U.S. remains vulnerable to anthrax attack, experts say
By MICHAEL WALSH
Capital News Service

WASHINGTON | The United States is still “very poorly prepared” for an anthrax attack six years after a 2001 assault against Congress and television broadcasters, a former CIA director says.

“There is very little attention being paid to biological weapons,” former director James Woolsey said this week. “And that’s a shame.”

Woolsey spoke at a news conference called to release a report from ExecutiveAction, a Washington-based consultant, analyzing three anthrax attack scenarios, including a hypothetical attack at the Academy Awards.

Neil Livingston, ExecutiveAction chief executive officer, said the report was meant to be an “educational document” for the public and to show the risks that America faces.

“Terrorists could recruit a scientist at a laboratory who had access to a lethal strain of anthrax,” Livingston said. “Alternatively, they could break into a laboratory, bribe a scientist or threaten a scientist to obtain a sample.”

Livingston said that once obtained, anthrax “can be smuggled into just about any building in the United States.”

“Someone could just open up a sugar packet (filled with anthrax), spread it on a table and then leave the room,” he said.

Livingston pointed to the mystery that still surrounds the 2001 attack that struck in Florida, Connecticut, New York and metropolitan Washington as evidence that anthrax is on the back burner.

Five people died in the attacks.

“The most alarming thing is that we have not solved the 2001 anthrax attacks,” Livingston said.

Though the amount of anthrax used in the attacks was small, it was still enough to shut down the Hart Senate Office Building for five months and require millions of dollars in decontamination costs.

If terrorists were to step up the amounts of anthrax or “get creative” in another attack, the results could be devastating beyond the loss of life, said David Wright, president of the Annapolis-based biodefense company PharmAthene.

“A one-gallon Ziploc bag of anthrax is enough to destroy the U.S. economy,” Wright said. “I don’t want to scare people, but this is scary.”

The report also called for increased stockpiles of antibiotics, therapeutics (which provide protection after antibiotics lose their effectiveness) and a modern vaccine.

The anthrax vaccine is available only to the military, and is a six-shot sequence, Livingston said.

Wright said the federal government needs to step up its funding through Project Bioshield, created in 2004 to provide medical countermeasures in case of a biological attack.

by Lauren Cohen
Friday, November 30, 2007

At Madison Public Library Thursday, a former University of Wisconsin lecturer said America’s future is in jeopardy without 9/11 Truth, an organization that believes the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were part of a conspiracy by the U.S. government.

Kevin Barrett, who gained nationwide attention for his controversial views about Sept. 11 when he was teaching an introductory Islam class at UW last fall, explained how searching for answers behind the Sept. 11 attacks, “a pseudo-religious act of human sacrifice,” affect Americans’ cultural, spiritual and physical survival.

“We are on the brink of a chemical war; you should care because your life depends on it,” Barrett, the founder of Alliance for 9/11 Truth, said.

He also said Americans’ survival was threatened by anthrax threats and said official sources have confirmed anthrax threats came from Fort Detrick, Md.

“Bush didn’t want an investigation after 9/11, and we can see why the administration didn’t want to talk about why is anthrax coming from within the U.S.,” Barrett said.

According to Barrett, not providing answers and a “lie of this magnitude” kills the human spirit.

“Their spiritual life has diminished since 9/11 because there is more fear in the air and people are afraid to really live and open up to the world, they go around looking like zombies,” Barrett said.

Barrett said he believes it is “absolutely reasonable” to believe the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition and now there are CIA experts including Ray McGovern and Bill Christensen and colonels and generals coming forward.

“This monstrous lie will be far more pernicious, spiritually and every other way, than the actual murders,” Barrett said. “The lie is infinitely more harmful.”

Barrett said America’s current leaders are completely out of control.

“The war in Iraq has taken over a million lives so far,” Barrett said. “There have been executive orders where Bush can declare a state of emergency without getting approval from Congress. We are on the way to becoming a dictatorship.”

In terms of the future, Barrett said 9/11 Truth has the potential to change public opinion and finding out what happened “might unite us.”

UW College Democrats Chair Oliver Kiefer said while Barrett is free to express his speech, it is not an opinion he agrees with. Kiefer said he believes in a more “mainstream” view that the Bush administration has failed the country.

“The Bush administration didn’t adopt recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, nor take safety precautions, and have left us vulnerable,” Kiefer said. “For example, nothing was done with our ports until Democrats took over in Congress, and that’s just inexcusable.”

Madison resident Lou Stolzenberg said she doesn’t accept new information quickly. However, once she looked at information from scientists and engineers about the World Trade Center’s collapse, she agreed with the conspiracy theory.

“[These are] qualified, educated and reputable people — who don’t just accept any information, but have high standards for verifying information,” Soltzenberg said. “I believed the theory.”

America's sole supplier faced oblivion if its rival's product was adopted. It was time to call on political connections.

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 2, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax mailings, top U.S. science advisors said the country "urgently needed" a new, improved anthrax vaccine.

The existing vaccine often caused swollen arms and muscle and joint pain. Inoculation required six injections over 18 months, followed by yearly booster shots. The estimated shelf life was just three years.

The scientists' report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, called for "an anthrax vaccine free of these drawbacks" -- a vaccine that would require only two or three injections, achieve protection within 30 days, stay potent for a long time and cause fewer adverse reactions.

Yet nearly six years later, the old vaccine is still the only one available -- and the government is buying it in mass quantities for the Strategic National Stockpile.

The manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions Inc. of Rockville, Md., prevailed in a bitter struggle with a rival company that was preparing what federal health officials expected to be a superior vaccine. The episode illustrates the clout wielded by well-connected lobbyists over billions in spending for the Bush administration's anti-terrorism program.

Emergent's rival, VaxGen Inc. of South San Francisco, had spent four years developing a new anthrax vaccine and had won an $877.5-million federal contract to deliver enough doses for 25 million people. The contract threatened Emergent's very existence. The old vaccine, its only moneymaker, would likely be obsolete if VaxGen succeeded.

Emergent responded by mobilizing more than 50 lobbyists, including former aides to Vice President Dick Cheney, to make the case that relying on the new vaccine was a gamble and that the nation's safety depended on buying more of Emergent's product.

The company and its allies in Congress ridiculed VaxGen and impugned the competence or motives of officials who supported the new vaccine. The lobbying effort damaged VaxGen's credibility with members of Congress and the Bush administration, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

When VaxGen encountered a stubborn scientific problem and needed more time to deliver its vaccine, the firm found scant support, even among officials who had earlier backed its efforts. The government then imposed tougher testing requirements on the struggling company.

A senior federal scientist who oversaw the project said she sought authority to allow advance payment to VaxGen to help it work through the difficulties. Top administration officials blocked her requests, she said.

Finally, a year ago, officials canceled VaxGen's contract, all but capsizing the company.

Emergent, meanwhile, has won federal contracts worth at least $642 million for the old vaccine and is in line to win many millions more as the government expands the strategic stockpile.

Kimberly B. Root, a spokeswoman for Emergent (formerly BioPort Corp.), said the company's lobbying ultimately served the national interest.

"Had we just thrown up our hands, what position would we be in now?" Root asked. "Where would the government be? There wouldn't be, potentially, a vaccine in the stockpile."

Bill Hall, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said VaxGen's "poor performance" sealed its fate. In canceling the contract, Hall said, officials acted "as effective custodians of government finances."

Yet Dr. Philip K. Russell, a vaccinologist and retired Army general who was a senior biodefense official in the Bush administration, described the outcome as "a big, dramatic failure."

"National security took a back seat to politics and the power of lawyers and lobbyists," said Russell, who supported the decision to award VaxGen the contract.

If officials had granted the company a bit more time, Russell said, it would likely have solved its scientific problem and delivered a superior vaccine. He noted that setbacks are common in developing vaccines and said VaxGen appeared capable of overcoming this one.

"It wasn't an insurmountable problem," said Russell, who after leaving the government did not lobby for or advise either of the competing vaccine companies. "It was a solvable problem."

Effort to contain threats

On the Sunday night after Sept. 11, 2001, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson convened an urgent meeting of health officials and leading scientists.

"Tommy Thompson was really, really concerned that something could happen," recalled Dr. Donald A. "D.A." Henderson, a former World Health Organization physician who led successful efforts to eradicate smallpox. "There was intelligence information coming through and some chatter coming through, suggesting there was going to be a second event, that the second event could very likely be a biologic event.

"And anthrax and smallpox were both raised as possibilities."

The imperative was clear: Find a way to eliminate both threats.

About 10 p.m., as they filed out of HHS headquarters, Henderson and health department lawyer Stewart Simonson acknowledged their fears.

"I told D.A., 'We're going to make this work.' And he said, 'I just hope we're not too late,' " Simonson recalled. "That's how scared we were."

They and other federal officials later scored a victory over one of the two threats: Working closely with vaccine manufacturers, they assembled 200 million doses of smallpox vaccine.

Countering anthrax quickly proved to be more complicated.

In October 2001, six envelopes containing powdered anthrax were sent through the mail on the East Coast, killing five people and sickening about 20 others. Authorities closed contaminated buildings in Washington and Florida, and treated hundreds of congressional employees with antibiotics. No one has been charged in the attacks.

The anthrax mailings showed that the most reliable way to prevent death is with an antibiotic such as Cipro or doxycycline, administered quickly and for up to 60 days. Inhaled anthrax otherwise can kill up to 90% of those infected. The Strategic National Stockpile now holds enough such antibiotics to treat more than 40 million people.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and has advised President Bush and Congress on U.S. preparedness, said: "We already know that we prevented a serious problem on the Hill by essentially blanket-treating people with [Cipro]. We know that because when we went back and did surveys, we found that many people who had absolutely no symptoms were actually exposed."

