inbox when I came home from the health club this afternoon. They
were all from two of the three Anthrax Truthers who have been posting
to my blog. One said only:
gentle
people - there is no purpose in posting on Ed Lake's blog because he is
an asshole
That really amuses me. It confirms
that when Anthrax Truthers are confronted with arguments they cannot
challenge, they resort to name calling. What else can they do? They have no
facts to argue with.
Another email complained that I did not post Mohamed Atta's visa
application beside the anthrax letters on this web site and make a comparison. I didn't
think it was necessary, since an Anthrax Truther did that HERE,
and I wrote a
comment on the blog about how the G's don't match, the 4's don't
match, and the Y's don't match. I could also have pointed out
that the M's don't match, the E's are drawn with two strokes instead
of 4, the N's are drawn with two strokes instead of 3, the R's are
more Catholic style than public school
style, and when he uses serifs on his 1's, he only uses the top
serif. So, why would anyone
think that there was any reasonable possibility that Atta wrote the
anthrax letters? The M's, E's, 4's and 1's should be enough to
convince any expert (or
non-expert) that
Atta didn't write the anthrax letters. And, of
course, Mohamed Atta was DEAD for a week at the time of the
first mailing, and DEAD for a month at the time of the second mailing,
and the facts say that the writer learned a lot about writing between
the sending of the first and second letters. How much can a
dead man learn? And, there are indications that the second
mailing was sent because the first was ignored. How would a dead
man know his first mailing was ignored?
The Truther who did the mathematical equation "confirming" that Atta
wrote the letters says in an email he didn't "assume" that Atta did
it. He says, "The letter was purportedly from Atta." Who
did the purporting? Another anthrax truther, of course. The
mathemetician just assumed
that the Truther was right when he did his calculations. So,
technically, he was assuming that the Truther was right about Atta
writing the letters, he wasn't assuming that Atta wrote the
letters. I stand corrected.
January 23, 2012 (A) - Wow. My
interactive blog has never been so busy. And it's doing what I
want it to do: It's recording some of the most bizarre thinking anyone
could ever come up with. If I claimed someone made such
arguments, most people would never believe me. But, the blog is proof. For
example, in this
week's thread, there's this:
The chance Ivins would pick
a first grader who would come as close or better to matching Atta's
known sources is low. I would estimate less than .0001 at least.
How many first graders would you have to go through for them to
generate an equal or higher match measure to Atta? Maybe a 1 million is
not enough.
Same with Ivins disguising his writing to randomly equal or exceed the
match measure to Atta.
So we conclude Atta was the source over these competing hypotheses.
And this was despite the fact that it is VERY clear that 9/11 terrorist
Mohamed Atta's handwriting does not
match the writing on the letters and envelopes. The
writer used a mathematical formula
to come to his conclusion! Check it out. It
appears to begin with the assumption
that Atta wrote the letter and then calculates the odds that Ivins
could write or find someone who writes exactly like Atta.
And in the thread
from three weeks ago, last night someone added this comment :
For all we know OTHER
dailies received letters (but no one got sick and the letters were
discarded without notice). For all we know CNN in Atlanta might have
received a letter that was discarded without incident.
You are judging by
(mere) surface things. (Nearly) always a mistake.
So, looking at the facts
is (nearly) always a mistake?
And, isn't the trail of anthrax spores through
the various post offices evidence
that no anthrax letter passed through any Atlanta post office?
Or, is that evidence just another "(mere) surface thing"?
And, in last
week's thread, this afternoon a different Anthrax Truther posted
this:
Ed, you are a moron with
absolute no understanding of the real world or the use of experts in
prosecutions.
But, of course, he
didn't explain exactly where
I was wrong and exactly what
he believed to be true. Instead, he just made general statements
that did not appear to address the issue at all. The issue
was a situation where the prosecution
uses conflicting expert witnesses to show that the prosecution's own evidence is "inconclusive."
January 22, 2012 (B) - One reason
for endlessly arguing with Anthrax Truthers is that, in the process of
trying to find new ways to
counter their repeated arguments, sometimes I come up with something
new that seems devastating to
their cause. I think an example of that came up in my interactive
blog this morning.
The argument was still about the handwriting on the letters. In the
blog thread for this week, I argued things one way:
I don't have time to dig
into it, but you can probably find an expert who has a totally
different opinion about the anthrax handwriting than another expert.
You will undoubtedly pick the expert who supports your beliefs, but I
will just say that it only means that handwriting analysis is an art
NOT a science. Therefore, we need to determine if the "expert" began
with any biases. And we need to compare one "expert's" opinion to
another to see which makes the most sense. And that means it
becomes my opinion versus your opinion, and we're never going to
agree.
So, my analysis stands until it is proved wrong.
But, in the
blog thread from last week I argued things in a slightly different
way:
Why can't you understand?
The FBI's analysis of the handwriting is INCONCLUSIVE. That
means they have experts who disagree with each other.
So, all you're doing is looking for some "expert" who seems to agree
with YOU, so you can say you are right.
When experts disagree, taking the side of the "expert" who agrees with
your personal opinion is RIDICULOUS. The facts are saying that they
can all be wrong!
I love it! Why didn't I come
up with that argument years ago? I probably I did, but I just
didn't express it the same way. I've repeatedly told Anthrax
Truthers that they are just siding with the "expert" who agrees with
them and ignoring all other experts who have solid facts. But
that was usually about science and scientists who disagreed with the
evidence or who believed "the government" was hiding the real evidence.
But, handwriting analysis is usually
not about solid facts. Handwriting analysis is NOT a
science. It's an ART. The FBI has many handwriting experts,
and they evidently cannot agree about the handwriting, so the FBI says
the handwriting evidence is "inconclusive."
The Anthrax Truther wants to find an expert who agrees with him.
But, when experts disagree, that means they can all be wrong.
And, of course, if all
the "experts" are wrong, that could
mean I'm right. :-)
January 22, 2012 (A) - I allowed
myself
to get into a series of debates with Anthrax Truthers last week.
Most of it was just a waste of time, but some of it
was mildly productive. The most productive discussion was
the one where it was pointed out to me that Bruce Ivins examined the
anthrax powder in the Daschle letter by doing serial dilutions, plating
the results and counting colonies. Yet, he evidently failed to
notice any morphs. Why? Terry Abshire noticed them.
And, she appears to have had far less experience with anthrax than
Ivins.
Of course, Abshire only noticed them after she'd unintentionally
allowed some colonies to sit and grow for longer than
normal. For me, that brought up the question: What is the size of a
colony that is formed from a single spore and allowed to grow
overnight? To find out, I first checked "The
Story of Suzy the Spore." Yup, it's there in the last
panel. A colony that is allowed to grow for 24 hours is "2 to 5
millimeters in diameter." However, rather than rely on myself as
the
authority, I checked my Suzy sources. The source was the Eiko Yabuuchi paper.
It says:
Under
aerobic condition, dull and off-white colonies >3.0 mm in diameter
with fluffy edges appeared on TSA plate after 20 hr incubation at 30 C.
Different anthrax strains could
grow at different rates, I suppose, but it's good enough data to work
with in this situation. It means that after just 24 hours, the
colonies were not the nickel
or dime-size colonies used to illustrate how the various morphs
looked. They were colonies ranging from between the
diameter of the head of a pin to the diameter of a pencil. That
would make it more difficult to notice the differences
Terry Abshire saw between normal colonies (a.k.a. "Wild Type") and
morph colonies.
But, I still find it very interesting that Ivins not only failed to
notice the billions of morphs in his creation - flask RMR-1029 - but he
was
absolutely certain it was virtually free of morphs. If he did notice them, he must have
considered them
to be "normal" colony variations. And he was absolutely certain
that morphological variants were caused by passaging.
His confidence in his own superior knowledge of anthrax was the cause
of his downfall. But, that's what I wrote about last Sunday, so
I'm repeating myself somewhat.
Interestingly, one of the arguments I had last week was with a
microbiologist & Anthrax
Truther who thought she spotted an error in the way the FBI Repository
collected
evidence. On January 10, on Lew Weinstein's site, she
wrote this about the subpoena the FBI sent out to collect samples
for their repository:
Also note that by following
the instructions to incubate the slants for 12 to 18 hours after
transfer to assure viability, what is actually being submitted is an
actively-growing SUBCULTURE of the original material requested.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!!!
For over a week, I wondered what she was talking about. Why was
the required
method of sending samples to the FBI Repository wrong -- in her
opinion? Of course, no one on Weinstein's site asked her.
Anthrax Truthers there mostly just preach their unproved beliefs
without
ever being challenged. No Anthrax Truther seems to care what
another Anthrax Truther believes. Each one only cares about what he or she believes. And each
believes only he or she knows the real truth, and the FBI is
wrong. So, that's what they preach. But, last week that
same Anthrax Truther/microbiologist
sent me an email
in which she said the same thing she'd posted to Weinstein's site on
the 10th. When I asked her what she was talking about, she
explained:
A proper protocol for
submission of
FLASK RMR-1029 SPORE MATERIAL to ensure the sample is representative
and to minimize variation between samples would be AN ALIQUOT OF THE
LIQUID SPORE MATERIAL! (DUH!)
Well, obviously she had no
understanding of why the FBI
sent out the subpoena asking for TSA slants to be made from every
available sample of the Ames strain in every lab which had the Ames
strain. She ignored all that investigation stuff. She just
jumped straight to what the FBI should have done after they spent years finding the
source of the attack powders. They should have taken "an aliquot
of the liquid spore material," instead of using a slant. And,
apparently, she believed the same should have been done with all the
other 1,000+ samples. Her bizarre assumption must have been that
all the other 1,000+ samples were also
flasks of liquid material. I explained to her that many samples
were slants, dried crusts on the bottom of beakers, frozen bacteria,
and dried agar plates. She apparently saw the error of her ways,
since he told me she didn't want to talk about it with me anymore,
since she was a microbiologist and I am not.
Meanwhile, two different Truthers calling themselves "Anonymous" were
arguing with me about other things in the Jan.
15 and Jan.
8 threads on my
interactive blog.
When things got confusing, Anonymous #1 identified himself as Richard
Rowley, and it was clear Anonymous #2 was "DXer" from Lew
Weinstein's site, since he began posting some of the same True Believer
sermons on my
blog, and
I had to delete some of it.
DXer began posting with his favorite argument: He believes I'm wrong in
concluding that "The Facts Say a Child
Wrote
the Anthrax Letters." He endlessly brings up my handwriting
hypothesis, claiming that no one
agrees with me. When I
posted, "I've told you again and again that people have written me
to say they agree with the hypothesis," he just ignores my post.
Instead, he
wrote: "You lack common sense which is why no one agrees with your
First Grader Theory." When I point out that the idea originally
came
from someone called "Brother Jonathan," he then usually accuses me of stealing the idea. This time
he argued that even Brother Jonathan doesn't agree with me: "Brother
Jonathan, unlike you, knows that the FBI concluded that Ivins acted
alone." When I
point out the fact that postal employees delivered the letters doesn't
change the fact that Ivins acted alone, so an unwitting participant is
not a party to the crime, the Anthrax Truther ignores that and
seemingly argues that the FBI says Ivins acted alone, therefore the FBI is claiming no one could
have done the writing except Ivins. The fact that the FBI has
stated that their analysis of the handwriting is "inconclusive" means
nothing. Only the Anthrax Truther's beliefs mean anything.
