投稿者 佐藤雅彦 日時 2001 年 12 月 03 日 17:29:17:
(回答先: ＦＢＩ 炭疽菌を流出元を陸軍感染症研究施設と判断 権力内部捜査へ［日刊ゲンダイ＆ＮＹタイムズ］ 投稿者 あっしら 日時 2001 年 12 月 03 日 15:56:05)
FBIが突き止めた炭疽菌騒動の発信源：米国陸軍感染症医学研究所（USAMRIID）
●「あっしら」さんが先ほど下記の情報を紹介して下さいました――
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http://asyura.com/sora/war5/msg/271.html
戦争・国際情勢５ 投稿NO:271 2001/12/03 15:56:05
投稿者: あっしら
e-mail:
題 名: ＦＢＩ 炭疽菌を流出元を陸軍感染症研究施設と判断 権力内部捜査へ［日刊ゲンダイ＆ＮＹタイムズ］
バカの一つ覚えで、“護憲派”ＦＢＩガンバレ！です。
炭疽菌テロの菌が米軍研究施設から流出したものというのは、大きな捜査の前進だと考えます。
炭疽菌テロを突破口に９．１１事件の真相にまで到達して欲しい。
ＦＢＩさん、ＣＩＡの捜査も忘れずにね。
誰の力でも、今の世界的な暴虐の動きが止めて欲しい。
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ＦＢＩ 炭疽菌テロで米軍関係者の捜査開始 ［日刊ゲンダイ］
菌は陸軍施設から流出
米国を震撼させている炭疽菌事件で、連邦捜査局（ＦＢＩ）は操作対象を軍、政府研究機関などの「インサイダー（内部関係者）」に広げ、事情聴取を始めた。けさ（現地時間２日）のニューヨーク多無図が報じた。
それによると、米国内でバラまかれた毒素の強い「エームズ株」の菌は、メリーランド州にある陸軍の感染症研究施設から流出。「ワクチン開発など研究目的で国内の施設１０から二十数ヶ所に渡されたもの」とされる。ＦＢＩは、ワシントンやニューヨークの郵便物から同種の炭疽菌が検出されていることから国内単独半切に傾き、犯人像を「炭疽菌を入手できて、取り扱いなどの知識に精通した人物」としている。
［原文を入手しようとしましたが一日遅れで入手困難。記事の所在のみ確認］
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Date: December 2, 2001
Anthrax Inquiry Looks at U.S. Labs
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER
The F.B.I. has expanded its investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks to include the laboratories of the government and its contractors as a possible source of the disease.
Source: The New York Times
Section: National Go to Article
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● 上記のニューヨーク・タイムズ記事を見付けましたので、下記に
同記事および最新の続報の原文を紹介しておきます。
●なお、ニューヨーク・タイムズ（ http://www.nytimes.com/ ）は、
無料のユーザ登録をすれば、だれでも記事を見ることができます。
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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/02/national/02POWD.html
December 2, 2001
THE INVESTIGATION
Anthrax Inquiry Looks at U.S. Labs
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER
The F.B.I. has expanded its investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks to include the laboratories of the government and its contractors as a possible source of the anthrax itself or the knowledge to make it, scientists and law enforcement officials say.
While theories about the attacker have focused mainly on domestic loners and foreign states or terrorists, law enforcement officials are now also examining the possibility that the criminal may be a knowledgeable insider.
Asked if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating American military and nonmilitary laboratories that have had the powdery anthrax strain used in the attacks and individuals associated with such centers, a law enforcement official replied, "Certainly." The official said, "We are aggressively investigating every possible lead and every possible avenue," adding it was logical.
Few details of the insider investigation are known. But federal agents are already interrogating people in the military establishment that replaced the old program for making biological weapons. The facilities for that effort, in western Maryland, are major repositories of the Ames strain of anthrax, the particularly virulent form that federal officials have identified as the type used in the attacks that killed five people.
Col. Arthur M. Friedlander, the senior research scientist at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., said in an interview on Friday that officials there were cooperating with federal investigators.
"They've asked us about personnel who had access," he said, speaking reluctantly.
"They didn't talk to me about my personal experience," said Colonel Friedlander, a physician and leading anthrax expert. "They asked me about other personnel."
He went on to dismiss the insider idea as improbable. Whoever made the killer anthrax, he said, "clearly knew what they were doing."
"But to make the leap that this came out of a government lab is somewhat large," he added.
He emphasized that no one in his organization, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a leader in developing germ defenses, even knew how to make dry anthrax, as was found in the letters used in the attacks. Instead, he said, scientists there used wet anthrax, which is far easier to make. It is used in developing vaccines and testing their effectiveness.
"We haven't had an offensive program for a long time," Colonel Friedlander said. Nobody at the Army's laboratory, he added, "has that kind of expertise."
A dozen or two American laboratories are said to have the Ames strain, though no one knows for sure because researchers over the decades have informally shared pathogens like anthrax. Military laboratories like the one at Fort Detrick, as well as military contractors, are central to the Ames network, as they have often pioneered the nation's research on vaccines and other defenses against germ weapons.
The United States began its military program to make germ weapons during World War II and over the decades developed many ways to spread many diseases. A top agent was anthrax, a gallon of which was strong enough to kill eight billion people. President Richard M. Nixon, after renouncing germ weapons in 1969, championed a global treaty that, starting in 1975, banned such arms.
Since the start of the anthrax attacks, federal officials, scientists and amateur sleuths have scrambled to identify the source. Some see the attacker as home-grown ・perhaps a disaffected scientist or a militia group ・while others discern a conspiracy by a state like Iraq or a foreign terrorist group. In the United States, there are probably scores of laboratories and contractors and hundreds of people who have access to essential anthrax ingredients and recipes.