The success in limiting deaths from the 2001 mailings brought into focus the lack of expert consensus about the magnitude of the anthrax threat. Some scientists have said that terrorists could disperse anthrax over a wide area, inflicting casualties on the scale of a nuclear weapon.

Skeptics, however, note that although anthrax is relatively easy to obtain and can linger tenaciously on surfaces, it is not contagious and is difficult to deliver lethally outdoors.

Another attack, Fauci said, "would create massive panic in this country. It would create economic and other real, logistical problems. But at the end of the day, you're not going to kill as many people as you would if you blasted off a couple of car bombs in Times Square."

Nevertheless, fear of a panic-inducing anthrax event generated momentum for amassing millions of doses of vaccine as a backstop to the antibiotics that would be the first line of defense.

Bush underscored the threat as he rallied support for the Iraq war. In an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, the president told a crowd that Saddam Hussein's regime had supplies of anthrax and other biological weapons "capable of killing millions." Such weapons could be easily deployed, Bush added: "All that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it."

The U.S. already had a military stockpile of anthrax vaccine, filled with Emergent's product. Now, support grew for creating a civilian cache, to allow mass inoculations immediately after an attack.

The idea was that a new vaccine -- faster-working, with fewer doses and fewer side effects -- would protect people who couldn't tolerate antibiotics and would work against anthrax that withstood antibiotic treatment. A vaccine might also help protect people reentering a building that had been contaminated.

In February 2002, the Institute of Medicine released its report, calling the old vaccine "reasonably safe" but "far from optimal" and concluding: "A new vaccine, developed according to more modern principles of vaccinology, is urgently needed."

Officials meeting privately in late 2003 -- including Russell, Simonson, representatives of the vice president's office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security and Fauci's staff -- decided to push for the purchase of 75 million doses of a new, genetically engineered vaccine.

Dr. Kenneth W. Bernard, then a biodefense advisor to Bush, estimated that such a stockpile -- providing three doses for 25 million Americans -- would be enough to respond to simultaneous attacks on New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Henderson and Russell said the requirement for 75 million doses was based as well on a desire to keep a manufacturer operating continuously, so it could quickly ramp up production in a crisis.

The problem now, both said in recent interviews, is that the nation has not gotten a newer, better vaccine.

Project BioShield contract

In July 2004, President Bush signed legislation called Project BioShield, providing $5.6 billion for "next generation" vaccines and drugs to counter threats of biological terrorism.

VaxGen had been working for two years on its anthrax vaccine, building on earlier efforts by the Army. VaxGen's early work had impressed Fauci's staff, which oversaw $100 million in federal research grants to the company.

Now VaxGen wanted to win the first BioShield contract. The company had been formed in 1995 by scientists from Genentech Inc., which retained an ownership stake. Lance K. Gordon, inventor of the first vaccine for infant meningitis, became VaxGen's chief executive in 2001.

But by 2003, the company's survival was in doubt. It had seen an experimental AIDS vaccine fail in late-stage testing. And in August 2004, the Nasdaq stock exchange delisted VaxGen for failing to file timely financial results; the company's stock price sank 35%.

VaxGen sought the BioShield contract by proposing to genetically engineer an anthrax vaccine with greater purity, more consistent potency and fewer unwanted side effects than Emergent's old vaccine.

But inside the company's salmon-colored walls facing San Francisco Bay, technicians were seeing disquieting data: Blood samples drawn from study patients showed that the vaccine failed to trigger enough anthrax-fighting antibodies.

VaxGen hired more vaccine experts, including a new chief scientific officer.

The complication did not deter federal health officials. On Nov. 4, 2004, HHS Secretary Thompson announced that VaxGen had been awarded the BioShield contract, worth $877.5 million. The money would start to flow when the company made its first delivery of vaccine, expected in two years.

"Acquiring a stockpile of this new anthrax vaccine is a key step toward protecting the American public against another anthrax attack," Thompson said.

The announcement was bad news for Emergent, whose vaccine remained the only revenue generator for its BioPort subsidiary.

"We were worried about it," recalled retired Navy Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served on the company's board from 1998 through late 2005. (Crowe was interviewed at a hospital in Virginia in late August, two months before his death at age 82.)

BioPort was founded in 1998 by Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Lebanese financier. Along with Fuad, his U.S.-educated son, El-Hibri formed BioPort by purchasing vaccine-making facilities of the state of Michigan for $24.75 million. The company's only product was the anthrax vaccine, called BioThrax, which it sold chiefly to the U.S. military. In mid-2004, the company reorganized as Emergent BioSolutions.

To counter the challenge posed by VaxGen, Emergent invested where it could buy immediate impact: lobbying.

"We had 500 employees who were about to lose their jobs, and we went out and became advocates for them," said Allen Shofe, a company vice president who managed its lobbyists.

In 2005, Emergent's yearly spending for lobbying nearly quadrupled, to $1.41 million. Last year it reached $2.1 million, federal records show. All told, from 2004 through June 2007, the company used 52 lobbyists at a cost of $5.29 million, the records show.

During the same period, VaxGen spent $720,000 on six lobbyists.

Emergent's lobbyists stressed a core message:

* U.S. civilians were at risk of death without an immediately expanded stockpile of anthrax vaccine;

* Emergent stood ready to supply the civilian stockpile, whereas VaxGen had yet to prove it could deliver a new product;

* Emergent might stop making the vaccine if the government chose not to buy its product for the stockpile.

The company enlisted friendly members of Congress and recruited a cadre of former government officials to press its attack. Among them was Jerome M. Hauer, a former acting assistant secretary for emergency preparedness at HHS.

Hauer had been in the thick of decisions to pursue a new anthrax vaccine. While at HHS, he told Emergent in a February 2003 letter that the department had concluded a new vaccine was "a better long-range option than investing in expanding manufacturing capacity" for BioThrax. Hauer wrote that "the scientific basis" for a genetically engineered vaccine was "very sound and will result in an improved product."

But after leaving the Bush administration in late 2003, Hauer did an about-face, delivering Emergent as a client to his new boss, the Fleishman-Hillard public relations and lobbying firm, according to company records and people familiar with the matter.

At a December 2004 biotech-industry conference, Hauer said the government should purchase more of the old vaccine. He also took aim at Simonson, the HHS lawyer, who had succeeded him as assistant secretary. Hauer said that Simonson should be stripped of his authority for his handling of the BioShield contract.

In June 2005, Emergent placed Hauer on its board of directors. In that year and 2006, Emergent paid $360,000 to Fleishman-Hillard, records show.

In an interview, Hauer said he lobbied members of Congress and advised the company how to "educate" the administration. He said he changed his mind about Emergent's vaccine after concluding that he had relied earlier on "biased information" from his then-colleagues at HHS.

In the spring of 2005, VaxGen became more vulnerable to its rival's onslaught. VaxGen scientists determined that the problem with the new vaccine's potency was not the result of a lapse in refrigeration, as they had first speculated. The difficulty lay with the vaccine's formula. An aluminum additive, expected to increase potency, had the opposite effect.

"Our vaccine had a stability problem," said Dr. Marc J. Gurwith, a scientific executive with VaxGen. "The problem was going to take more testing to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it."

VaxGen needed patience and flexibility from its presumed allies in Washington. But Thompson had resigned as HHS secretary, and Emergent's lobbying had changed the atmosphere. Officials who had backed VaxGen's drive to deliver a better vaccine were no longer responsive.

"We had a very productive partnership with the government until we encountered a problem," said Piers Whitehead, VaxGen's vice president for corporate and business development. "Things deteriorated very rapidly."

In April 2005, Dr. Noreen A. Hynes took over the HHS office that oversaw development of new drugs and vaccines under Project BioShield. Hynes, previously a bioterrorism advisor in the White House, said she was concerned about whether any small company could shoulder the costs of developing a new vaccine.

The Project BioShield law allowed advance payments of up to 10% of the value of a contract. But when she sought permission to grant such payments, Hynes said, she was turned down.

"I was told that the administration had decided there would be none," Hynes said in an interview. Asked who made the decision, Hynes said that she did not know but that it flowed from "the highest level."

Hynes, an infectious-disease specialist now at Johns Hopkins University, added: "It was not surprising, frankly, that this new type of vaccine would have been delayed in development. That's just the way vaccine development is. . . . It's one of the reasons why you would want to have the advance-payment authority."

VaxGen officials said they sought advance payment three times in 2005 and 2006: twice in discussions with HHS and once in writing. Hall, the health department spokesman, said any consideration of such payments "became moot" because of VaxGen's lack of progress.

Emergent executives knew well the problems inherent in developing and manufacturing vaccines. The state facilities they acquired in Lansing, Mich., had been beset with problems. In 1999 and 2000, inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration found deficiencies in the company's vaccine, including problems with stability, potency and purity.

The company pledged to rectify the inadequacies -- and the government stuck with it as the sole supplier of anthrax vaccine to the military.

Now, as Emergent sought to neutralize the competitive threat from VaxGen, it added to its lobbying team John V. Hishta, who had deep ties to the Republican congressional leadership.

Hishta was chief of staff to Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) and has continued to serve him as a campaign advisor. Hishta also directed national efforts to elect Republicans to the House from 2000 through 2002.

In July 2005, he arranged for an Emergent executive to appear before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, which was chaired by Davis.

In his opening statement, Davis voiced "concern" that federal officials had "made insufficient efforts to stockpile existing countermeasures while new and improved ones are being developed."

The Emergent executive, Robert G. Kramer, told the committee that health officials were undermining national security by contracting for VaxGen's product instead of buying more of Emergent's.