And, of course, he repeatedly calls me a "True Believer" because I
don't agree with him. And so it goes. It's an argument that
he's
been waging for nearly ten years.
(I'd really like some
suggestions on how to get some recognized
handwriting "experts" to evaluate the evidence on my page about the
handwriting. I've asked a few, but they want me to pay for their
opinions. And, I don't want their opinions that badly.
Others have already stated their opinions either to the FBI or on their
web sites, so they aren't about to change what they've already
officially concluded.)
DXer also berates me because I don't read the books he reads. To
him, that means I'm uninformed. In reality, it just means I've
got my own reading list. Currently, during breakfast and lunch,
I'm reading "Asimov's
Chronology of Science & Discovery," by Isaac Asimov. I'm on
page 480, with only about 170 pages left to go. Did you know that
in 1898 doctors and scientists were desperately trying to figure out
why some people were dying of
diseases, yet no one could see any disease-causing
bacteria under their microscopes? They tried filtering out all
the
bacteria in the victims' blood, but the material that got through the
filter still caused
disease.
No one couldn't figure out why. Then Dutch botonist
Martinus Willem Beijerinck decided that there must be something smaller than a
bacterium that also causes
disease. He didn't know what it might be, so he simply called it
"filtrable virus." Virus is
the Latin word for "poison." And, as we now know, it turned out
there are a lot of diseases that aren't caused by bacteria, they are
caused by viruses.
The other "Anonymous" poster, Richard Rowley, goes round and round with
me about how the evidence against Ivins isn't evidence because it's not
what he considers to be
evidence. And, he calls me a "True Believer" because I accept
the evidence that he believes isn't really evidence. In one
message, he explained to me that eventually, perhaps years from now,
the FBI is going to come around to his way of thinking. I told
him that is truly the
thinking of a True Believer.
And, meanwhile, the Russian/Kazakh attack
continues. They're still trying a new IP address or two every
day. They tried two new ones this morning. But they were
both in ranges I have blocked. I keep wondering what's going to
happen when they find
an address I haven't blocked. They should have a lot of pent up
frustration by now.
Last week, I only managed to get one new Chapter done for my new
book. I'm
currently writing about the "off the record" meeting between Ivins and
the FBI/DOJ that took place on June 9, 2008. I think it's the
only time Ivins was asked questions about Gõdel, Escher, Bach and the
handwriting on the media letter.
And Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary! Wow! It's
hard to imagine anyone voting
for Gingrich. What could the voters have been
thinking? But, I couldn't imagine anyone voting for a
beady-eyed sociopath for governor of Wisconsin, either. But they
did. And now we're going to have a recall election to try to get
rid of him.
And, while all the above was going on, I was worrying a bit about my
67-year-old sister and her husband who emailed me to say they are
having a good time on their vacation as they bounce around in a bus
going from town to town in the southern Philippines. In an email
I received this morning, they said they'd decided to fly to another
island instead of taking a ferry. That's safer, I think.
Maybe.
It's a fascinating world we live in.
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 15, 2012, thru Saturday, January 21,
2012
January 20, 2012 (C) - I just
received another email reminding me that Terry Abshire had left some
plates grow longer than normal, and that's what resulted in her
noticing the morphs. Yet, in all of Ivins' years working with the
contents of RMR-1029, there's no indication that he ever noticed a morph. That
says he either (1) didn't notice the unusual colonies, or (2) he was
afraid of questioning the
unusual colonies since it would lead directly to questioning the
contents of RMR-1029 which was his creation and had cost a lot of money
and time.
January 20, 2012 (B) - Someone just
sent me a very
interesting email about my (A) comment this morning. She reminded
me that Ivins plated out the Daschle powder and The New York Post powder, and
he didn't mention seeing any
unusually shaped or unusually colored colonies. And, there were
supposedly as much as 20 times as many morphs
in those letters than in flask RMR-1029. Yet, it appears
everything seemed normal to him as he counted
the colonies that grew on the plates.
That seems like solid
evidence that Ivins thought that abnormalities in the shape, size and
color of
anthrax colonies were "normal." And, it's probably because
he'd become accustomed to seeing different shaped colonies when he did
serial dilutions and quantification tests on material from
RMR-1029.
But, in her work, Terry Abshire had not become accustomed to seeing odd
shaped colonies. So, she questioned them. And she brought
them to the attention of others.
It's the classic discovery process.
Someone notices something that everyone else failed to notice.
She asks questions. And the answers turn out to be a major
discovery. In this case it also led to the identification of the
anthrax killer: Bruce Ivins.
January 20, 2012 (A) - I don't know
if
anyone is going to be interested in this, but it took me hours to track down, so I'm going
to mention it anyway. I found copies of the chart and the photos
Bruce Ivins gave to the FBI in January of 2002. They're on pages
136 - 138 in the Ancillary Documents File on the CD you can purchase
from the National Academy of Sciences. Here's the chart which has
a date of January 22, 2002 in the lower right corner (click on
the images to view larger versions):
As you can see, the
chart appears to show a sample being taken from the original 1981 Ames
supply and put into a culture which is then distributed to U of NM,
DRES, Battelle and Dugway. And, then there's another depicted
route which shows passaging after passaging which ends up in a culture
which is used to give a sample to a redacted lab (apparently a "culture
collection" of some kind), which gives it to a redacted lab, which
gives it to Porton Down, which gives it to a redacted lab, which gives
it to a redacted lab.
And, Ivins notes that the Daschle spores seem to have gone the
passaging route, NOT the direct, non-passaging route.
Here's the first photo
which Ivins saw as representing the often passaged method:
And here's the second photo which Ivins saw as representing the way he
did things:
Because they are Xerox-type copies of photos, even in the larger
versions it's difficult or impossible to figure out what Ivins was
seeing. There appear to be large colonies near the bottom end of
both plates. Also note that the date on the photos is November
29, 2001, which strongly suggests they are photos that Terry Abshire
took when she noticed unusual morphological variants on the
plates. When she showed them to Ivins two months later, he typed
the captions onto copies of the photos and drew the chart. He
evidently saw it as an opportunity to lead the FBI away from USAMRIID. But, he
misunderstood what morphological variants were all about, and may have
confused them with contamination by other bacterial species.
January 19, 2012 - I've been studying the FBI report
about the June 9, 2008 "off the record" meeting between Bruce Ivins, his lawyers and members of the FBI and
DOJ. I can't provide a link because it's no longer on-line in the
FBI's archives.
I've been trying to understand the implications of this paragraph (green indicates redacted
information I un-redacted, and red
indicates information I'm trying to emphasize for this comment):
In January 2002, Terry Abshire
provided IVINS a
photograph of the spores from the mail
which were grown on a sheep
blood agar (SBA) plate. The
photo shows morphological variants
which commonly develop from not using
the single colony pick method
used by IVINS and those in his
lab. Abshire also
provided IVINS a
photograph of "IVINS SPORE
PREPARATION" spores grown on an SBA
plate, and these spores are free of
variants. When IVINS received
these photographs, he typed captions
under them to explain what was
depicted. IVINS also drew
diagrams to explain the difference
between spores grown using his single
colony pick method and those
grown otherwise. When IVINS drew
the diagrams and typed the
captions under the photographs, the information he was providing
honestly
reflected his thinking at the time. Namely, spores grown
using his method, including RMR-1029,
were free of morphological
variants and did not resemble the
spores which were mailed.
So, it appears that, at this time in 2008, the FBI and DOJ understood
that when Ivins talked with the FBI about those photographs in January
2002, he was "honestly" talking about "his thinking at the time."
In
other words, Ivins wasn't making anything up. He thought the FBI
was
on a wrong track with their analysis of the morphs, and he wanted to
put them on what he considered to be the "right track," a track that
led to Ivins' belief that the attack spores were untraceable.
The captions Ivins typed under the two photographs are described on
page 16 of FBI
pdf file #847547, which is part of a report on their February 13,
2008 meeting:
"Ames
strain - From xxxxxxxxxxx culture collection at
USAMRIID. Similar in appearance
to the Bacillus
anthracis colonies from mail.
Sent to Porton Down, who
sent it to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, who
sent it to xxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx. This version of the Ames
strain was
serially passaged before freezing down
and storing in the
culture collection."
"Ames strain - from original agar
slant from Ames, Iowa,
USDA. This is the version of the
Ames strain used by Pat
Fellows
and Bruce Ivins. This version of the Ames strain
given to Dugway Proving Ground,
Battelle Memorial
Research Institute, DRES, and U. of
New Mexico."
So, the first caption belongs to the SBA plate that
shows the
variants. And Ivins concluded that by X sending it to Y who sent
it to
Z, it was serially passaged and that caused the creation of the morphs.
And the second caption belongs to the photo of the SBA plate which
evidently didn't show any variants/morphs that Ivins recognized as
variants/morphs. Ivins described it as
the
version of the Ames strain he
used.
On page 17 of FBI pdf file #847547 there's a description of what Ivins
thought about the photos and the captions in February of 2008, six
years after he typed them:
After reading the captions and examining the photographs,
IVINS explained that he obtained the
photographs from Terry Abshire
and typed the captions on them. Although IVINS was able to
understand what the diagram and captions explained, he could not
remember the specific interview which caused him to create them.
Additionally, he would not adopt
the statements or explanations as
his own beliefs.
So, in February 2008 Ivins basically disowned what he'd written in
February 2002. And in June of 2008, the FBI and DOJ understood
that
what Ivins had written in February 2002 "honestly reflected his
thinking at the time."
So, I appear to have been wrong in the comment I wrote on Sunday if I
implied that the FBI/DOJ still
believed Ivins was giving them false information in where I said,
The FBI was right about the morphs, of
course, and the morphological
variants did lead
the investigation directly to USAMRIID and Ivins. But, the FBI
was wrong in thinking Ivins was trying to mislead them in January of
2002. Ivins believed in
what
he was
saying, and it was shattering to his ego to learn that he was
wrong.
For a long time, the FBI and DOJ may
have thought that Ivins had been trying to mislead them in February
2002 by writing false
information about passaging in that first caption, but the FBI and DOJ
appear to have eventually realized that Ivins wasn't really trying to
"mislead" them with false information,
he was trying to correct what he thought the FBI mistakenly believed
about morphs to agree with what Ivins firmly believed about
morphs.
And the "correct" path would lead to agreeing with Ivins belief that
the spores in the letters were totally untraceable.
Wow! That's complicated!
Grumble, grumble.
It's probably too complicated to use in my book, since it doesn't
really make any crucial
point. It just shows another occasion where the FBI was wrong
about
something for awhile, but eventually learned they were wrong and
corrected themselves before any harm was done. I doubt there's
ever been a mystery which was solved without an investigator going down
a wrong path or misinterpreting something. If something is solved
without anyone making a mistake, it probably wasn't a mystery.
January 18, 2012 - This morning, I
received an email from a scientist who just cannot believe that Ivins
could believe there were absolutely no morphs in flask
RMR-1029.
