Is a U.S. bioweapons scientist behind last falls anthrax attacks?
WASHINGTON — When Arthur O. Anderson, chief of clinical pathology at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), saw the anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., last October, he was amazed. “There was nothing there except spores,” he told Salon. “Normally, if you take a crude preparation of anthrax spores, you see parts of degenerated bacteria. But this stuff was highly refined.” Another former Army lab scientist characterized the sample as “very, very good.” “Only a very small group of people could have made this,” said David Franz, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and biodefense scientist at USAMRIID, who now works for the Southern Research Institute, a defense contractor. “If you look at the sample from the standpoint of biology, it tells me this person [who made the anthrax] was very good at what they do. And this wasn’t the first batch they’ve made. They’ve done this for years. The concentration was a trillion spores [on anthrax] per gram