"HHS has staked the nation's protection against the No. 1 biologic threat on an experimental product," Kramer said.

Kramer emphasized that Emergent would reassess whether to keep making the anthrax vaccine. The company, he said, "finds itself at a critical juncture in terms of its ability and willingness to commit resources to a product that lacks a committed customer."

Representatives of VaxGen were not invited to appear.

Asked about his role, Hishta said, "I don't want to comment on my lobbying work."

Davis did not respond to questions submitted through an aide.

Another key lobbyist for Emergent was Todd A. Boulanger, who had served as an aide to Republican members of Congress. Boulanger helped shape a letter by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to Thompson's successor as HHS secretary, pressing him to explain why his department had not purchased more anthrax vaccine from Emergent.

The selection of VaxGen, Grassley wrote, was "highly suspect." In his letter, dated Jan. 28, 2005, Grassley told the new secretary, Mike Leavitt, about "a number of troubling allegations" regarding the vaccine contract. Grassley suggested that HHS "acted prematurely" in awarding it to VaxGen. "Some have questioned the effectiveness" of VaxGen's product, he wrote, noting that the old vaccine "has been available for use in this country for several decades."

Nine weeks later, Grassley again wrote to Leavitt: "I remain greatly concerned that the department is not prepared to protect the American people from an anthrax attack."

Grassley also questioned the independence of Russell, the vaccine specialist who backed awarding the BioShield contract to VaxGen. Grassley claimed the former general had been involved in developing the vaccine years earlier with the Army.

Russell, who left the health department in late 2004, said he had no financial stake in the vaccine and no role in developing it.

"How do you confront a whisper campaign?" Russell asked. "The lobbyists have to earn their pay."

Boulanger's role in providing material to Grassley -- including language for the senator's January 2005 letter -- was described by people who said they had direct knowledge of his actions. Asked for comment, Boulanger said, "I'm not going to say anything about my private conversations with his [Grassley's] staff."

Emergent paid Boulanger's firm, Cassidy & Associates, $300,000 from 2004 to 2006.

A spokeswoman for Grassley, Jill Kozeny, said the senator's letters were "based on information from a number of sources."

Grassley's intervention hurt VaxGen on two fronts, company executives said:

Because of his reputation as a fiscal watchdog, his criticism sowed reticence about VaxGen within Congress and the administration. And the prospect of overcoming potent political opposition while trying to solve a tough scientific challenge weakened the resolve of VaxGen's major investors.

Emergent, meanwhile, broadened its connections to the White House by hiring Cesar V. Conda and Ron Christie as lobbyists. Both had been policy aides to Vice President Cheney, who championed Project BioShield.

According to people familiar with the lobbyists' conversations with lawmakers, Conda and Christie raised doubts about Simonson's handling of the vaccine contract, just as Hauer had.

As assistant secretary for emergency preparedness, Simonson could have made the case within the Bush administration for giving VaxGen an advance on its contract. But that prospect was dimmed after the lobbyists' attacks, said Russell.

"Simonson was neutralized," he said.

Simonson, who left the government in mid-2006, declined to comment on Emergent's lobbying effort.

Neither Conda nor Christie responded to messages seeking comment. Emergent paid their firm, DC Navigators, $340,000 from 2006 through June of this year.

One of Emergent's other lobbying firms, McKenna Long & Aldrich, has taken credit for helping write the Project BioShield law. Seven members of the McKenna firm subsequently registered to lobby for Emergent.

From 2005 through June 2007, Emergent paid the firm $380,000.

Government changes rules

VaxGen's contract called for delivery of the first 25 million doses of vaccine by November 2006.

In May of that year, government health officials extended the deadline three years.

But they also erected new hurdles: They required VaxGen to complete, at the company's expense, new testing of the vaccine in animals, plus an additional study in humans. The original contract had allowed VaxGen to defer such studies until after the company began receiving payments.

VaxGen fought without success for better terms, notably partial payment before delivering the vaccine. It objected to the new regulatory requirements. It kept at work on the stability problem.

After reviewing VaxGen's progress, the FDA on Nov. 2, 2006, denied approval to begin the new study in humans, citing concern about whether the vaccine was stable enough.

On Dec. 19, 2006, the health department canceled VaxGen's contract. By this fall, VaxGen had laid off 90% of its workforce, which peaked two years ago at 295 employees, a spokesman said. The company plans to merge with another Bay Area biotech firm.

In an October report, the Government Accountability Office said that health officials and VaxGen had been "unrealistic" in believing the company could deliver its vaccine on schedule. The GAO also said VaxGen was hindered by regulatory requirements that "were not known" to the company when the contract was awarded.

VaxGen's Gurwith said in an interview that based on lab results, he was convinced as of July that the company had figured out how to maintain the vaccine's stability. Chief executive James P. Panek said that if the government had stood by VaxGen, it probably would have delivered a better vaccine "well ahead" of any other manufacturer and at far lower cost.

Emergent, meanwhile, has continued to win contracts to deliver more of the old vaccine to the civilian stockpile. In a recent interview, two senior federal health officials, Gerald W. Parker and Carol D. Linden, said they remained determined to buy enough vaccine to inoculate 25 million Americans.

Henderson, the Bush administration advisor and former World Health Organization official, said he was uncertain how much of the old vaccine should be stockpiled for civilians, considering its shortcomings.

"All of us were quite persuaded that once you got the [new] vaccine, you wouldn't be buying the old stuff," he said.

david.willman@latimes.com

Times researchers Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles and Sunny Kaplan in Washington contributed to this report.

Anne Ryman
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 16, 2007 12:00 AM

One of the world's foremost anthrax researchers toils in a cramped, windowless lab at Northern Arizona University.

Inside a locked room only a few can enter, he and his research team study germs so dangerous that the U.S. government considers them top bioterror threats.

It was here that Professor Paul Keim made a significant discovery: the 2001 anthrax letter attack on a Florida photo editor came from a genetic strain identical to one developed in U.S. government labs. The finding led the FBI to rule out foreign terrorist attacks in the jittery days after Sept. 11. The FBI called the anthrax letters the worst biological attacks in U.S. history. 

Keim's anthrax analysis catapulted his career from niche researcher to the equivalent of a scientific rock star and shone a new light on NAU. His grant funding skyrocketed from less than $1 million to about $8 million a year, and his research on more-common diseases expanded.

Soon he will have a new lab to match his world-renowned status.

He and his team of 50 researchers are moving into the top floor of a $25 million three-story, glass-and-brick building billed as one of the most energy-efficient in Arizona. The lab space is more than triple what they have now. The building's most talked-about feature, besides the fact it will house anthrax, is the use of recycled blue jeans to insulate the walls. NAU needed to build the lab because of the increased biodefense research workload and more federal safety and security restrictions since 2001. Keim, 52, has come a long way in six years.

In early 2001, he had 25 researchers for his various projects and was among a handful of U.S. scientists who worked on Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that lives in soil and causes anthrax disease. The lethal germ is considered a top bioterror threat because even a tiny amount of spores, smaller than the head of a pin, can kill if lodged in the lungs.

Keim was well-known in genomics circles, a scientific field that studies genes and their function. In the late 1990s, he and a colleague, Paul Jackson, pioneered a DNA fingerprinting technique to distinguish among the various anthrax strains. The finding revolutionized anthrax research but stopped short of elevating him to the ranks of famous scientists who transcend their fields.

Everything changed six years ago when doctors diagnosed Bob Stevens, a photo editor of the supermarket tabloid the Sun, with anthrax.

Fateful call

On the afternoon of Oct. 4, 2001, Keim was in his office when the telephone rang. On the other end was an FBI agent, who told him a plane was on its way to Flagstaff from Atlanta with a culture taken from Stevens' spinal fluid. The FBI wanted Keim to analyze the DNA and find out what type of anthrax Stevens had contracted. This could provide possible clues to where the anthrax originated.

Keim broke into a sweat, and his hands tingled.

He had expected the call. The FBI knew his reputation, and his NAU lab had the world's largest database of about 2,000 anthrax strains.

Four hours later, Keim jumped into his 1990 Toyota 4Runner and made the 15-minute drive to Flagstaff's Pulliam Airport. The setting sun painted the sky red as the small FBI plane landed. A door swung down, and a blond woman stepped out with a cardboard box in her hands.

"This is the anthrax," she said.

The plane and the blonde brought to Keim's mind visions of a famous movie and a moment of humor in an otherwise serious situation.

"I'm like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca," he thought.

The agents filled out paperwork, then handed the box to Keim, who placed it in the back of his 4Runner and drove back to his lab. A glass tube nestled in ice held the culture from Stevens' body. Keim and a couple of his key researchers worked through the night, isolating, processing and magnifying the DNA using machines and computers similar to ones found in crime labs. In the early morning, they compared the results with their anthrax database. They found a match: a virulent type called the Ames strain. The U.S. Army developed the lab strain in the 1980s as a test for the anthrax vaccine.

Keim outlined his results the next morning in a conference call with the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The media knew nothing of Keim's analysis. Then a few days later, a Florida U.S. attorney held a news conference on the anthrax investigation and said the FBI had sent samples for analysis to NAU.

Within 90 minutes, television satellite trucks pulled up and news crews tried to push into his lab. University officials posted 24-hour guards and rushed to install extra locked doors. Hundreds of news reporters left messages on his voice mail.

A producer from the Oprah Winfrey Show wanted to have a camera in the lab when Keim discovered who committed the anthrax attacks.

"I knew I had made the big time when Oprah Winfrey called," Keim said.

He gave no interviews, based on advice from the FBI, which worried that revealing details could jeopardize the investigation and could make him a potential target of whoever committed the crimes. He snuck in and out of his lab using various doors to avoid the media and stopped answering his telephone.