I think if someone had confronted Ivins and asked him if it was totally impossible for there to be any morphs in flask RMR-1029, Ivins
would have had to admit that it was indeed possible that the flask contained some morphs. But, he wasn't
talking about scientific
possibilities when he was talking about flask RMR-1029 and his
submissions to the FBIR. He was speaking the way "normal people"
speak. He believed that flask RMR-1029 was virtually free of morphs and
contaminants.
The definition of "virtually" is: in
effect although not in fact; for all practical purposes.
So, Ivins probably
believed that for all practical
purposes, flask RMR-1029 was free of morphs. If there was
a morph or two in there among the 30
trillion spores, they didn't affect anything. And, the
chances were infinitesimal that he'd pick up a bunch of morphs when
taking a tiny sample to create a slant. So, when he talked the
way "normal people" talk, without qualifying his every word and being
scientifically accurate, he talked as if he believed flask RMR-1029 to
be free of morphs.
Plus, he believed that passaging
created morphs. Like "normal people," microbiologist Dr. Bruce
Edwards Ivins could also be wrong sometimes. (Note that I didn't
write "totally wrong," since it's scientifically
possible that a morph or two can
appear during passaging. But, morphs are not caused or created by passaging.)
January 17, 2012 - For what it's
worth, I found these two paragraphs in an FBI report about the June 5,
2008 taped conversation
between Bruce Ivins and Patricia Fellows to be very interesting
(they're on page 68 of the modified version of FBI pdf file #847551):
In IVINS's last interview [with the FBI] he was told the
materials in the letters had colony
morphology variance. The way
that XXXXX lab did it was to pick a
single colony so they wouldn't
have the morphology variance.
One would have to swipe over a plate
to get the morphology variance.
IVINS claimed his microbiology
background taught him to always pick a
single colony.
Ivins talked about the submissions that XXXXXXXXXXX IVINS
made to the [FBI anthrax]
Repository. He claimed that
the first
submission was fine, however, someone
threw it away; and the second
submission was where the morphologies
were seen.
So, Ivins believed that there were no morphs in
the first sample he'd sent to the FBIR in February 2002, and there were morphs
in the replacement sample he sent in April 2002.
That, of course, is exactly the opposite
of what was true.
The question is: How did Ivins come to believe the opposite of what was
true about his FBIR submissions?
It appears to be his interpretation of what the FBI was telling him,
warped by his rock solid belief that there could be no morphs in flask
RMR-1029. But, it could also be a line of baloney he was telling
Fellows for some reason. Or Pat Fellows could have
misinterpreted what Ivins told her, and the FBI report shows her
misinterpretation. Or the FBI could have deliberately
misled Ivins about the morphs to keep him from understanding exactly
what
the FBI was looking for with the morphs.
I tend to think it was the first of those options. Ivins believed
that the first sample that he took from flask RMR-1029 and sent to the
FBIR in Febuary 2002 contained NO morphs, and it was therefore
considered "fine" by the FBI. But, for some unknown reason his
second submission was NOT "fine." That would seem to suggest that Ivins' April
2002 submission to the FBIR was NOT produced with the single colony
pick, it was a sample he took from a source other than flask RMR-1029. If
he had produced the sample using the single colony pick method, and it
contained morphs, Ivins would have considered that to be almost impossible, and he would have
talked more about it.
But there are too many unknowns to be certain of exactly what Ivins was
thinking. And, we don't have transcripts of that part of the
discussion between Fellows and Ivins. The redacted transcript
sections shown on pages 70 &71 of the FBI
Summary report are only about Ivins' "non-denial denials."
January 16, 2012 (B) - There's a
point I should have made more clearly in my (A) comment this
morning. I've made it before, but it's worth making again:
In February 2002, Ivins was 100 percent certain that morphs were caused
by passaging, and he believed there were absolutely NO morphs in flask
RMR-1029, because passaging wasn't used to create the contents of flask
RMR-1029. Its spores were grown directly from a pure sample that
he was certain contained no morphs. Therefore, when the FBI
Repository wanted a sample from flask RMR-1029 to test for morphs, he
was more than happy to provide it. The same with the "gold
standard" aliquot he provided to Terry Abshire. If the FBI was
looking for morphs, Ivins was 100%
certain they wouldn't find any in flask RMR-1029.
This means that Ivins' supporters, and particularly the uninformed
people at PBS
Frontline, The
New York Times, McClatchy newspapers and ProPublica were dead wrong when
they argued that Ivins would NOT have given a real sample from flask
RMR-1029 to Terry Abshire if he was guilty, since Ivins knew that a
real sample would contain the morphs. Yes, Ivins knew the FBI was
going to test for morphs, but Ivins was totally certain that flask
RMR-1029 was free of morphs.
That's why the February 2002 slants contained the morphs. That's
why the sample he gave to Abshire contained the morphs. Later, he
learned more, he became less certain of his beliefs, and that's why he
submitted a false sample
without the morphs in April 2002.
January 16, 2012 (A)
- I've received a couple emails expressing confusion over what I wrote
yesterday about Bruce Ivins' January 2002 attempt to utilize for his
own purposes his belief that the FBI was wrong in what they believed
about morphological variants,
a.k.a. mutations or "morphs."
I can see where people might be confused. I was putting things
together in my mind as I was writing the comment, and I had to go back
and modify it a dozen times just to make it clear for myself.
This
morning, I could go back and further revise yesterday's comment, but I
think it would be better to just explain things further. So, here goes:
When Ivins mailed the anthrax letters, he believed that the Ames strain
was a common strain used in labs all over the world, it mutated
very very very rarely, and it was therefore totally untraceable.
That's why he used it when he prepared the powders.
However, after the letters were found, the FBI focused on USAMRIID very
quickly. Ivins didn't know why. His emails suggest he
thought it was
because all the conspiracy theorists believed the Ft. Detrick was still
in the bioweapons business, and the theorists believed the
attack powders came from illegal bioweapons stockpiles at Ft.
Detrick.
And Ivins believed the FBI was following that screwball idea.
Ivins
didn't know that the FBI had given a sample of the attack powder to
Paul Keim, and, of all the samples of Ames strain in Keim's massive
collection,
the only DNA match to the
attack anthrax was a sample Keim had received years earlier from
USAMRIID.
So, in email after email, Ivins argued his firm belief that the Ames
strain came from the USDA in Ames, Iowa, and it was distributed to labs
all over the world. Therefore, focusing on USAMRIID was just an
unwarranted attack by
anti-military nitwits upon the hard working people working in and for
the U.S. military. Ivins believed
with total certainty
that the Ames strain was untraceable, so he argued that over and over
by pointing people to the USDA. He was wrong, but it's what he believed.
In January of 2002, it started to become clear that Ivins may have been
wrong about the source of the Ames strain. The USDA knew nothing
about
the Ames strain, and they certainly hadn't distributed it to labs all
over the world.
And, also in January of 2002, Ivins started picking up rumors about
scientists in the Diagnostic Sytems Division finding "morphs" in the
attack anthrax. Ivins didn't know the details of what they were
talking about, but the rumor said that the morphs might pinpoint the
source of the anthrax -- possibly a source within USAMRIID.
Again, Ivins believed with total
certainty that that wasn't possible. He used the "single
colony pick" technique, a technique which he believed virtually eliminated the
development of morphological variants. Therefore, he felt the FBI
was again
on the wrong track. Ivins believed that morphological variants
were primarily caused by "passaging," i.e., the transferring of growth
material from plate to plate in sequence. But, if the FBI
believed
"morphs" might lead them to the culprit, he was willing to name people
who commonly used "passaging."
So, according to pages 3 - 6 of FBI pdf file #847443,
on January 23. 2002, Ivins contacted an FBI agent working at USAMRIID
and tried to show the agent how it was "passaging" that caused
mutations. That meant the FBI needed to look at scientists who
did a
lot of "passaging" when they worked with Ames. And he named
names.
Ivins offered to produce photographs two different plates, one plate
seemingly contained "morphs" that were the result of "passaging" done
by a scientist he named. But the FBI agent wasn't in a position
to
take such evidence, so the agent told Ivins to hold onto the photos
until he was contacted by another agent. Ivins was contacted
later, possibly the same day, and turned over the photos and a diagram
Ivins had drawn.
This all happened a full month
before Ivins produced the first slants for the FBIR from flask
RMR-1029, the slants
which he prepared incorrectly.
He still didn't know exactly
what the
FBI was looking for, so he created slants that could not be used in
court as part of the FBI repository evidence. He used a different
kind of media. He didn't think it
was
possible for any morphs to be in flask RMR-1029 because "passaging"
wasn't done to create flask RMR-1029. So, he did create the slants
from the contents of flask RMR-1029, and the slants contained the
morphological variants. But, he made sure the slants were not
usable in court (for the specific
comparison needed for the FBIR).
The subject of that first meeting with the FBI agent about
"passaging" came up again and again in later interviews Ivins had with
the FBI. On pages 16
& 17 of FBI
pdf file #847547 Ivins is again asked to explain what he was
talking about. That interview took place on February 13,
2008.
In the interview, Ivins stated that he couldn't even remember the
2002 discussion with the FBI or
the photos or the
diagram. But he apparently
still believed it was passaging
that created morphological variants,
and he seems to still be arguing that the Ames strain came from the
USDA in Iowa. This is from page 17:
IVINS eventually explained that XXXXXXXXXXXX would make
several
subcultures, or serial passage the organism when growing
them.
This caused variants or mutations to appear. IVINS did not
use
serial passages. Rather, his cultures were all grown from the
original
slant provided to USAMRIID by the USDA, thereby preventing
the
creation of variants or mutations.
The
subject was mentioned again in an "off-the-record" meeting with the FBI
on June 9. 2008.
That meeting was described in an FBI pdf file that was later deleted
from the FBI on-line archives, so I can't provide a link. But,
the original FBI pdf file #847551 had this on page 70:
When growing spores, IVINS and those in his laboratory
streak
a plate and pick a single representative colony from the
plate
to innoculate a growth medium. This ensures all subcultures
are
identical and do not have morphological variants. Using the
single
colony pick also ensures any contaminants present on the
plate
are not introduced into the growth medium. If one were to
swipe
across the plate and use those spores to innoculate the
growth
medium, the resulting spore growth would have variants.
Therefore,
IVINS would expect
that all of his subcultures,
including
RMR-1029, are homogenous and free of variants.
In
reality, as I described as "Error Two" in my supplemental page about "The Errors That Snared Dr. Bruce Ivins,"
mutations are generally totally random.
Passaging doesn't cause them. The single-colony pick technique
can't
prevent them. On average,
anthrax mutations occur approximately once in
a billion generations,
but it could be the first generation in the billion, the last, or
anywhere in the middle. It's a matter of
statistics.
And, the thirty trillion
spores produced for flask RMR-1029 virtually guaranteed that
there would be billions upon billions of mutations in the flask.
Yet, Ivins had
thought it was free of mutations.
He was as wrong as it was possible
to be wrong.
(The single colony pick technique does
help prevent contaminants
from one plate being transferred to another plate, but that has nothing
to do with morphological variants. Ivins may have been connecting
contaminants to variants.)
It took a long time for Ivins to accept that he'd made critical errors,
and it shattered his ego. He wasn't the most knowledgeable
anthrax expert among
experts he believed himself to be. He was a careless
scientist who believed total nonsense and who made crucial mistakes
that caused
5 people their lives and pointed the FBI directly to him as being the
anthrax killer.
January 15, 2012 - Last week, the "Russian/Kazakh attack" upon
my web site continued. I've gone back to thinking of it
in terms of an attack, rather
than just a mystery. Each day last week, the attacker would try a
different IP address, once trying two different IP addresses in a
day. The groups of five HEAD commands were farther apart than
previously, often there was an hour or more between groups. But,
they all involved ranges of IP addresses I had blocked months
ago. On Friday the 13th, he tried something a bit
different. He tried 4 GET commands in a row, less than a second
apart, from a blocked Ukraine IP address. So, it got him
nowhere. And, this morning he was back again using HEAD commands
and a different IP address in Kazakhstan, but it was still an IP
address I had started blocking months ago.
Meanwhile, the Anthrax Truthers on Lew Weinstein's
web site seem to be doing nothing but repeating themselves.
If there's anything worse that a silly, irrelevant argument, it's a
silly, irrelevant argument that gets repeated over and over.
Instead of doing their own investigation, they want access to all the
details of the FBI's investigation, apparently so
that they can attack
and argue with everyone who disagrees with their beliefs.
You'd think that after ten years
they'd realize that they have never found any convincing proof to
support their beliefs, and the mere fact that they disbelieve the evidence against
Ivins doesn't mean that the evidence is invalid or insufficient to
prove guilt. And attacking everyone who disagrees with them does not prove the
people they are attacking are wrong. That's why I
sometimes refer to them as "the Lunatic
Fringe." They believe nonsense, they argue against facts, they
attack people who disagree with them, and
they are absolutely certain
they are
right - even though no two of them believes in exactly the same
thing. So, in actuality, they're individuals who believe they are
right and the entire rest of
the world is wrong - regardless
of what the facts say.
And, on my
interactive blog, an Anthrax Truther calling himself "Anonymous"
started arguing another
familiar and oft repeated argument: that I am a True Believer because I
won't convert to his beliefs. Of course, he won't explain exactly
what his beliefs are. He'll only argue that he doesn't believe
the government's case against Bruce Ivins, therefore the government is
wrong. And I'm a True Believer if I don't agree.
In spite of those distractions, last week I managed to make some progress on the
first draft of my new book. I'm now on page 343 in Chapter
43. I don't know how much I have got left to go, but it can't be
much. Chronologically, I'm in June 5, 2008, when the FBI
persuaded Dr. Ivins' former associate, Patrica Fellows, to have coffee
with Ivins
so their conversation could be taped. It resulted in the
conversation where Ivins made his non-denial
denials. I thought that discussion would be at the end of
Chapter 41, but, as I did research, I found a massive amount of
interesting detail that I've never carefully studied before, and
Chapter 41 ended with the January 18, 2008 meeting between Ivins, his
lawyers, FBI agents Montooth and Lisi, and Assistant US Attorneys Kohl
and Lieber. It was the first meeting between Lieber and Ivins,
and it was the meeting that Rachel
Lieber considered to be a true turning point in her thinking about
Ivins.
So, I then figured that the taped Fellows-Ivins conversation would be
at the end of Chapter 42. But as I collected
facts and details from the time period, put them into chronological
order,
and then started analyzing it all and writing about it, it turned out
that Chapter 42 ended on March 19, 2008, when Ivins made his first
suicide attempt.
So, the taped Fellows-Ivins conversation will be in Chapter 43,
possibly near the beginning instead of at the end.
I can also see that, after I finish the first draft, I'm going to have
to do a lot of thinking about
various aspects of Bruce Ivins'
personality. Right now, he seems to have been a man who never
matured after
his
first or second year of high school. Yes, he certainly gained
more knowledge about science
and
microbiology, but he
apparently never gained any additional understanding
of his fellow human beings. In his work, he
became very good at doing
things he had done many times before. But how much did he
really understand?
And, if I'm right about his lack of understanding, how can I explain it
and
document
it? I'd have to have a very good understanding of it myself
before I can even attempt to explain it to others. After all,
Ivins participated in the
writing of 44 scientific papers, and he was co-inventor on at
least two patents.
Ivins appears to have had a massive ego. He often seemed to
believe that he was right and everyone else in the world was
wrong. And, the massive errors
he committed when he launched the anthrax attacks of 2001 tore away at
his ego.
One particular error by Ivins seems particularly fascinating because
it's matched by what appears to be an error by the FBI and the
Assistant US Attorneys (AUSAs). It's the attempt by Ivins in
January 2002 to explain to
the FBI that the morphs they were seeing in the attack
anthrax did NOT point to USAMRIID. He gave them a drawing and two
photographs to explain what he was talking about. The FBI and the
AUSAs saw that
the photos and the drawing as another
attempt by Ivins to mislead the investigation by supplying false
information. But, to me it seems far more complex than
that. I see it as an attempt by Ivins to convince the FBI that
they
were wrong about something that, in reality, Ivins was wrong about, but
he didn't know he was wrong.
Ivins tried to convince the FBI that the morphs they were seeing were
the result of the "passaging" being done in FBI testing, i.e., the
process of taking spores from a
culture, using those spores to grow a new culture, then taking spores
from the second culture and using those to create a third culture, then
using spores from the third culture to create a fourth culture,
etc. Ivins believe it was "passaging" that created
the morphs the FBI had found, and Ivins didn't do that kind of
passaging. He would usually start with either the original
Ames sample or a second sample, and then he'd use the "single colony
pick"
technique to seed new cultures, a process which he believed virtually
eliminated the formation of
morphological variants.
In late 2001, Ivins saw that the FBI was
beginning to focus on USAMRIID as the source of the attack anthrax, but
Ivins thoroughly believed
that the Ames strain was widely used in labs
all over the world and was totally
untraceable.
That's why he
used the Ames strain in the attacks. He thought it was
untraceable. In
January 2002, he didn't know exactly what
the FBI was looking for when they became interested in morphs, but he
thought they had to be on the wrong
track. And the wrong
track led to USAMRIID. So, he tried to get them on
the
"right
track" by
explaining to them what he believed actually caused morphs:
passaging. The
"right track" would lead them to the correct understanding that the
attack spores were untraceable. Ivins' massive ego assured him
that he knew more about anthrax than
any FBI scientist or anyone else did.
Ivins was trying to lead the
investigation away from USAMRIID by showing the FBI scientists that
they
were wrong in what they were
doing, not by trying to
deliberately mislead them with false information.
The FBI was right about the morphs, of course, and the morphological
variants did lead
the investigation directly to USAMRIID and Ivins. But, the FBI
was wrong in thinking Ivins was trying to mislead them in January of
2002. Ivins believed in what
he was
saying, and it was shattering to his ego to learn that he was
wrong. His self-confidence was already severely weakened by
his horrendous and unforgivable mistake of thinking the anthrax letters
he'd sent through the mails wouldn't harm anyone. His ego was
pulverized when he learned that
there were vast quantities of traceable morphs in flask RMR-1029.
He
believed his spore growing techniques made the contents of flask
RMR-1029 virtually free of
morphological variants. Once again, his understanding was totally wrong. And he soon learned he had made
another
huge mistake in choosing the Ames strain, which, instead of being a
common strain used in countless laboratories all over the world, turned
out to be a rare strain used primarily by USAMRIID. When he
saw all the critical mistakes he'd made, his ego was virtually
destroyed. "Ivins the Anthrax Expert" ceased to
exist. He'd become
"Ivins the Fool," a careless scientist who made stupid mistakes in life-and-death
situations. He began talking about becoming a greeter at a
WalMart after retiring on his government pension. Or, at most,
he'd work as a laboratory technician for
someone else, and he'd do only as told.
It wasn't any hounding by the FBI that drove Ivins to suicide. It
seems to have been the totally shattering of his ego. He'd seen
himself as was a top expert among experts. Yet, his own mistakes
- one huge and critical mistake after another -
had put him in the FBI's crosshairs. He could live with being
considered sloppy and forgetful, but he couldn't live with being
viewed as dangerously careless and ignorant of basic scientific facts.
I'll have got to make sure that is all totally understandable,
fully documented, completely believable, and also interesting reading
when
I start working on the second draft of
my book.
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 8, 2012, thru Saturday, January 14,
2012
January 10, 2012 - The last thing I
need right now is another "conspiracy theory" involving complex
science. But, someone just sent me a link to a science article
titled "Fighting
on after the war is over, HIV contrarian publishes yet another paper."
I didn't even know there was a controversy over the connection between
HIV and AIDS. But, apparently there is, and the people who don't
believe the connection are still writing and trying to get "scientific
papers" published which promote their beliefs. In 1991, "a
collection of people who called themselves the Group for the Scientific
Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis managed to get a
letter published in Science
in which they stated their case." The new article says this about the 1991
letter:
Although the letter's
signatories labelled themselves skeptics, its language is that of conspiracy
theorists and cranks. With a few exceptions, most of its signatories
don't even have the relevant expertise, and many of them have serious
issues with science in general. In short, these are not people
who should be listened to when it comes to matters of evidence.
Unfortunately, someone did.
And, even more unfortunately, that someone
was Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, who appointed at least two
of them to a committee that evaluated his country's response to AIDS.
One result of this was a long delay in the widespread use of
antiretroviral therapies in South Africa, which a 2010 paper
estimated as having cost hundreds
of thousands of lives.
Sounds familiar. I
recall another item from Science
magazine that was about bogus science that wasn't identified as bogus
science, and which will probably be cited in new scientific papers
forever.
The new AIDS article I was just sent also includes this:
Whatever damage was done by
Duesberg and other contrarians in the past, they've now been relegated
to the sidelines; nobody is
basing public policy based on their unfounded skepticism anymore.
Unfortunately, it's all too
easy to see why some people might have
found them compelling in the past. The
contrarians included a Nobel Prize winner and a member of the National
Academies of Science—if you didn't pay careful attention to the company
they kept and the fact that they had a tendency to back zany ideas, it
was easy to conclude they were an impressive group. And, to
someone who didn't look into the details, their arguments sounded
scientific. After all, as described above, they were able to paint the
medical establishment as ignoring Koch's Postulates, the very
foundation of infectious disease research, and present themselves as
the true scientific skeptics.
That also seems very familiar. I recall a
recent nonsensical article about the Amerithrax case that three
scientists with impressive credentials paid to get published.
It confirms what I've learned again and again over the past ten years:
There's no idea so ridiculous that you can't find an "expert" with
perfect credentials to support it.
And, "fighting after the war is over" is what the Anthrax Truthers,
9/11 Truthers, Moon Hoaxers, and JFK conspiracy theorists continue to
do every day. Facts and logic have no meaning to them. To
them, only their beliefs represent "the truth." The "war" won't
be over until these True Believers convert every one else in the world
to their beliefs.
January 9, 2012 (B) - Apparently in
response to my (A) comment this morning, an
Anthrax Truther posted this to Lew Weinstein's web site:
As we know the slants Ivins prepared
worked, because a copy were kept and tested at another location.