He even had a stalker. A woman, convinced she had contracted anthrax, left messages on his voice mail and showed up outside the building. She wanted him to cure her. She called him once from the waiting room of a doctor's office in Prescott, adding "but I still want to see you, Dr. Keim."

Growing reputation

As the FBI investigation progressed, Keim gave limited interviews and confirmed his help to the government. The FBI sent more cultures for analysis. The Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal featured him on their front pages. He spoke before Congress during terrorism hearings.

His sudden fame gave a new prominence to NAU, the smallest of Arizona's state universities and the least research-intensive of the three. In the university world, famous scientists lead to more research grants and enhanced prestige. Star scientists help draw other high-ranking scientists and students.

"As far as the biosciences go, Paul put NAU on the map, and he continues to do so," said David Engelthaler, a former state epidemiologist who has known him for a decade.

Keim stayed down-to-earth with his sudden fame, Engelthaler said. He could talk to top scientists one day and fit in with regular folk at a community event the next day.

Keim's higher profile had an important side benefit for Flagstaff's economy. In addition to his work at NAU, Keim since 2003 has been director of pathogen genomics at the Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen. The non-profit organization opened a new facility, TGen North, in Flagstaff in 2006, and it has grown to employ 14 people.

"In a sense, he's an economic-development agent all by himself," NAU President John Haeger said.

Yet even as his national reputation grew, he and other researchers faced questions.

Investigators speculated that whoever committed the attacks had access to Bacillus anthracis and an intimate knowledge of how the pathogen worked.

Scientists came under scrutiny.

The bacterium that causes anthrax is rare. The average person's chances of coming into contact are slim. Anthrax is far more common in animals, and human cases often come from people handling infected animal hides.

The anthrax-spiked letters, which sickened 22 and killed five Americans, had been "weaponized." Someone had concentrated the bacterial spores to make them easier to inhale and more lethal.

Some mornings, Keim talked to FBI agents about his anthrax analysis. Then in the afternoons, other agents interviewed him about his whereabouts before the attacks. Keim had an alibi. He had been in Arizona, far from the East Coast where the letters were postmarked.

He, like many others, wondered who did it.

One night he woke up as his mind raced through possible suspects. He reported his suspicion to the FBI.

"They evidently investigated this person, and it wasn't him," Keim said. He declines to say whom he suspected.

More than six years after the crime, the FBI has made no arrests.

Research continues

Keim's current lab is in the locked wing of a science building.

"You might as well smile for the camera; they're recording you," Keim tells visitors as they go through several locked doors.

A sign outside the lab that says "Molecular genetics" hints at the important science going on behind closed doors.

Inside, machines hum. Undergraduate students in white lab coats prepare anthrax DNA samples for analysis. Students sit at banks of computers where they read and interpret DNA analysis from the machines.

The number of researchers in Keim's lab has doubled since 2001, and their research into other pathogens has expanded. Keim also has a second lab through TGen North near the Flagstaff airport.

Keim walks through the NAU lab dressed more like a business executive on a semi-casual day than a scientist, in his chocolate blazer and tan slacks and a blue dress shirt.

His schedule is a blur. The previous day he spoke at a biodefense meeting in Boston. On this morning, he gave Arizona legislators a tour of his lab. In two days, he leaves for Thailand, where he has a project with melioidosis, a lethal infectious disease found in Southeast Asia and northern Australia.

Since 2001, his research on other common diseases has expanded. His various projects read like an encyclopedia of illness and disease: valley fever, the staph "superbug," tuberculosis, salmonella, E. coli, plague, sepsis, pneumonia.

One grant is aimed at developing DNA fingerprinting for all bacterial pathogen threats. It's not science for science's sake. Faster identification of life-threatening illnesses means doctors can diagnose and treat patients earlier.

This year, Keim and his research team got a U.S. patent for a new method to identify various strains of the tuberculosis-causing bacterium. He has similar patents pending for salmonella and E. coli. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used his technology to track the recent California spinach E. coli outbreaks.

The anthrax attacks created a sort of "war dividend" for public health, Keim said, as scientists use labs and instruments developed for biodefense to also study common diseases.

"The improvements in public health would never have occurred without the 'anthrax letter' attacks," he said.

Reach the reporter at anne. ryman@arizonarepublic.com or at 602-444-8072.

Former CBS Newser Defies Court, Won’t Reveal Sources
By The Observer.

When Jim Stewart stepped down from CBS News in November 2006 after some 16 years of reporting on a range of topics for the Tiffany Network, the longtime Washington-based correspondent retired to the warmth of Florida. Now, depending on a judge’s ruling in an ongoing case, Mr. Stewart could be spending a part of his golden years in a much less sunny position—namely in contempt of a federal court.

In legal documents filed on the eve of the holidays, Mr. Stewart, citing promises of confidentiality, continued to defy a judge’s order to reveal the names of his sources for a series of reports he produced in 2003 for CBS News about the F.B.I.’s investigation into the domestic anthrax attacks of 2001.

If U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton decides in the coming months to hold Mr. Stewart in civil contempt for his defiance, the case, which lately has been unfolding largely under the news radar, could become one of the more tortured—and high-profile—media soap operas of the new year.

And, in the wake of the Valerie Plame affair, in which The New York Times’ Judith Miller served jail time for her own refusal to give up sources, it could offer additional ammunition to advocates of a federal shield law—which would increase journalists’ legal right to protect their sources in court. Norman Pearlstine, the former editor in chief of Time Inc. who earlier this year wrote a book about confidential sources, media law and his pivotal role in the Valerie Plame affair, told NYTV that Mr. Stewart’s case “is a perfect example of why we need a federal shield law.”

Some back story: In the summer of 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft named Steven Hatfill, a former government scientist, as a “person of interest” in the government’s criminal investigation into the anthrax attacks. Roughly a year later, Mr. Hatfill filed a civil lawsuit alleging that by talking about him to reporters, FBI and DOJ staffers had violated his rights under the federal Privacy Act—a 1974 law that restricts the public disclosure of certain information about government employees.

Over the course of several months in the summer of 2003, Mr. Stewart, who was then covering counterterrorism for CBS News, produced three Evening News reports about the investigation and the FBI’s ongoing surveillance of Mr. Hatfill, whom many authorities considered to be a top suspect. According to court documents, Mr. Stewart’s reporting relied, in part, on four confidential sources at the F.B.I.

Fast-forward four years. This past August, with Mr. Hatfill’s lawsuit still unresolved, Judge Walton ruled that Mr. Stewart and a handful of other reporters who had covered the story—including Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek, Brian Ross of ABC News, Allan Lengel of The Washington Post, and Toni Locy of USA Today—would be required to turn over the names of their sources.

When deposed this past September, Mr. Stewart declined to do so. (All the other reporters except Ms. Locy were apparently released by their sources from their pledges of confidentiality. Ms. Locy claimed in her deposition not to remember the names of her sources.) In response, Mr. Hatfill’s lawyers, who did not return phone calls from NYTV seeking comment, filed a motion to hold Mr. Stewart in contempt of court.

The contempt motion argued that Mr. Stewart’s “entrenched defiance” called for escalating fines, starting at $1,000 per day. And it added: “The risk of industry support for Mr. Stewart’s contempt calls for one additional measure: the Court should prohibit Mr. Stewart’s solicitation or acceptance of any reimbursement for any contempt fines it should levy.”

Just before Christmas, Mr. Stewart responded to the motion for contempt. In extensive court filings, he explained that he had reached out to three of his four F.B.I. sources, only one of whom had agreed to be named. That source, a former F.B.I. public affairs specialist named Edwin Cogswell, had previously been contacted by other reporters in the case and in due course had essentially outed himself.

Mr. Stewart’s legal team went on to argue that because of intervening developments—specifically, the fact that Mr. Cogswell and two other former F.B.I. and Department of Justice employees have come forward as reporters’ sources—the judge should reconsider his initial ruling compelling Mr. Stewart to identify his sources. Mr. Stewart’s lawyer, Lee Levine, declined to comment on behalf of his client.

CBS appears to have largely extricated itself from the affair. Last May, it quashed an effort by Mr. Hatfill’s lawyers to subpoena CBS Broadcasting Inc. A CBS spokesperson declined to comment on the case.

The case has some parallels to that of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a former government scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been accused of sharing classified nuclear information with China, and who subsequently sued the federal government under the Privacy Act. In the suit, Mr. Lee’s lawyers similarly subpoenaed six reporters, seeking the identities of their confidential sources in the government. The judge in the case ordered the reporters to testify, but the case came to an end before they did so when Mr. Lee settled with the government.

In Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources, Mr. Pearlstine wrote that the Wen Ho Lee settlement would encourage “plaintiffs in other Privacy Act lawsuits against the government to seek testimony from the media whenever leaks from confidential sources are involved.”

And to some media-rights advocates, that appears to have happened, creating concern about reporters’ ongoing ability to credibly promise confidentiality to sources. “The [Privacy] Act was intended to cover such private information as medical data, psychiatric history and employment details,” Sandra Baron of the Media Law Resource Center told NYTV. “To the extent that this would mean that someone who is a suspect in an investigation can’t be reported on, I think that’s outrageous and unacceptable.” Ms. Baron called the pressure put on reporters to give up their confidential sources “a very ugly and very invasive side effect of these Privacy Act claims.”

Whether Mr. Stewart will become the next poster child for the cause depends, for now, on Judge Walton.

– By Felix Gillette 

Lawyers for Steven Hatfill, cited as 'a person of interest' in the investigation but not charged with a crime, say the federal officials gave damaging information about their client.

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
1:34 PM PST, January 11, 2008

WASHINGTON--Lawyers for the former Army physician who was called "a person of interest" in the deadly anthrax mailings in the fall of 2001 today named three federal officials who they said illegally leaked confidential investigative information against their client.

Steven J. Hatfill, who has not been charged with a crime and maintains his innocence, is suing the FBI, the Justice Department and a handful of current or former law-enforcement officials. Hatfill is alleging that the leaks damaged his reputation and violated his right to privacy.

"We have identified three of the leakers who were previously anonymous," said Mark A. Grannis, one of Hatfill's lawyers, near the outset of a sparsely attended hearing in federal court. "Some of the most damaging information leaked in this case [came] straight out of the U.S. attorney's office."

The mailings killed five people and sickened about 20 others from Florida to Connecticut. Coming on the heels of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon, the mailings led to the shutdown of a Senate office building and heightened the nation's fear of prolonged terrorism.

Hatfill's lawyers alleged that the three officials who leaked investigative details to the news media were Roscoe C. Howard Jr., who from 2001 to 2004 served as U.S. attorney for District of Columbia; Daniel S. Seikaly, who served as Howard's criminal division chief; and Edwin Cogswell, who formerly served as a spokesman for the FBI.

One of Hatfill's lawyers said during the hearing that he would soon seek "sanctions" relating to Howard's additional role in leading the government's defense in 2003 and 2004 against Hatfill's lawsuit. Hatfill's lawyers named the three purported leakers after questioning under oath six reporters from major news-gathering organizations.

Howard and Seikaly, who both now practice privately at the same Washington, D.C., law firm, did not return messages seeking their comment. Cogswell, who is still employed by the FBI but in another capacity, could not be reached. His successor said the bureau would not comment because it concerned a matter of "ongoing litigation."

An attorney with the Justice Department, Elizabeth J. Shapiro, did not confirm or deny the alleged leaking during the court hearing, held to discuss the status of Hatfill's nearly 5-year-old lawsuit. But Shapiro urged the judge presiding over the case to direct the parties to seek settlement of the matter out of court.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the lawyers for the government and for Hatfill to seek "mediation" over the next two months. The prospects of a mediated settlement notwithstanding, Walton said he expected a trial could begin in December.

Hatfill's lawyers, Grannis and Thomas G. Connolly, did not speculate in court on the likelihood for a settlement. Afterward, Grannis said, "The court has set a schedule for bringing this case to trial this year, and we're very pleased at the prospect that Dr. Hatfill will finally have his day in court."

david.willman@latimes.com

An Army doctor, a 'person of interest' never charged in the deadly 2001 mailings, names three federal officials.

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 12, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Attorneys for the former Army physician who was branded a "person of interest" in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings named three federal officials Friday who they said leaked investigative details that harmed their client.

The physician, Steven J. Hatfill, has not been charged with a crime and maintains his innocence. Hatfill is suing the FBI, the Justice Department and a handful of present and former law enforcement officials. He alleges that the leaks were illegal, damaged his reputation and violated his right to privacy.

"We have identified three of the leakers who were previously anonymous," one of Hatfill's attorneys, Mark A. Grannis, said near the outset of a sparsely attended hearing in federal court. "Some of the most damaging information leaked in this case [came] straight out of the U.S. attorney's office."

The anthrax mailings killed five people and sickened about 20 others from Florida to Connecticut. Coming on the heels of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon, the mailings led to the shutdown of a Senate office building and heightened the nation's fear of prolonged terrorism.

Hatfill's attorneys alleged that the three officials who leaked investigative details to the media were: Roscoe C. Howard Jr., who from 2001 to 2004 served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; Daniel S. Seikaly, who served as Howard's criminal division chief; and Edwin Cogswell, who formerly served as a spokesman for the FBI.

One of Hatfill's attorneys said during the hearing that he would soon seek "sanctions" relating to Howard's additional role in leading the government's defense in 2003 and 2004 against the lawsuit. Hatfill's attorneys named the three purported leakers after questioning six reporters under oath. Howard, Seikaly and Cogswell had released reporters from their earlier pledges of confidentiality, according to a lawyer familiar with the matter. Neither the reporters nor their organizations were named in Friday's hearing, held to discuss the status of Hatfill's nearly 5-year-old lawsuit.

Howard and Seikaly, who now practice privately at the same Washington law firm, did not return messages seeking their comment. Cogswell, who is employed by the FBI but in another capacity, could not be reached. His successor said the bureau would not comment because it concerned a matter of ongoing litigation.

An attorney with the Justice Department, Elizabeth J. Shapiro, did not confirm nor deny the alleged leaking during the court hearing. However, Shapiro asked the judge to direct the parties to try to settle out of court.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the attorneys for the government and for Hatfill to seek mediation over the next two months. The prospects of a mediated settlement notwithstanding, Walton said he expected that a trial on the lawsuit could begin in December. Hatfill's attorneys, Grannis and Thomas G. Connolly, did not speculate in court on the likelihood for a settlement.

Afterward, Grannis said: "The court has set a schedule for bringing this case to trial this year, and we're very pleased at the prospect that Dr. Hatfill will finally have his day in court."

Hatfill's lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages. It alleges that the defendants' actions impeded his ability to secure full-time work and that he suffered "severe emotional distress."

Hatfill, 54, formerly held government positions at the Army's medical research institute for infectious diseases and at the National Institutes of Health. He did not appear in court Friday.

A settlement of the case could carry political implications: On Aug. 6, 2002, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft first identified Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the anthrax mailings. By settling with Hatfill, the government would all but dispel the possibility that he might ever be charged for the deadly mailings. And -- in an election year when fear of terrorism looms as an important issue -- Hatfill's exoneration would remind voters that no suspect has been caught.

George Piro, a personable and handsome FBI agent, appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday to tell us Saddam Hussein's secrets. The 36-year-old Lebanese-American was Saddam's interrogator. In addition to whatever the show disclosed about Saddam, it also revealed a lot about how the U.S. media and bureaucracies have handled and stoked the controversies over Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) -- basically, afflicted by chronic Alzheimer's. The events relevant to understanding OIF go back nearly 18 years -- to Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Few people worked on Iraq all those years. Still, those doing so now ought to know that history. Neither 60 Minutes nor the FBI do.

Piro explained that when he finally asked Saddam about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Saddam replied that most were destroyed by U.N. inspectors (UNSCOM) and the rest were destroyed by Iraq. After their destruction, however, Saddam tricked the world into believing Iraq still had them. "That was what kept him...in power. That capability kept the Iranians away," Piro affirmed.

Yet in the first four years following the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq sought to do the opposite. It worked mightily to demonstrate that all its banned weapons had been destroyed and economic sanctions should be lifted. Baghdad was successful to a very significant extent. By March 1995, considerable pressure existed in the U.N. Security Council to reward the Iraqis for their cooperation and lift sanctions. Congressional leaders complained the Clinton administration was weak on Saddam, and the White House publicly promised to veto any attempt to end sanctions.

Yet the U.S. never had to use that veto. Although Iraq's chemical, nuclear and missile programs were thought to have been neutralized, one issue remained outstanding -- Iraq's biological program. UNSCOM began to address it in July, and as UNSCOM did so, Saddam prepared to toss the inspectors out (which he actually did three years later). In that context, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who had overseen Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, defected. The regime panicked, fearing what Kamil might tell UNSCOM. It wanted to control the flow of information, and it then acknowledged that all its proscribed programs had been much larger and more sophisticated than it had previously disclosed.

Baghdad relinquished no further proscribed material. It claimed to have unilaterally destroyed what it had just admitted once having and provided no coherent account of the destruction of that material. UNSCOM concluded that the unilateral destruction -- in violation of the U.N. resolution which called for UNSCOM to supervise that activity -- had been a shell-game to conceal the retention of some of the supposedly destroyed material.

In particular, Iraq's biological program remained a "black hole," as UNSCOM chairman, Ambassador Richard Butler, repeatedly complained. In early 1998, editors and reporters of the New York Times met with Butler, who warned that Iraq had "enough biological material like anthrax or botulin toxin to 'blow away Tel Aviv.'" Days before, President Bill Clinton had warned similarly, "Think how many can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax, and think about how it's not just that Saddam Hussein might put it on a Scud missile an anthrax head, and send it on to some city he wants to destroy. Think about all the other terrorists and other bad actors who could just parade through Baghdad and pick up their stores."

EVEN IF WE ACCEPT that Saddam tricked UNSCOM, two successive U.S. administrations, indeed, pretty much the entire world, into believing that he retained dangerous proscribed weapons when they no longer existed, this still leaves a major problem. It fails to explain the first four years after the 1991 war -- when Iraq did the exact opposite, working to convince the world that its banned weapons programs had been destroyed and nearly succeeding in doing so.

Other explanations exist. One member of UNSCOM told this author that in April 2003, shortly after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, an Iraqi biological scientist called to tell him that part of Iraq's biological program had been moved out of the country and part of it had been destroyed shortly before OIF began. Indeed, James R. Clapper Jr. headed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is now Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Director of Defense Intelligence. In October 2003, Clapper told reporters that "satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material 'unquestionably' had been moved out of Iraq," as the New York Times reported.

The Iraq Survey Group learned that Iraqi intelligence operated five biological laboratories until the start of OIF. In 2004, the Pentagon debated whether to release a cache of captured Iraqi documents. Individuals familiar with those papers say they justified the war. Then Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, however, argued against publicly releasing them, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sided with Cambone. Subsequently, a handful of those documents were leaked to a small on-line news service.

Among the leaked Iraqi papers is one detailing the production of small amounts of anthrax and another detailing the production of small amounts of mustard gas. Such quantities could be used for terrorism.