That is experimental proof that the Ivins slants were equivalent in
fact.
That is admissible evidence in court that the Ivins’ slants were
equivalent.
The slants "worked,"
therefore they were "equivalent"? Really? That's like
saying a car works to get from New York to Los Angeles, so a car is
equivalent to a jet airliner. And death stops headaches, so
taking asprin is equivalent to death. Lunacy!!
The slant retained by Paul Keim definitely "worked" when it was used to
create a new and properly prepared slant for the FBI Repository.
And, it definitely "worked" to show that Ivins didn't know exactly what
the FBI was looking for in February of 2002, so he didn't eliminate the
morphs. He created slants that were not useable as
evidence. So, the slant "worked" to show Ivins was attempting to
mislead the investigation.
And the Anthrax Truther's comment "worked" to get me to realize I can't
just waste my time debunking every screwball claim they can come up
with. I'm going to have to spend more time on my book and try to
leave the debunking for my Sunday comments.
January 9, 2012 (A) - The preposterous
Anthrax Truther nonsense continues. Now they're claiming
that, since the FBI subpoena said "Tryptic Soy Agar (TSA) slants (Remel
catalog #05932 or
equivalent)," whatever Ivins used was an "equivalent," and
therefore Ivins was right in submitting whatever he submitted in
February 2002, regardless of how different it may have been, and the
FBI was wrong in throwing the slants away.
According to the August 8,
2008 press briefing, "He didn't use the proper medium." So,
Ivins apparently didn't even use TSA, but the Truthers still consider it to be equivalent.
And the FBI also stated at that briefing, "The first
sample we
received didn't really meet our requirements for the chains of
custody issue, either."
But, in the fantasy
world of Anthrax Truthers, the FBI was still wrong in throwing the
slants away, and, since that proves the FBI makes mistakes, the FBI
obviously cannot be trusted about anything. And that means Ivins
was innocent and Muslims did it.
January 8, 2012 (B) - Since I'm not
allowed to post to Lew Weinstein's web site, they have to post their
nonsense there, and I have to debunk their nonsense here. A
new post there in response to my (A) comment this morning shows
that at least one Anthrax Truther has a
basic misunderstanding of slants and the FBI repository.
All the slants for the FBIR had to be identically
prepared, otherwise, when comparing the 1,200+ samples in the
FBIR to one another, no one would be able to state with certainty in
court that a difference in the contents of a specific slant wasn't the
result of a different medium or a different method of preparing the
slant.
Labs doing various kinds of other tests
to assist the FBI in the Amerithrax investigation (such as Lawrence
Livermore or the IIT Research Institute) weren't sending slants to the
FBIR in response to a subpoena. Therefore, the subpoena rules for
creating slants for the FBIR didn't
apply. It made no difference to the FBIR how they prepared their
slants. So, the Anthrax Truther's new argument that those labs
prepared their slants differently has absolutely nothing to do with the improperly
prepared slants Ivins sent to the FBIR in February 2002.
January 8, 2012 (A) - I can't
believe I
spent almost all of last week on my Russian
Statistics Mystery. But, I did. However, I seem to have solved the mystery -
at least to the point where everything now makes sense. Here's
how I
"figured it out" (a.k.a. "stumbled across the answer"):
I contacted my web site
host and showed them my new web page about the "mystery," but they had
no advice to offer. They just suggested I keep doing as I've been
doing, i.e., blocking HEAD accesses from specific ranges of IP
addresses.
I also contacted a couple computer experts I know, and they didn't have
any idea about what the guy is doing, either. And they had no
advice to give. However, one of them sent me a link to a recent
news article
about a different kind of problem. The article was titled "One
Man's Fight With Google Over a Security Warning." I found the
comments that follow the article to be more interesting than the
article
itself, since nearly every one of the people commenting says that
Google is right and Dr. Roger Epstein is wrong. Then I
realized something: Dr.
Epstein's problem seemed to be virtually identical to the problem I had
over a year ago, when some hacker installed "Trojan
horse" malware in my web site host's computer.
Yesterday, when I researched that Trojan horse incident to
refresh my memory about it, I found this in my November 28, 2010 comment:
It appears that, although I solved the
"Russian attack problem," I
also had a different problem. This morning, people
began
telling me that I had the trojan horse "serial.jar" on my web
site.
It seems to have appeared on November 21. Fixing that problem was
my
top priority for most of the day. So, I didn't have time to write
any other comment for today until around 1 p.m. Central Time.
That's when my web site host advised me that the problem has been
fixed. It was a problem located in my
host's
computer in Atlanta, not in my own computer at home.
Bingo! My Russian Statistics mystery involved some
kind of residue connection to that Trojan horse attack in November
2010! I first noticed the "Russian attacks" involving the HEAD
command on November 18,
2010. And people started telling me about the "Trojan horse" on
my site a week later. I'd totally forgotten about that Trojan
horse
incident, and, as a result, I just
never realized that the two events could be connected. The
guy in Kazakhstan doing all the HEAD accesses to my web site could be
the hacker,
since he seems to have a lot of resources, and he's very
persistent. It's also possible, although much less likely,
that he
could be another victim of the hacker.
Either way, there's nothing I can do that I'm not already doing.
And, either way, it seems to be the solution to
the mystery. It's residue from that Trojan
horse attack. The hacker may be trying to find a way back
in. I
can't prove it definitively, but I don't need to
prove it definitively. It
makes sense. And, that's enough for me.
However, I'll have to keep watching and blocking, since he's still
there this morning trying a different IP address. And,
it's
still a mystery as to why he's so persistent and why this matter seems
to be
so very very important to
him. He seems to be
looking for a way to put another Trojan horse into my host's
computer via my web site. But, why is my web site so special to him?
Meanwhile, the only other happenings of interest last week were the
endless nonsense questions from the Anthrax Truthers. They simply
cannot accept that Ivins was making anthrax powders in his lab during
those unexplained evening hours prior to the attacks in 2001, since
that would mean that Ivins was
the anthrax killer, and that would mean their various theories about
someone else being the culprit are totally
bogus.
So, they're asking irrelevant
questions, because every time one of their silly questions goes
unanswered, to them it means that the Amerithrax case has not yet been
fully investigated - and that means Ivins could have been
innocent. It's the same mindless tactic they've been using
for over 10 years. Ten
years ago, one Anthrax Truther was asking questions involving an
endless stream of Arabic names. The questions went something
like this:
What was Haid D'Salami doing in Malaysia
in 1997?
Why
did Awana Fugya meet with M'Balz Ez-hari in 1998?
What did Grabirr Boubbi study at the University in Cairo?
Was I-Zheet M'Drarz ever alone when he visited USAMRIID in 1996?
Now, the same Anthrax Truther's meaningless and
irrelevant questions are about what Bruce Ivins and other people at
USAMRIID were working on during the
day on the days when Ivins' "unexplained" evening hours
occurred.
It's
the same plan: If they can ask enough irrelevant questions, they'll
prove (at least to themselves) that the case wasn't fully investigated,
and,
therefore, Ivins was innocent (and the Anthrax Truther's favorite
suspect must have done it).
Unbelievably, the Anthrax Truthers are still trying to prove that Ivins
was doing legitimate work during those "unexplained" evenings he spent
alone in his lab just prior to the anthrax attacks of 2001.
The
fact that Ivins himself could
not provide any explanation
for what he was doing - other than he'd
gone into his BSL-3 lab to get away from his troubled family life,
and/or to get
away from a guard he didn't like -
doesn't prevent the Truthers from trying to find something Ivins could have been
doing that would allow them to argue that Ivins was not making anthrax
powders -- even though there is a mountain of evidence which says Ivins
was the anthrax mailer and he almost certainly must have been making
anthrax powders during
those "unexplained" even hours.
But, that doesn't mean they can't also
distort the facts and try to mislead people.
An example of that is in this ridiculous post from yesterday on Lew
Weinstein's web site:
It's total nonsense, of
course. In 2001, the FBI kept all Amerithrax anthrax samples at
USAMRIID. The comment is about the State of Virginia's Division
of Consolidated Laboratory Services (DCLS), which had absolutely nothing to do with the FBI's
Amerithrax investigation. Virginia's DCLS was just another state health organization which
worked on first responder situations. If someone in
Virginia was suspected of having anthrax, test samples were sent to the
DCLS for testing. Similarly, in Florida, when a doctor at JFK
Memorial Hospital in Atlantis, FL, suspected that Bob Stevens had
anthrax, they sent samples of his blood to the Florida Department of
Health (DOH). The Florida DOH confirmed that Stevens had anthrax
and notified the CDC. The CDC re-confirmed and notified the
FBI. That doesn't mean that the FBI also kept "its Ames anthrax
in an old building" in Florida. The Anthrax Truther's statement
is total nonsense. Virginia's
DCLS was involved in the
attacks because there were victims in Virginia. Plus, they were
involved because they had to test countless false-alarm samples.
They never needed to secure evidence samples for the FBI.
And now, the
big debate is over the wording on the subpoena that requested
samples from all labs which had the Ames strain. Ivins didn't
obey the subpoena when he prepared the February 2002 slants for the FBI
repository. The Truthers are arguing that's because the FBI
didn't word the
subpoena properly. However, of the 1,200+ samples sent to the
FBIR, only Ivins failed to
sent the right
type of slant. According to the August
8, 2008 press briefing:
QUESTION:
I understand that, but the question is just how many were destroyed.
BACKGROUND
OFFICIAL: Remember, the
only sample received outside the
space of subpoena was that one sample. So that's the only
sample we destroyed.
Only the slants Ivins sent to the FBIR in February 2002 were
destroyed. (And, since Paul Keim saved his copy of the slants, we
know all we need to know about them.) So, the Truther's argument
now is that it's the FBI's fault
that only Bruce Ivins couldn't
follow the instructions. And, the FBI are "idiots"
because they didn't write the subpoena instructions properly.
In another
bizarre thread, the Truthers want to see "Laborary
Chain-of-Custody" forms for the February 2002 slants that were rejected
because they were not
valid as evidence. There would never be any "Laboratory
Chain-of-Custody" forms for materials that were not useable as
evidence. It's another totally silly request.
Now the Truthers will claim the FBI are "idiots" because the FBIR
copy of the slant was not
valid as evidence, yet Paul Keim's identical
copy was
valid as evidence. Why? Because Keim's copy was used for different purposes, and, when Keim's copy was turned
over to the FBI, the slant was used to create a new slant that was compatible with
all other FBI repository slants. So, the new slant became additional
evidence in
the
FBI repository showing the source of the attack powders, and the old
slant became additional evidence of how Ivins
tried to mislead the investigation.
But, the Anthrax Truthers don't want to know that.
Anthrax Truthers are clearly not interested in finding answers to any
questions. They're only interested in creating doubt by asking irrelevant questions, by
distributing misinformation and by falsely accusing the FBI of causing
Ivins' "mistakes."
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 1, 2012, thru Saturday, January 7,
2012
January 5, 2012 (B) - This is off
topic, but I just read an excellent Newsweek article titled "The
GOP's Suicidal Tendency" which seems to hit the nail on the head in
its description of the situation with the Republican candidates for
President.