Ronald Kessler also interviewed Piro, and Kessler's latest book, The Terrorist Watch, includes three important points absent from the 60 Minutes interview. First, "Saddam was very smart -- a lot smarter than we gave him credit for in the West," Piro told Kessler. Second, "after Desert Storm [the 1991 war], Saddam considered himself to be at war with the United States," Piro explained. Finally, Saddam's foremost concern was his legacy. Before OIF began, Saddam was offered a comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam told Piro "he cared more about what people would think of him in five hundred or a thousand years than they did that day."

These observations knock down two views embraced by Middle East experts after the 1991 war that helped buttress Bill Clinton's do-nothing policy toward Iraq -- that Saddam was "stupid" and that his foremost concern was his own survival and the survival of his regime. Taken together, Piro's three observations suggest that sometime in the future, when Operation Iraqi Freedom is no longer a political football, Americans will likely learn that Saddam was indeed a major threat and that he was not idle in the 12 years between the end of the 1991 war and the start of the second war.

Laurie Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America. Her articles can be found at lauriemylroie.com.

Griffin Hospital created an award-winning work environment by honoring its commitment to open communication. Our columnist explains how

by Carmine Gallo

The research and consulting firm Great Place to Work Institute recently issued its annual list of the best companies to work for in the U.S. In the past several years, I have interviewed leaders at some of the companies on the list, including Google (GOOG), Intuit (INTU), Cisco (CSCO), Paychex (PAYX), Baptist Health South Florida, and FedEx (FDX). While benefits are important, our conversations show that employee engagement is crucial—employees want to work in an environment where they have a voice. For one example of a company that has managed to create such an environment, consider No. 49 on this year's list, Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn.

Griffin Hospital leaders tell me the secret to landing on the list for eight straight years is a policy of open communication and action with their patients, employees, and volunteers. They say their managers go beyond simply listening to actively soliciting input, and managers turn that information into tangible improvements.
Standing Up Under Pressure

In my interview with Griffin Vice-President Bill Powanda, he told me a memorable story of how the hospital's communications policy was put to the test. In November, 2001, an elderly woman was admitted to the hospital and died several days later. Ninety-four-year-old Ottilie Lundgren had become the nation's fifth victim of anthrax inhalation. Although the hospital's lab had confirmed the results through multiple tests, the FBI had yet to come to its own conclusions. Griffin CEO Patrick Charmel had called a meeting to inform the 400 day-shift employees of the situation. The FBI was adamant about delaying the announcement until after it had completed its own tests, a full six days after Lundgren had been admitted. Even then-Governor John Rowland got involved, requesting that the hospital cancel its staff meeting.

With all this pressure bearing down, Charmel and Powanda were beginning to wonder if holding the meeting was the right decision. They called a representative from the American Hospital Assn., who said that if their situation had been taking place in any other hospital, he would have also recommended that the meeting be delayed. But Griffin was different: "If you do not follow the open and honest culture you have created at Griffin, you will destroy in one day what has taken you 10 years to build." Charmel held a staff meeting as scheduled to communicate the facts of the case, the results of the tests, and how anthrax is spread.

Griffin went on to win an award from a local newspaper for its boldness and commitment to the public's right to know. Charmel's actions were "nothing short of heroic," according to the New London Day. A front-page story told readers what his colleagues already knew: Charmel had become a hero to his staff long before the anthrax crisis because he committed himself to making them all feel as if they played key roles in the hospital's success, which they most certainly do.

Griffin leaders like Charmel have set a precedent with staff and provide a model for behavior that all employees—managers, doctors, nurses, and administrators alike—strive to emulate. Every employee is considered a "caregiver"—even the security guards, parking lot valets, and chefs—and they all feel comfortable addressing Charmel directly with praise, concerns, or suggestions. If an employee believes the hospital is failing to put the patient first in any area of care, Charmel is the first to know; he makes himself as available as possible. He keeps the lines of communication open with the following practices:

A long day's walk. Charmel spends most of the working day in the hospital, but out of his office. He typically starts office work after 5 p.m. because he meets with people in their own departments all day; they do not come to him. This is the ultimate open-door policy.

A monthly orientation. Charmel welcomes new employees with a two-hour presentation every month. This orientation is mandatory for all new employees and volunteers, and Charmel does not miss it. First impressions count.

A biannual meeting for everyone. Twice a year Charmel hosts a "State of the Hospital" meeting for all employees and volunteers, where everyone hears exactly the same information as the board of directors: strategic information, market-share data, financial statistics, and plans for the future. Everything.

Regular updates. Charmel contributes to a daily newsletter, Griffin Today, which is distributed to 700 hospital workstations accessible to both employees and patients. The daily is supplemented by an electronic newsletter.

Old-fashioned correspondence. Charmel sends letters directly to the homes of employees and volunteers, about hospital, community, or medical issues as they directly affect them.

Many CEOs talk about creating a "customer-centric" organization. But the management at Griffin Hospital provides a working example of how it's done.

Carmine Gallo, a business communications coach and Emmy-Award winning former TV journalist, is the author of Fire Them Up! and 10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Business Communicators. He writes his communications column every week. 

There is life after Hamilton Township politics and former Mayor Glen Gilmore has found it 1,632 miles from his Hamilton Square home, at least for a few days.

While the former mayor is not making a career change just yet, he did accept an invitation extended in October from the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center in College Station, Texas, to share with other government officials what he learned from responding to Hamilton's anthrax scare in 2001. He is in Texas through tomorrow doing just that. 

 "I provided quite a bit of background and they asked if I'd come out here and critique a new leadership seminar for Homeland Security that they're doing," Gilmore explained yesterday in a phone call from this Texas A&M University town located about 100 miles northwest of Houston.

"I flew into Houston and drove here. It's a beautiful day. They were asking me how cold it was back home."

Called "Lessons in Leadership for America's Anthrax Crisis," the four-hour seminar for elected officials from jurisdictions with populations of 200,000 or greater will use Hurricane Katrina case studies prepared by Harvard University as examples. It was scheduled to begin this morning with a dozen officials participating. All the courses are funded by Homeland Security.

Gilmore was not paid for his participation, but he will receive reimbursement for travel and lodging.

Hamilton became the epicenter of the anthrax scare in October of 2001 with the closing of the township postal facility on Route 130 when it was discovered that three anthrax-laced letters had passed through it.

Gilmore's impatience with the government's response prompted the national press to praise him when, six days after the discovery, he ordered the postal facility closed and sent a police car to South Jersey to pick up 18,000 Cipro antibiotic pills for postal workers. More than 1,000 postal workers were treated.

Seven Hamilton-area postal workers were infected, but none died.

Time magazine called Gilmore a "man of action." To the Washington Post, he was a "high-energy suburban mayor."

To Rick Comley, director of executive programs for National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center, Gilmore was a man whose name popped up when the subject of anthrax was explored.

"He's helping us develop a case study course funded by Homeland Security and is participating in the first pilot of this course. We asked him to come down and give us the benefit of his expertise," said Comley. "The first pilot will be on Katrina, the second on anthrax, the third on the Baltimore tunnel fire and the last on the attack on the Pentagon."

Today's seminar with Gilmore was designed, Comely explained, "to find out how off the mark we are" in terms of emergency security. Mayors from Sugarland, Bryan and College Station, Texas, will be among those in attendance.

An attorney by profession, Gilmore lost his bid for re-election in November to Republican John Bencivengo amid charges of budget shortages and mismanagement. Bencivengo has a bit of anthrax experience himself. He ran a company called Eterna and sold a product called Skin Guard that was advertised as the "first line of defense" against anthrax. He has since blamed the manufacturer for false or misleading claims.

Gilmore would not say what his future employment plans were and stressed that his visit to Texas was purely "accepting an invitation."

"The lesson I learned from what happen with anthrax in Hamilton was to make sure you do everything possible to protect lives and not wait for the cavalry to come," Gilmore said, "because the cavalry may not show up and, even if they do, they might not be fit for the fight."

Contact Joyce J. Persico at jpersico@njtimes.com or at (609) 989-5662.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- Contact: Lucy Dalglish, (703) 807-2100
Reporters Committee calls for shield law after Locy held in contempt

Feb. 19, 2008

In light of the drastic contempt sanctions imposed on former USA Today reporter Toni Locy today, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press calls on Congress to quickly pass the reporter's shield bills that have been progressing through the House and Senate.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton today found Locy in contempt of court for failing to cooperate in former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill's Privacy Act suit against the government. His written order imposing the sanctions he outlined orally in court is expected to be filed in the coming week.

Locy faces escalating fines for her refusal to identify sources for her story about the federal government's investigation of Hatfill. She will be fined $500 a day for seven days, $1,000 a day for the following seven days, and $5,000 a day for the seven days after that. In all, she could accumulate more than $45,500 in fines over the 21-day period. Walton is also considering whether to order her to pay the fines herself, with no assistance from Gannett Co., owner of USA Today, or anyone else.

"Of all the federal court sanctions on reporters for refusing to reveal confidential sources over the past several years, this is perhaps the most disturbing," said Lucy A. Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee. "Toni Locy is being punished for doing what reporters are supposed to do: making sure important information gets to the public about whether the government had the investigation into a major public health threat under control. We ask the U.S. Senate to take up the Free Flow of Information Act as soon as possible," Dalglish said.

"Toni Locy faces possible financial ruin for doing her job, and doing it well," Dalglish said.

Locy was one of five reporters Hatfill subpoenaed while trying to track down anonymous government sources who had identified him as a "person of interest" in the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks. Without identifying the source of those disclosures, Walton said, Hatfill cannot proceed with his suit against the government for releasing information about the investigation.

Since being subpoenaed, Locy has maintained that she does not remember the specific sources who identified Hatfill, but rather only a catalog of those who gave her information about the investigation generally. She no longer works for USA Today.