January 5, 2012 (A) - There were no
emails from the Anthrax Truther in my inbox this morning. And the
guy who's causing me problems with my statistics by using all those
HEAD accesses seems to have stopped for awhile. (Maybe he's
checking his bank account to see if he has enough money to buy a new
group of IP addresses.)
To put all the information about the problem with my web site
statistics in one place, I created a new page HERE
where I can show the web site log entries as they actually appear,
instead of squeezing them down or trimming them off to fit this
page.
Hopefully, this will be my last comment on those two "problems" until
my regular weekly comment on Sunday.
January 4, 2012 (D) - My (C) comment
today must have
upset the Anthrax Truther. He just sent me an email that says:
stop your endless streams of mistakes
Your
suggestion that the July 9, 2001 aliquot was evidently the part
that involved Ivins' time during October of 2001 is more uninformed,
lay speculation -- instead, always turn to the documentary evidence and
stop compounding mistakes daily.
It seems to be a direct
order. Or, it could be a threat, except that he doesn't say what
will happen if I don't do as he demands.
It seems to me I was looking
at the "documentary evidence." I looked at the Reference Material
Receipt Record form for flask RMR-1029 (HERE
and HERE) which shows the
withdrawals for study #B00-03, and I looked at documents
he sent me which say that the rabbit study was #B00-03 and the
schedule for the first batch of rabbits was to start at the end of
March of 2000, but there were scheduling problems. Ivins sent the
emails to someone else who was going to do the rabbit "bleeds."
Where's the problem? Evidently, the problem is that the
documentary evidence doesn't support the Anthrax Truther's beliefs.
Plus, of course, the documents suggest that the July 9, 2001 aliquot
taken from flask RMR-1029 could have provided at least some of the
source material for the anthrax attacks. Ivins would have done
concentration tests for each dose for each animal, which would have
required hundreds of plates - possibly enough plates to produce all the
anthrax powders in all the anthrax letters.
January 4, 2012 (C) - I asked an
Army FOIA person about getting documents showing the exact times when
the exsanguination
of rabbits was done in October 1-5, 2001, and since I carbon-copied the
Anthrax Truther, the Truther promptly sent me some irrelevant documents
from March of 2000 about the same study (B00-03). That
reminded me of something: The Reference Material Receipt Record for
aliquots taken from flask
RMR-1029 (HERE and HERE) shows that aliquots were removed
for the rabbit study (B00-03) on the following dates:
B00-03
part 1: April 3, 2000
B00-03
part 2: July
7, 2000
B00-03
part 3: April
6, 2001
B00-03
part 4: July
9, 2001
B00-03
part 5: December
10, 2001
B00-03
part 6: January
14, 2002
B00-03
part 7: September
17, 2002
The July 9, 2001
aliquot was evidently the part that involved Ivins' time during October
of 2001. However, in theory, the list should mean that Ivins
would have similar long overtime hours related to all seven parts of
the study. But, that didn't happen. So, either there was
something very unusual about what was done in early October 2001, or we
have further evidence that the exsanguination of rabbits didn't
have anything at all to do with Ivins' unexplained evening hours.
I'm clearly getting too involved in debunking the beliefs of the
Anthrax Truther. This all seems totally irrelevant
to the case. It's only relevant to debunking the Anthrax
Truther's beliefs. I already regret making the FOIA request and
carbon-copying the Anthrax Truther. He's starting to fill my
inbox with irrelevant nonsense. And, I'm supposed to be working
on my book, not arguing with Anthrax Truthers all day.
January 4, 2012 (B)
- There were 4 new emails from the Anthrax Truther in my inbox this
morning. He's simply ignoring what I wrote in my (C) comment
yesterday,
and he's continuing to argue that Ivins was taking care of rabbits
during
those "unexplained" evening hours in his lab. He's now trying to
find
out how long it takes to "bleed" the 52 rabbits used in the study
Ivins was
performing. Bleeding the rabbits was Ivins' job. So, the
Truther's assumption is undoubtedly that it couldn't be done during
the course of a normal work day and would have to be continued at
night. The fact that it is totally preposterous
to believe that Ivins wouldn't have given that as
his reason for being alone in Suite B3 at night makes no difference.
When Ivins was asked to explain why he prepared an invalid slant for
the FBI repository in April of 2002, he came up with a dozen possible explanations. None
made any sense, but he knew the FBI could not scientifically disprove any of
them.
Yet, when asked why he had spent so much time in his BSL-3 lab during
the evenings prior to the attacks, his only explanations were that (1)
he
went there to get away from his troubled home life, and (2) he went
there to get away from a guard who constantly annoyed him and who
couldn't get into the BSL-3 area. Those are explanations which
are next to impossible to disprove. Working with rabbits would
have been
a perfect explanation for
working those long hours. Why didn't Ivins use it? It seems
extremely
unlikely that he didn't think of it or forgot about doing such
work. The only logical answer I see is that
he knew that explanation could be easily
disproved.
So, maybe the Anthrax Truther should be looking for the way it could be
disproved.
But, since that's the last thing the Truther wants, he's wasting
everyone's time making FOIA requests for more
irrelevant documents which he can
interpret to mean that Ivins was
working with animals during those "unexplained" hours.
I could make the FOIA request. But, do I really want to waste
government money by making FOIA requests that do nothing but disprove
some Anthrax Truther's beliefs?
January 4, 2012 (A) - I don't want
this to turn into a blog about my "Russian problem," but if anyone's
interested, the groups of 5 HEAD reads every 20 minutes that began at
11:26 a.m. yesterday continued through the night and into this morning.
Someone sent me a link
to some software I can use to block all
accesses from an entire country. I have no interest in doing
that. I probably have a lot of regular visitors from
Russia. It's just the one person (or company) that I want to
prevent from causing all these seemingly pointless accesses that screw
up my web site statistics.
I see it as a very interesting problem. How do you communicate
with someone who isn't trying to communicate with you, and you don't
know who they are, but we're both causing problem for each
other? It appears that I may be a much bigger annoyance to
them than they are to me. They apparently don't know how to
figure out who's causing their problem, and I haven't really tried very
hard to figure out who is
causing my problem. I've mostly just been trying to figure out
what they're trying to do.
Maybe that's the solution: Find out who
they are and write to them. The facts say they don't read my web
site, since, if they did, they'd know about the problem they're causing
and what I'm doing to them. (It no longer appears that they are deliberately trying to cause me
problem, since there are a thousand ways of doing a better job of that.)
There are lots of different web sites involved, but all the annoying
HEAD accesses during the past 24 hours have used the same IP address: 2.133.227.52.
Uh oh. Looking up that
IP address, I find it's in Kazakhstan, not
Russia:
| Location |
 KAZAKHSTAN, ALMATY, ALMATY |
| Latitude, Longitude |
43.255058, 76.912628
(43°15'18"N 76°54'45"E) |
| Connection through |
JSC KAZAKHTELECOM |
| Local Time |
04 Jan, 2012 09:07 PM (UTC +06:00) |
| Domain |
TELECOM.KZ |
And
looking up the IP address that was used on New Years Day (94.190.9.193)
I find the location this time is
in Russia:
| Location |
 RUSSIAN FEDERATION, SVERDLOVSK,
EKATERINBURG |
| Latitude, Longitude |
56.837814, 60.596842
(56°50'16"N 60°35'49"E) |
| Connection through |
INTERRA LTD |
| Local Time |
04 Jan, 2012 09:16 PM (UTC +06:00) |
| Domain |
INTERRA.RU |
However, the IP address
(178.123.18.201) used on December 26 was in Belarus:
| Location |
 BELARUS, -, - |
| Latitude, Longitude |
53.915837, 27.68331
(53°54'57"N 27°40'60"E) |
| Connection through |
REPUBLICAN ASSOCIATION BELTELECOM |
| Local Time |
04 Jan, 2012 06:19 PM (UTC +03:00) |
| Domain |
MAIN.BELTELECOM.BY |
And the IP address (187.174.201.12) used on November 26 was in Mexico:
| Location |
 MEXICO, DISTRITO FEDERAL, MEXICO |
| Latitude, Longitude |
19.42705, -99.127571
(19°25'37"S -99°7'39"E) |
| Connection through |
UNINET S.A. DE C.V |
| Local Time |
04 Jan, 2012 09:23 PM (UTC -06:00) |
| Domain |
UNINET-IDE.COM.MX |
However,
the web site associated with the 10 HEAD accesses from the Mexican IP
address (see my January 1 (B) comment) was http://yourroof.com.ua/ which is a
web site supposedly in the Ukraine, since it has
a .ua suffix.
(Maybe it's someone at the Ukranian embassy in Mexico City.)
Okay. Clearly, blocking a country won't do any good, even if I
wanted to try doing that. The question is: What's the
common denominator? What do those 4 different IP addresses in
four different countries have in common? They don't even use the same
language. However, the Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian and
Kazakh languages all use the Cyrillic
alphabet. That's the only common denominator I can see.
How does that help me find out who's behind this? I have no
clue. I think they may all be using some program purchased from a
common source, but I don't see any way to track that down. So,
I'll just continue doing as I'm doing. Except I can no
longer refer to it as my "Russian problem." Maybe I should refer
to it as my HEAD problem. No, that's not a good idea. I'll
just call it my "statistics problem."
January 3, 2012 (D) - Uh oh.
Just before shutting down at 5 p.m., I make a copy of the web site log
as of shutdown time. I found a group of 5
HEAD accesses that began at 11:26:53 a.m. with this one:
2.133.227.52
- - [03/Jan/2012:11:26:53 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 403 182
"http://pro-psixology.ru" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows
NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
And there were 5
more starting at 12:21 p.m., at 12:41 p.m., at 12:59 p.m., at 1:18
p.m., at 1:38 p.m, at 1:59 p.m., at 2:19 p.m., at 2:39 p.m., at 2:59
p.m., at 3:20 p.m., at 3:39 p.m., at 4:02 p.m., at 4:28 p.m., at 4:55
p.m. at 5:20 p.m., and at 5:48 p.m.
However, 2.133.227.52 is an IP address that I started blocking long
ago. That's why it got the 403 error code. Maybe the
Russians have run out of IP addresses. And maybe they think
that 5 HEAD reads won't be as noticeable as 10 HEAD reads on my web
site logs. Who knows? It's still all a mystery. They
also used about eight different web sites. Why? Another
mystery.
January 3, 2012
(C) - I don't know
if anyone else is interested in my arguments with Anthrax Truthers, but
I find it fascinating and amusing. And, occasionally it's
somewhat informative. The Anthrax Truther I mentioned in my (A)
comment this morning sent a follow up email in response to my (A)
comment. As usual, since he had no argument to counter my
evidence that his claim that it took Ivins 2 hours to do animal checks
was totally bogus, the
Anthrax Truther changed the subject.
Here's what he wrote:
Ed quotes AUSA Rachel Lieber:
" thus justifying his presence in the lab for a short time on each of those days (Friday, September 28 through Tuesday, October 2). However, the first three of those days, he was in the hot suites for well over an hour, far longer than necessary to check to see if any mice were dead. And for the three nights before each mailing window, Dr. Ivins was in the hot suites for between two and four hours each night, with absolutely no explanation. "
Ed quote demonstrates well Rachel Lieber's error in analysis. Rachel makes no mention of rabbits (as Ed doesn't). Their mistake is not appreciating that Dr. Ivins was also up to his eyeballs in dying rabbits in the formaldehyde study. See his October 5, 2001 email and the protocol.