If Congress is able to get a shield bill through both houses and signed by the president, it should help Locy avoid the contempt sanctions. A bill has already passed the House, and the Senate Judiciary Committee has passed a similar bill, although that has not gone to the Senate floor yet.

Under the House bill, H.R. 2102, Sec. (2)(a)(3), the identity of a confidential source is protected unless it meets one of four specific exceptions, relating to: prevention of acts of terrorism, (2)(a)(3)(A); prevention of imminent death or significant bodily harm, (2)(a)(3)(B); certain trade secrets, health information, or financial information, (2)(a)(3)(C); and, classified information that will cause significant harm, (2)(a)(3)(D). None of those exceptions apply to the Hatfill case.

Under the Senate bill, S. 2035, the identity of a confidential source can only be compelled in a civil lawsuit if "the testimony or document sought is essential to the resolution of the matter," Sec. (2)(a)(2)(B). A number of the sources used by journalists in the Hatfill story have already come forward, and the case can be easily resolved without Locy's information, particularly because she has testified that she cannot specifically recall which of her many sources might have given her specific information that violated the Privacy Act.

Additionally, Sec. (2)(a)(3) of the bill requires that before a journalist can be compelled to reveal a source, a federal judge must determine "that nondisclosure of the information would be contrary to the public interest, taking into account both the public interest in compelling disclosure and the public interest in gathering news and maintaining the free flow of information." Again, since Hatfill has already obtained information regarding information released by government officials, there is little or no public interest in compelling a reporter to release more information, and the public interest in allowing reporters to cover government actions in something as critically important as an anthrax attack should easily outweigh the interest in disclosure.

At least 13 news media subpoenas have been served in this case, including to reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore Sun. Most of those were withdrawn after either the government made sources available for depositions or the reporters' sources came forward. Walton today also delayed ruling on contempt sanctions again former CBS reporter James Stewart. Stewart has already identified three anonymous sources who granted him a waiver of his promise of confidentiality but refuses to identify any additional sources, saying they are no longer necessary for Hatfill to continue his case.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge held a former USA TODAY reporter in contempt of court on Tuesday for failing to identify sources who named former Army scientist Steven Hatfill as a possible suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he would begin fining Toni Locy $500 per day, escalating to $5,000 per day, until she identifies the sources.

Hatfill's lawyers asked that Locy — and not her former employer or others — be required to pay the fines.

The judge said he would consider postponing the penalty, however, to allow Locy and her lawyers to appeal the contempt ruling. Walton didn't immediately decide whether Locy would be personally responsible for payment of the fines, if imposed.

At the same time, Walton delayed a decision on whether to hold former CBS reporter James Stewart in contempt for not disclosing sources for his reporting on the matter.

Hatfill, who was publicly identified in 2002 by then-attorney general John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the attacks, has never been charged. His lawyers have argued that news reports linking him to the federal investigation irreparably damaged his reputation.

"I don't like to hold anyone in contempt," Walton said. "I fully appreciate the importance of a free press. On the other hand, the media has to be responsible."

Hatfill was not present at Tuesday's hearing. His attorney, Patrick O'Donnell, declined to comment after the session.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, described the judge's order as a "drastic action."

"Of all the federal court sanctions on reporters for refusing to reveal confidential sources over the past several years, this is perhaps the most disturbing," Dalglish said.

"Toni Locy is being punished for doing what reporters are supposed to do: making sure important information gets to the public about whether the government had the investigation into a major public health threat under control," she said.

Dalglish also urged Congress to take up proposed legislation that would shield reporters from being forced to identify confidential sources.

"Toni Locy faces possible financial ruin for doing her job and doing it well," Dalglish said.

Locy is one of five reporters Hatfill has subpoenaed to disclose government sources who identified him as a possible suspect.

Now a journalism professor at West Virginia University, Locy has argued that she spoke to a number of officials regarding the anthrax inquiry, but she cannot remember which sources provided information linking Hatfill to the government's inquiry during her reporting for USA TODAY.

Journalism professor under judges’ threat of being held in contempt
By Katie Wilson
Times West Virginian

FAIRMONT — A West Virginia University professor is providing her students with firsthand experience.

WVU journalism professor Toni Locy teaches media law. At this time, Locy is under threat of being held in contempt by a federal judge for refusing to reveal her sources.

Locy said she has covered her case in class because it’s important prospective reporters understand what they may face on the job.

“I feel I have to prepare students for the real world and unfortunately, this is the real world for reporters,” Locy said.

According to The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said Locy defied his order last August that she cooperate with Steven J. Hatfill in his lawsuit against the government. Walton indicated he would impose a fine until she divulged her sources, but that he would take a few more days to decide whether to postpone the penalty as she pursues an appeal.

Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s infectious diseases laboratory from 1997 to 1999, was publicly identified as a “person of interest” in the 2001 anthrax attacks. He is suing the Justice Department, accusing the agency of violating the federal Privacy Act by giving reporters information about the FBI’s investigation of him.

“I will order she provide the sources of information,” Walton said during a hearing, as Locy looked grim and slowly shook her head in disagreement.

“I don’t like to have to hold anyone in contempt,” the judge added, but when it comes to cases where a person says his reputation was destroyed because of stories published about him, “the media has to be responsible.”

Walton indicated that the amount of the fine would be $500 each day for the first week, $1,000 each day the second week and then increased to $5,000 each day the third week. Hatfill’s attorneys had asked Walton to initially fine Locy $1,000 a day the first week, with the amount increasing by $1,000 each subsequent week to force compliance.

Locy is a former Associated Press reporter who wrote about Hatfill while working for USA Today.

During her classes, Locy is discussing some of the issues this case raises for reporters everywhere.

“It affects all of us,” Locy said. “We’ve talked about the dangers reporters covering police will face if this decision holds up. No reporter will be able to talk about an ongoing investigation if this holds up.”

Journalists everywhere are watching Locy’s case and renewing calls for a federal shield law for reporters. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would back the right of reporters to protect the confidentiality of sources in most federal court cases, but the full Senate has not yet acted on a similar measure.

One of those groups is the Society of Professional Journalists.

“This case is on point as to why we need to stop allowing the government, especially federal prosecutors and judges, to strong arm the free press into serving its needs,” said Kevin Z. Smith, assistant professor of journalism at Fairmont State and secretary-treasurer of SPJ. “Forcing reporters to reveal anonymous sources undermines our ability to do our work,”

Smith noted he didn’t like anonymous sources and when he teaches, he notes they should only be used as a last resort, but reporters in Washington, D.C., often face the fact that it’s nearly impossible to get a story without promising anonymity. He noted a lot of thought must go into every use of an anonymous source.

“When it’s met the ethical standards and that information is deemed necessary to unveil the truth to the public, especially since we are watchdogs of government, then we are doing a great service by telling the story, even with secret sources,” he said.

E-mail Katie Wilson at kwilson@timeswv.com.

Making history is not always fun, particularly when fighting for a principle could lead to financial ruin.

Reporter Toni Locy, a Washington County native, faces a $500-a-day fine -- possibly escalating to $5,000 a day plus jail time -- since a federal judge last week found her in contempt of court for refusing to name confidential sources who talked to her about the potential connection a former Army scientist had to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

USA Today, which published the stories and employed Locy at the time, is paying her legal bills. But U.S. Judge Reggie B. Walton of Washington, D.C., another Washington County native, is considering prohibiting USA Today -- or anyone other than Locy -- from paying any contempt fines that he imposes. Locy said she plans to appeal the contempt ruling.

"Reporters don't have subpoena power; there are limits to where we can go," said Locy, 48, who now teaches journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown. "So we need insiders, people with a conscience. We need to know about abuses of power. 

"In our democracy, a robust press is crucial to making sure government is accountable," she said.

Locy has worked at The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She began her career at The Pittsburgh Press after graduating from WVU in 1981. Locy is the oldest of six children whose mother was a coal miner.

Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the Washington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Walton's contempt charge against Locy is the most egregious of a recent spate of court decisions against journalists who refuse to identify confidential sources.

"If this is allowed to stand, no one will be able to report on a federal investigation until charges have been brought," Dalglish said. "If no one could do that in the anthrax case, that would've done an incredible disservice to the American public."

Five people died after being exposed in fall 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to anthrax spores sent through the U.S. mail. News outlets and the Washington offices of two Democratic U.S. senators received anthrax-contaminated letters. The FBI continues to investigate the case. No charges have been filed.

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly identified Steven Hatfill, a former bioweapons expert for the Army, as a "person of interest" in the investigation. Hatfill has sued Ashcroft, the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI, accusing them of violating his privacy rights. The federal Privacy Act limits the disclosure of personal information by government officials.

Walton said identifying Locy's sources would help Hatfill pursue his lawsuit.

The main story in question was published in May 2003 and reported that the FBI had Hatfill under round-the-clock surveillance. Locy reported that sources said the investigation focused on Hatfill because many investigators believed he was behind the anthrax mail attacks. Those sources requested anonymity because the anthrax probe remained active.

Hatfill's Washington-based lawyer, Mark Grannis, declined to comment beyond court documents he has filed on behalf of his client. In a May 9 memorandum, Grannis addressed Locy's and other reporters' contention that they should be allowed to keep sources confidential.

Grannis argued journalists "have no right to withhold evidence that private citizens need in order to obtain justice."

In an Aug. 13 opinion, Walton wrote that allowing journalists the privilege of always protecting confidential sources -- even when they have "allegedly illegally leaked information" -- can have "the perverse effect" of preventing someone such as Hatfill from repairing "his good name, reputation and ability to earn a living."