This was pointed out a full year ago but Ed has always failed to comprehend the point. He similarly took months to comprehend that B3 was Biolevel 3 including the two animal rooms in the suite, that the animals were in B3, and that the challenge of the rabbits took place on or about October 1, with the rabbits dying over the course of the next week.
Ed confuses the unsupported assertions by a prosecutor in a memorandum as evidence.
Instead, the October 5, 2001 email and the rabbit protocol constitute evidence.
So, the subject is no
longer the claim that there's documentation that it took two hours for
Ivins to check on the test animals, the subject is now that Rachel
Lieber (who evidently did a lot of the writing in the Summary Report)
made an error when she wrote
the footnote on page 32 which I quoted and the Anthrax Truther repeats
in his email.
There's no mention of rabbits in the Lieber quote. And the
Truther's arguments now seem to be entirely
about rabbits. There was a "formaldehyde study" going on at
the time of the attacks, and it involved 52 rabbits. The
Truther's claim is that Ivins was "up to his eyeballs in dying rabbits
in the formadehyde study," and that explains his long hours in his lab.
Up to his eyeballs in dying rabbits? Really?
The Truther uses as evidence an
email Ivins wrote on October 5, 2001. The email says that 12
rabbits had died during the 3 days before the writing of the
email. That's just four
rabbits per day, but all twelve could have died during the day
on the third day, for all we know. How does that impact Ivins'
evening hours? The Truther doesn't say. He evidently just assumes that it somehow does.
How many of those rabbits were found dead during normal working
hours? He doesn't say. How many were found dead in the
evening by animal handlers? He doesn't say. He just
inexplicably assumes that the deaths of 12 rabbits somehow caused Ivins
to work a lot of evening hours -- hours which the Truther believes
explain Ivins' "unexplained" hours.
But, his key point is probably that Rachel Lieber didn't mention the
rabbits at all when she wrote the FBI/DOJ Summary Report. The
Truther assumes
this is an "error." And, he must also be assuming that Bruce Ivins also forgot all about those
dead rabbits since, despite repeated questioning, Ivins was
unable to explain or show anything in his notebook which would explain
those nighttime hours before the attacks.
So, Ivins couldn't remember being "up to his eyeballs in dying rabbits"
at that time. The Truther believes Rachel Lieber made
an error in not mentioning the dying rabbits. And the Truther
believes he has found the "truth" through his interpretation of protocols,
emails and other vague documents which support NONE of his claims.
The evidence, as it stands now, says that the rabbit tests were routine
tests that didn't require much work from Ivins at all. He may
even have let his assistant Pat Fellows do all the work. There is
no record of Ivins doing anything but write reports, although the
protocol says he would immunize and challenge the rabbits, which would
almost certainly be done during the day. The fact that the
protocol says that Ivins "will also help monitor the animals after
challenge" only means that he may have
checked the animals at some time during the day. Since cleaning
cages would seem to be nightwork, the animal handlers could do the
checking at night. Why would the Principal Investigator need to
spend unusual hours at night and on weekends in his lab because of the
rabbits?
He wouldn't. If he did, why didn't he remember it? Why
aren't there records showing what he did? Protocols are about
what should be done and
why. Records show what
was done, when it was done
and who did it. The
existing records don't show Ivins doing any actual work with
rabbits. So, there's absolutely NO reason to believe the rabbits
in any way "explain" Bruce Ivins' unexplained evening and weekend hours
in Suite B3.
January 3, 2012 (B) - A picture
might be worth a thousand words when it comes to describing my "Russian
problem." Click HERE to view
part of a page from my web site log for yesterday. The page
shows all 10 HEAD accesses that began at 6:30:24 a.m. and all 10 that
began at 6:50.59 a.m. It shows how noticeable the groups of 10
are amid the rest of the log entries. And, it also shows a single
HEAD command used by the Chinese search engine Baiduspider about midway between
those two groups of Russian access attempts. The Chinese
used the HEAD command the way it's supposed to be used. It's
still a mystery what the Russians are doing. But, there have been
no new strings of 10 HEAD accesses from them since 12:48 p.m.
yesterday. So, they're probably trying to figure out what IP
address to try next.
I've got 46 groups of IP addresses blocked, with 256x256 or 65,536 per
group, for a total of 3,014,656 blocked IP addresses. Another
interesting part of all this is that, as far as I can tell, the
Russians have stopped using all
of those 3,014,656 IP addresses to get to my site.
I awoke this morning trying to think of an analogy for my "Russian
problem." Here's what I came up with: It's like some
Russian guy buying a Ferrari automobile and he puts regular gas into
it. When he uses the car, the engine runs rough, so he buys a new
Ferrari. He puts regular gas into it, and when it runs rough, he
buys a new Ferrari, ad infinitum. He apparently doesn't
realize that the simple solution to his problem would be to use the
right grade of gasoline, i.e., to stop doing what he's doing with my
web site.
(BTW, I tried using
the Baidu search engine to see what it would find. It's kind
of interesting.)
January 3, 2012 (A)
- This morning, I was sent another email by that same Anthrax
Truther. He asked:
Ed,
on what basis under the SOPs (governing the procedures) are you
disagreeing with the scientist who said it would take a couple hours for Dr. Ivins to
do the work -have you not seen the SOPs? Is that it?
Why do you regularly assert
your unsupported opinion rather than obtain and post the most relevant
documents?
Are you suggesting it took
Dr. Ivins more than the approximately 2 hours? On what dates?
Since it accomplishes
nothing to respond to him by email, and doing so only causes him to
send a hundred times as many emails, I'll respond here:
First, the
scientist who made that statement was apparently Mara Linscott, and she
was talking about how long it would take her
(not
Ivins) to check on animals on a weekend.
The statement is on page 23 of FBI pdf file #847425
(with my deduction underlined in the version below):
Linscott
perceived the normal laboratory hours to start
between the morning hours of 7:00AM to
9:00AM and last through
5:00PM, although there would be
occasions when someone would
come in later. If someone came in on the weekend it
was to look
at the animals/count the dead
animals. This could take
approximately two hours and was
usually a one-person job.
Second,
when someone asks how long it takes to do something on a weekend, the
usual response is about the time it takes away from a normal weekend. That time
includes driving in to work. It includes showering and changing
into lab clothes. It includes showering and changing back into
street clothes. And it includes driving back home again. In
other words, it takes two hours out of her weekend to check on the
animals.
Third,
it's ridiculous to believe it
takes two hours to just check
on animals, when the task only involves looking at a few dozen animals to
see if they are still alive, and making a note if one or more of them
is dead. All other test animal-related chores are done by other
people (animal caretakers and veterinarians).
Fourth, a
footnote at the bottom of page 32 in the FBI/DOJ
Summary Report says:
It
bears mention that during the first five days of this second phase, Dr.
Ivins did make notations regarding the health of some mice involved in
a study being conducted by another colleague – thus justifying his
presence in the lab for a short
time on each of those days (Friday, September 28 through
Tuesday, October 2). However, the first three of those days, he was in
the hot suites for well over an hour, far longer than necessary to check to
see if any mice were dead. And for the three nights before each
mailing window, Dr. Ivins was in the hot suites for between two and
four hours each night, with absolutely no explanation.
So, except for the comment taken out
of context by the Anthrax Truther, there's no reason for anyone
to believe that the unexplained evening and weekend hours Ivins was
spending in his BSL-3 lab prior to the anthrax letter attacks were the
result of needing to
work with test animals. The facts say those hours were spent
drying and purifying the anthrax powders he used in the
attacks.
January 2, 2012 - Grumble grumble. I'm
getting sidetracked by mysteries not directly related to the anthrax
attacks of 2001. I awoke this morning with two questions turning
over in my mind. The first question was about the Russian
"attack."
The "attack" is continuing this morning, but I'm blocking them.
Their
accesses still show up on my web site log, but now they get a 403 error code
which causes a message to be displayed saying they are FORBIDDEN to
access my
site. Previously, they got the 200 status code (OK) which gave
them
permission to access the site. This morning's first
group of ten attempts started with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [02/Jan/2012:05:29:28 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 403 182 "http://tolkuchca.ru/"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)"
It was at 5:29 a.m. The other groups of ten began at 5:49, 6:09,
6:30, 6:50, 7:11, 7:32, 7:54, 8:18, 8:42, and 9:07, or roughly 20 to 25
minutes apart. I checked the log at 9:12 a.m., so they're
probably continuing as I write this. (Yes, a check at 11:52 found
more accesses at 9:30, 9:53, 10:16, 10:37, 10:58, 11:19 and 11:41.)
(Another check at 4:30 p.m. showed more accesses at 12:03, 12:24 and
12:48. Nothing after that.)
Note that the accesses are
closer together than yesterday. I assume it's because, once they
found that they could get into my site, they increased the access
rate. Why? I don't know. But, yesterday I noticed
something that was still on my mind when I awoke this morning.
Yesterday, while using Google to look for a web site I could use as a
link to explain what the HEAD command was used for, I came across the
blog site HERE.
It's all technical jargon, but they're apparently talking about a very
similar problem:
bdoreste wrote a
year ago:
The problem - every time I
edit a post, my WP install is performing http HEAD commands on all of
the <a> tags.
When I log into my affiliate
marketing portal, I see a whole
bunch of "clicks" from my server fetching the http HEAD command.
Of course, these false clicks skew the conversion tracking on the links.
What is causing WP to fetch http HEAD
on the <a> tags every time I edit posts, and how
do I get it to stop? The HEAD commands are definately coming
from my server, as the apache logs show my server IP, the redirect
link, and the HEAD every time it is requested.
and Porcupine73
responded 11 months ago:
Hello. I am noticing this
type of activity as well. I was
wondering if anyone had any additional information on these HEAD
requests, and more importantly, how to stop them? I installed
the no self pings add in which helped me not get so many e-mails when
inserting links to my own site, but these HEAD requests are still killing
the server.
The thread is closed, and they didn't find any answers. As near
as I can figure, what they're saying is that every time they edit a
post on a WordPress blog entry where there is a link, each link is
automatically checked or accessed using the HEAD command to verify that
it's a valid link. (The
coding for links involves <a> and </a> before and after the
URL for the site to be accessed.) It might explain something, but
it doesn't
help that they gave up without getting an answer. And it doesn't
explain why I've only got the problem with Russian sites, nor why the
Russians keep changing IP addesses so they can get around the problems I cause for them.
I don't think the Russians are after me personally, nor are they after
my site. They're more of an annoyance than a true problem.
The accesses distort my web site statistics.
It could be a program "bug" in a Russian program. I think there
are probably other web site operators who
have the same
problem, but very few notice it, and even fewer care about solving the
problem.
The second mystery on my mind when I awoke this morning was how to
verify if mice were "challenged" in the guinea pig animal room
#B305. I figured that B305 probably contained a biosafety cabinet
or glove box for doing the injections, while B310 didn't. So, all
subcutaneous injections in Suite B3 would be done in the same place, regardless of the species of animal.
But, I don't need to concern myself with that question anymore.
This morning I had 4 emails in my inbox from the anthrax truther
complaining that I misunderstood the email he sent me yesterday.
The first read:
Ed,
the name of an animal room in B3 does not control whether guinea pigs
or mice were challenged there - Lincoln is not the only fellow who
slept in the Lincoln bedroom
Any of numerous USAMRIID scientists could have told you that.
The
second read:
Ed,
your massive confusion on Amerithrax stems from not realizing that B3
was all bio-level 3 and that the guinea pigs, rabbits and mice were all
in B3, Building 1425
You could have confirmed that by the most rudimentary inquiry.
The third read:
Fwd; Ed, as explained by
the readily available protocol, the mice were challenged in B305, what
you call the guinea pig room. You lack common sense and are
a terrible researcher.
Is there no email you cannot distort? My point was that your
assumption that the rabbits were not in one of the animal rooms in B3
-- because of the name of the room -- was stupid and uninformed.
All you needed to do was
ask for a copy of the protocol and/or ask those involved in the
experiment.
I'm only writing about
this
subject because the Anthrax Truther inexplicably seems to believe it
somehow proves that Bruce Ivins was working with test animals during
all those "unexplained" evening hours he spent in Suite B3 just before
the attacks, even though all the information the Anthrax Truther finds
says otherwise.
The fourth email was a copy of an FOIA request the Anthrax Truther sent
to the Army asking for a copy of "the USAMRIID form 'Animal Room Environment Report' for B310
and B305 in Building 1425 for Sep - Oct 2001?" Why does he need this
report? If I interpret what he's saying correctly, he says he
needs it to help convince the world that a Muslim was behind the
anthrax attacks, and everyone should stop blaming Bruce Ivins, because
if people continue to blame Bruce Ivins, they won't realize that the
Muslim
terrorist could use another bioweapon against us again at any moment.
It's the same argument
he's been waging for the past ten years. Only, prior to August
2008, when Bruce Ivins was identified as being the anthrax mailer, his
argument was about any
non-Muslim American scientist, not Bruce Ivins specifically.
January 1, 2012 (E) - Hmm. I
just received an email from an Anthrax Truther who read my (C) comment
for
this morning and wrote:
the
mice were challenged in B305, what you call the guinea pig
room. You lack common sense and are a terrible researcher.
In my (C) comment, I
identified Room B305 in Suite B3 as the guinea pig room because that
was the way it was described on page 26 of FBI pdf file #847443:
Ivins pointed out the B3 cold room
as being on the right
side
of the hallway when looking
through the crash door, with a
black box on the door. Room 308
is the pass through to suite B4.
The mouse animal room is the third
door down on the right when
looking
through the crash door. The guinea pig room is across the
hall with the cleaning
supplies for the suite located to the right
of the door as the room
is entered.
According
to the floor plan for Suite B3, when
looking through the window in the crash door, the mouse animal room is
the third door down on the right (i.e., Room B-310) and the only room
across the hall that could be the guinea pig room is Room B-305.
The Anthrax Truther uses this document to question the FBI report:
The
title says the protocol is about "anthrax in mice." And, the last
paragraph says that the "animals" will be housed in Animal Resources
Suite AR-2 until they are challenged
in B-305. So, does that mean that Room B-305 was the mice animal
room
and not B-310 as the FBI report indicates? Or does it mean that
the tour given by Ivins was another occasion where Ivins was misleading
the FBI? Or
were things changed after the protocol was written in
January of 2001? Or were things changed before the FBI report was
written in February of 2003? Or, does it mean that all animals are "challenged" in
B-305? Or should the protocol have said B-310 instead of
B-305?
What difference does it make? It makes a difference to Anthrax
Truthers who believe if they can prove that someone who disagrees
with them is wrong about anything,
that means they have proven that person is wrong
about everything.
January 1, 2012 (D) - HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
January 1, 2012 (C) - On this New
Year's morning, I'm working on page 317 in Chapter 40 of my new
book. There are probably only about 5 chapters left, but it's
difficult to predict. As I do research, I keep finding
interesting details that cause me to add in additional chapters.
When I do the second draft, a lot of it may be deleted, and chapters
may be combined, but I won't know that for certain until I get to that
point.
Meanwhile, I keep getting emails from Anthrax Truthers who believe that
Ivins was tending to lab animals during those "unexplained" evenings he
spent in his BSL-3 lab just before the two mailings. The fact
that the in-out logs seem to say otherwise means nothing to them.
The fact that there were animal handlers to take care of the animals
means nothing to them. The fact that necropsies would be more
likely be performed by veterinarians than by research scientists means
nothing to them. The fact that it doesn't seem logical that a
busy key scientist would have to spend his time doing menial tasks like
disposing of dead animals means nothing to them. They want proof that Ivins was not busy taking
care of the test animals during those times. Until they get such
proof, they'll just
keep insisting that the FBI failed to realize that the "unexplained"
evening hours were actually very well explained by Ivins' work with the
test animals.
And, the Anthrax Truthers seem to be currently focused on specific
rabbit tests, which
documents show didn't begin until a week after the first anthrax
letters had been mailed.
This morning they sent me an email which pointed out what appears to be
an error in my December 27 comment, where I wrote:
The Anthrax Truthers haven't provided any
information about where the
52 rabbits were kept, but they assume
it was somewhere within Suite B3, even though Suite B3 had no animal room for rabbits.
They sent me an
undated document which seemingly shows that rabbits were indeed
kept in Suite B3 in building 1425 at
some point in time. However, their
comments about the document indicate that it may have been written
years after 2001 and after some remodeling of Suite B3 was done.
The facts still seem to indicate that there was no animal room for
rabbits in Suite B3 in September and October of 2001. The floor plan, FBI documents and
testimony indicates there were only animal rooms for mice (B310) and
guinea pigs (B305) in 2001. Did they put rabbits in with guinea
pigs? Did they convert the former glanders lab (B312) to an
animal room for rabbits? Who knows? And only the Anthrax
Truthers seem to care.
They've asked me to check with a certain individual to see if he'll
provide details of how the animals were handled. They evidently
can't persuade the guy to commicate with them, and they want me to give
it a try. I'll try, but I see no reason why he'll communicate
with me, either. Most people directly or indirectly involved with
the case just want to get on with their lives and leave the Amerithrax
case behind them.
Besides, the guy probably knows as well as I do that no amount of proof
will ever change the mind of a True Believer or any other kind of
Anthrax Truther. They'll just rationalize some way to
ignore the proof. So, why even bother arguing with them - or why
bother trying to find evidence to argue with them?
January 1, 2012 (B)
- Until this morning, I kept hoping that the Russians had stopped doing
whatever it is
they're doing with my web site. But, they haven't stopped.
They're still doing something that shows up on my web site logs as
strings of 10
HEAD accesses about a
second apart. Since about 99.9% of the accesses to my site are
GET accesses, ten nearly identical HEAD accesses together are
very noticeable as I download my web site logs. They're as
hard to miss as a group of 7-foot tall male basketball players would be
standing together in a long line of female jockeys.
The last time I was forced to block Russian accesses was on November 3,
2011. After that, for almost a month, I hadn't seen the pattern
until November 26, when I
noticed ten HEAD accesses in a row starting with this one:
187.174.201.12
- - [26/Nov/2011:04:42:50 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 318
"http://yourroof.com.ua/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows
NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
But it was just the ten. That wasn't too bad. And it took
another month for the next series of ten to show up. The first
access in that series was this one:
178.123.18.201
- - [26/Dec/2011:01:09:58 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 341
"http://sdlwebsite.ru"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
And 40 minutes later there were ten more, starting with this one:
178.123.18.201
- - [26/Dec/2011:01:50:07 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 341
"http://sekasamnogo.ru"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Those two accesses use the
same IP
address (in red) but they came from different web sites (also in
red). That's still not a problem for me, but it's part of their
pattern.
Then, on December 30, I got ten
starting with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [30/Dec/2011:13:49:06 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://tolkuchca.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
The next day, on December
31st, I got
ten starting with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [31/Dec/2011:00:49:36 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://tolkuchca.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
And 30 minutes later, ten more starting with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [31/Dec/2011:01:19:44 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://familniki.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
And, this morning - the first morning of the new year - for some reason
my web site host didn't provide me with the log entries for prior to
4:22 a.m. But, a few minutes after that time the logs show I had
ten accesses starting with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:04:38:28 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318 "http://familniki.ru/"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)"
Ten more about 30 minutes later starting with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:05:04:16 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318 "http://tolkuchca.ru/"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)"
Ten more starting about 28 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:05:32:36 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://tolkuchca.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Ten more starting about 30 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:06:02:24 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318 "http://zonatop.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Ten more starting about 33 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:06:35:26 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://familniki.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Ten more starting about 34 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:07:09:50 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://tolkuchca.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Ten more starting about 33 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:07:42:23 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://zonatop.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Ten more starting about 31 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:08:14:40 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://familniki.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
And, ten more starting about 37 minutes later with this one:
94.190.9.193
- - [01/Jan/2012:08:51:40 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 318
"http://familniki.ru/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Okay. There's obviously something automated involved. It's
not some person accessing my site. It's a computer program
attempting to do something. And, whatever is going on it probably
began before my logs began this morning. I have no idea how many
times they did their thing on my site before 4:22 a.m. (My web
site host probably saved the logs from prior to 4:22 a.m. as part of
December 31 logs, which I can no longer access.)
The log entries I have show there were 9 groups of 10 HEAD accesses
roughly 30 minutes apart. They all came from the same IP address
- 94.190.9.193 - but three different web sites were involved.
And, I can see that the accesses really began on December 30 with just
one set of ten accesses. That was like a reconnaissance
mission, with a longer reconnaissance mission on the next day.
Web browsers use the GET command to actually access and look at web
pages and images. The
HEAD command doesn't actually view the
page, it is normally just used to check to last-update information see
if there have been any changes to a page since the last time the
command was used. But, that is clearly NOT what the
Russians are doing.
I don't know what they're doing, but it doesn't look safe to me.
So, as I see it, I have no choice but to block accesses from the entire
94.190 group of IP addresses. (Past experience has shown that if
I just block one
specific IP address, they'll soon use another address in the same
group. By blocking an entire group (94.190.000.000 to
94.190.256.256) it makes it much more difficult for them to find
another IP address.)
Okay. I've done that. Now, I'll just wait to see what they
do next.
It's a mystery. It makes no sense. They've been doing it
for years. But, I can keep blocking them, and I'll continue to do
so until I either figure out what they are up to, or until they contact
me to explain what they are up to and give me a good reason to stop
blocking them.
It's not the way I expected to start the new year, but I love a mystery.
January 1, 2012 (A) - I don't know
how this new format will look on other computer screens and various
hand-held devices. Although no one has complained, I've become a
bit concerned that the old format may have been getting a bit
difficut to read. The old format used a box for comments that was
50%
of the screen width. That meant that, with new wide-screen
devices, a line of text could be very very
long. This format uses a box with a fixed width of 600
pixels. I think it should be easier to read. If not, please
let me know, and I'll switch back to the old format.
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