Bob Dubill, 71, executive editor at USA Today when Locy wrote the two stories at issue, said he was "sort of taken aback by this notion of judges requiring reporters to provide sources."

Sometimes, promising sources confidentiality is the only way to ensure the public receives the full story, Dubill said.

"That's what Toni did in her coverage of the anthrax-letter attacks," Dubill said. "That was a story with intense public interest. People were scared and, in some cases, petrified. Sources in stories like that won't come forth in the future if they can't rely on confidentiality."

Dubill described Locy in her post-9/11 reporting as dedicated and tenacious in "trying to draw a picture for our readers."

That cannot be allowed to cease happening, according to Kellen Henry, 21, a WVU senior who took Locy's media law class last semester.

Henry drafted a petition asking Walton to reverse his contempt decision. She circulated it to journalists and journalism students at WVU. Within hours, it made its way to the national office of the Society of Professional Journalists in Indianapolis.

"Journalists shouldn't be used as an investigative arm of the justice system," said Henry, a staff writer for WVU's paper, The Athenaeum.

"People open the paper and they want to know the truth. If the government or legal system is leaning on us and taking our information, it's going to hinder the public from making informed decisions."

Following Henry's lead, and in response to Locy's case, the Society of Professional Journalists released a statement urging immediate passage of a shield law. That would protect journalists and their confidential sources. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a version of a federal shield law in October. A Senate vote on its version is pending.

Walton continues to review whether to hold former CBS reporter James Stewart in contempt for refusing to reveal sources during his coverage of the anthrax investigation.

In his August opinion, the judge also ordered Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman and Washington Post report Allan Lengel to reveal their sources. The Associated Press quoted attorneys involved in the case as saying those journalists had cooperated in revealing information after their sources identified themselves to Hatfill's lawyers.

Walton quashed subpoenas filed on behalf of Hatfill to obtain further information from ABC, The Washington Post, Newsweek, CBS, The Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun and The New York Times.

In the meantime, Locy said she worries about her financial situation and possible imprisonment. But she doesn't begrudge Hatfill his rights.

"He has every right to sue," Locy said. "I do not challenge that right. There's just got to be a way to make him as whole as possible without trampling on the First Amendment."

Mike Cronin can be reached at mcronin@tribweb.com or 412-320-7884. 

MONDAY, Feb. 25 (HealthDay News) -- The water you drink stays in your hair, and it may reveal details about where you've been, new research suggests.

By analyzing the makeup of water molecules from human hair, University of Utah scientists were able to roughly determine the regions where people recently lived. While the approach isn't always accurate, the researchers say it's correct about 85 percent of the time.

Although the discovery has some implications for medical research, its more immediate use might be in tracking the history of unidentified bodies and perhaps testing the alibis of criminal suspects. "The big picture is for us to provide a tool for law environment," said study author James Ehleringer, a University of Utah biology professor. "This is an attempt to really try to help."

According to Ehleringer, the researchers wondered about the potential secret history exposed by water after the anthrax attacks of 2001. "We began to ask whether microbes might record the water environment in which they were living," he said.

Water, after all, makes up a major chunk of the human body. It comes from not only the liquids that people drink but also the food they eat.

To figure out if they could detect a kind of fingerprint from water, the researchers extracted water molecules from protein in human hair. Then they broke the molecules apart and studied the concentration of heavy and light isotopes.

The study findings appear in this week's online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists found what they call an "isotopic fingerprint," a combination of the ratios of heavy and light isotopes in the hydrogen and oxygen of the water.

The fingerprints can give scientists a rough idea of where the water came from, depending on how heavy it is. This is not related to the more familiar concept of "soft" or "hard" water.

Due to variations in geography, water is heavier in some parts of the world than others, Ehleringer said. According to him, it's now possible to differentiate water that comes from different places.

The technique can't pinpoint an exact city or town, but can say whether water came from a kind of place, such as a coastal region, he said. "For instance, if you were to give me bottled water from Sacramento, California, and Denver, Colorado, I could easily tell them apart," using the technology, he said. "But I might not be able to tell apart something from Sacramento, California, versus Fresno, California. That might be too close a region."

And what about people who only drink bottled water that may come from far away? Unless they boil their potatoes and make their coffee and bottle their beer in the water, local water will still show up in their bodies, Ehleringer said.

The cost of the test is about $100, said Ehleringer, who works for a company promoting the technology.

According to the researchers, the technology could be used in medicine. Hair might indicate that someone such as a diabetic -- drinks a lot of water or could offer clues to someone's diet.

Law enforcement is already using the technology. In Utah, homicide detectives tested the hair of an unidentified murder victim and discovered that she probably moved around the Northwest in the two years before she died.

Next, the scientists are planning to figure out where she grew up by testing the water in her teeth. "I think you'll see this technology have an impact on (identifying) unidentified victims from around the country," said Todd Park, a Salt Lake County sheriff's homicide detective. "The more specific information I can get about my victim, the better the odds will be for me to find out who she is."

Comment by Rod Lurie
Posted February 25, 2008

Boy, I'll tell you, there is something really insidious going on here.

A woman named Toni Locy is being held in contempt of court because she won't reveal her sources from a story she wrote in USA Today over six years ago.

I have just finished shooting a film called Nothing but the Truth which deals with this very topic. Kate Beckinsale plays a reporter who goes to jail protecting the identity of a confidential source who reveals to her the name of a CIA agent. The prosecutor in the film cites national security as a reason to coerce Kate's character into submission. It becomes the film's central conflict.

In her article, Locy revealed that Stephen Hatfill was a prime suspect in the government investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill has sued the government for destroying his reputation. U.S. district court judge Reggie Walton, the judge in the case, is ordering Locy to reveal to him and Hatfill's attorneys who it was that gave her her information.

Judge Walton has found an unusual way to enforce the contempt citation. He wants to fine Ms. Locy on a daily basis until she talks. Its starting at $500 a day but will eventually grow to $5K a day. What's really interesting is that the judge is considering (at Hatfill's request) not allowing USA Today or Gannett to pay the fines. This is even more damaging than being sent to jail. After all, a few days out of the joint and you can go back to life as usual. The same can not be said for recovering from bankruptcy. If all this stands, Locy will be financially wiped out for having done her job and done it well.

Hatfill certainly deserves remedy for the damage done to him. But the First Amendment can not be sacrificed for his benefit... and sacrificed it will be...

Simply stated, sometimes journalists can only get their information from informants who must remain anonymous in order to protect their careers and sometimes even their lives:

Watergate: Confidential sources.
The Pentagon Papers: Confidential sources.
Enron: Confidential sources.

The examples of anonymous sources enlightening society, holding the government or corporations accountable for their behavior, goes on an on.

True, sometimes, anonymous sources, when merely stating opinions or running a smear campaign, are certainly cowards. I have no respect for those who spoke under the veil of secrecy to the New York Times in last week's attack on John McCain. A prominent first amendment attorney told me he feared the proposed Federal Shield law now before the Senate may well be shut down because of Republican anger at the New York Times article.

However, when reporters are in the business of obtaining hard facts that service the free flow of information, journalists should have a right to obtain that information without fear of personal ruin or incarceration.

The ability of the press to print their stories without the government trying to get them to betray their sources is as essential to a free press as the ink it is printed with. Otherwise, who will hold accountable those who hold power over us? For what is the nature of a government without accountability? We should all shudder at the thought.

And so should Judge Walton.

By BENNY AVNI
Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 27, 2008
The New York Sun 

UNITED NATIONS — Just as its work is wound down toward final shutdown Friday, the unit that for 17 years hunted for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction — and in the process became the most watched U.N. operation — survived a new scare yesterday, as one of its inspectors developed a rash, leading to suspicion of contamination by a remnant of a chemical or biological weapon.

The NYPD's Emergency Service Unit responded to the scene, and the FBI was also contacted, according to a police spokesman, Paul Browne. After tests were conducted on air quality in the building adjacent to the United Nations' main compound on First Avenue, where the inspector worked, "no traces of harmful substances were found," a U.N. spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said. The U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission staffer first noticed the rash in December, after handling material brought to New York from Iraq. The rash disappeared at the time, and the inspector did not even report the incident to his superiors. Yesterday, however, after wearing the same ski gloves that he had used when he contracted the initial rash, the malady returned, and the inspector asked "out of precaution" to be checked at a U.N. medical facility, according to Ms. Okabe. The incident was then reported to the U.N. security authority.

Officials at the U.N. Department of Safety and Security called the "host country authorities," Ms. Okabe said. The inspector, whose name was not released, was in fine health yesterday, she added, but his gloves were sent to a laboratory in Edgewater, Md., for further examination.

When Unmovic shuts down its operation Friday, all the material will remain in U.N. possession. It has "already been continuously decontaminated for the last year and a half," an official who asked not to be named said. Last August, however, a vial that was found at the Unmovic offices led to an evacuation of its building, as it was suspected of containing traces of a chemical weapon. The scare was one of the reasons the Security Council decided to shut down the operation.

Unmovic was established in 2000 to replace older inspection teams that, since the 1991 Gulf War, were charged with verifying that Baghdad destroyed its previously documented arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, as well as all of its long-range missiles. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency handled Iraq's nuclear weapons disarmament.

Although the head of Unmovic just prior to the March 2003 invasion, Hans Blix, declared that the inspectors found "no smoking gun," none of his reports to the Security Council made a conclusive statement saying Saddam's Iraq had been completely disarmed. Since the war, the inspections team, financed by Iraq, mostly worked on archiving the mountains of material collected during its years of work. Last summer, the Security Council decided to dissolve the team by the end of February.

By yesterday, only three Unmovic workers remained on staff, attempting to complete all the preparations to archive documents, vials, and other materials that had been brought over from Iraq.