The insider avenue of inquiry is consistent with the official profile of the suspect, released on Nov. 9 by the F.B.I. The profile describes a man with a strong interest in science who is comfortable working with hazardous material and has "access to a source of anthrax and possesses knowledge and expertise to refine it."
Separately, a private expert in biological weapons, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, has recently published a paper contending that a government insider, or someone in contact with an insider, is behind the attacks.
Though not an expert on criminal profiling, Dr. Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York, has testified on biological weapons before Congress, advised Bill Clinton when he was president and made addresses to international arms control meetings, including one a few days ago in Geneva.
Law enforcement officials said Dr. Rosenberg's assertion might turn out to be well founded, though they emphasized that the investigation was still broadly based. One official close to the federal investigation called the Rosenberg theory "the most likely hypothesis."
Referring to her paper, the official said, "I might not have put it so strongly, but it's definitely reasonable."
Other analysts, including some scientists and experts in germ weapons, expressed more skepticism of the theory that it had to be an insider, contending that the skills and knowledge needed to produce the type of anthrax in this attack were widely available.
The paper laying out Dr. Rosenberg's thesis was distributed on Thursday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an arms control group. Dr. Rosenberg, who is chairwoman of an arms control panel at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, has argued repeatedly that states, not individuals, tend to have the wherewithal to make advanced biological weapons. International treaties that prohibit that work, she believes, are thus critical.
Dr. Rosenberg contends that the Ames strain probably did not originate in 1980 or 1981, as is often asserted, but arose decades earlier and was used in the secret American program to make biological weapons.
She agrees with a conclusion, reached by some experts knowledgeable about the investigation, that the anthrax powder distributed in the attacks by letter was treated in a sophisticated manner so it floated easily, as was done in the old American offensive weapons program, unlike Colonel Friedlander's defensive program, which uses the wet anthrax.
"All the available information," she said, "is consistent with a U.S. government lab as the source, either of the anthrax itself or of the recipe for the U.S. weaponization process." Dr. Rosenberg contended that the anthrax used in the attacks either originated in the weapons program itself or was made by someone who had learned the recipe.
The killer, Dr. Rosenberg concludes, is "an American microbiologist who had, or once had, access to weaponized anthrax in a U.S. government lab, or had been taught by a U.S. defense expert how to make it. Perhaps he had a vial or two in his basement as a keepsake."
The paper, "A Compilation of Evidence and Comments on the Source of the Mailed Anthrax," dated Nov. 29, is based on interviews with federal and private experts, published reports and scientific articles.
Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University who has followed the anthrax case and has read the Rosenberg paper, said he found it provocative but unconvincing.
"This is one extreme in the theorizing," Dr. Ebright said. "There are elements that are reasonable, but elements that are not. I'm confident that she started with the insider conclusion and then selected the facts." Even so, he said, American foes seem likely to seize on the paper and amplify the provocative thesis.
"Every state that's hostile to the United States is going to pick up on this," Dr. Ebright said. "They'll say it was an orchestrated government attack, which I don't believe for a second. But you can see people believing it."
Dr. Rosenberg's theory is getting attention in Europe, where the environmental group Greenpeace Germany is citing it as credible.
An American official sympathetic to her thesis said the Ames strain might have come from a place other than a military laboratory.
"There are other government and contractor facilities that do classified work with access to dangerous strains," the official said. "But it's highly likely that the material in the anthrax letters came from a person or persons who really had great expertise. We haven't seen any other artifacts that point us elsewhere."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/national/03POWD.html
December 3, 2001
THE SPORES
Terror Anthrax Linked to Type Made by U.S.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The dry powder used in the anthrax attacks is virtually indistinguishable in critical technical respects from that produced by the United States military before it shut down its biowarfare program, according to federal scientists and a report prepared for a military contractor.
The preliminary analysis of the powder shows that it has the same extraordinarily high concentration of deadly spores as the anthrax produced in the American weapons program. While it is still possible that the anthrax could have a foreign source, the concentration is higher than any stock publicly known to be produced by other governments.
The similarity to the levels achieved by the United States military lends support to the idea that someone with ties to the old program may be behind the attacks that have killed five people. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently expanded its investigation of anthrax suspects to include government and contractor laboratories as a possible source of the deadly powder itself, or of knowledge of how to make it.
Its high concentration is surprising, weapon experts said, and far beyond what military analysts once judged as the likely abilities of terrorists. Still, experts caution that the emerging evidence is tentative and that it is too early to rule out other possible suspects, be they domestic lone wolves or hostile foreign states like Iraq.
A yardstick for measuring the quality of anthrax emerged almost three years ago when William C. Patrick III, a longtime federal consultant and one of the nation's top experts on biological weapons, wrote a report assessing the possible risks if terrorists were to send anthrax through the mail. Based on the difficulty of developing advanced anthrax, he predicted that the terrorist germs would be one-twentieth as concentrated as what the government developed and what has recently turned letters into munitions.
"The quality of the spores is very good," said a federal science adviser who shared the Patrick report with The New York Times. "This is very high-quality stuff" ・equal, he said, in concentration to that produced by the United States military before it abandoned germ weapons.
The high quality, the adviser said, lends credence to the idea that someone with links to military laboratories or their contractors might be behind the attacks. "It's frightening to think that one of our own scientists could have done something like this," he said. "But it's definitely possible."
He said the anthrax sent to the Senate contained as many as one trillion spores per gram, a figure confirmed by an administration official.
A gram is just one-twenty-eighth of an ounce. Yet in comprising up to one trillion spores, a gram of anthrax powder has vast potential to kill. If a lethal dose is estimated conservatively at 10,000 microscopic spores, then a gram in theory could cause about 100 million deaths.
The letter sent to Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, is said to have held two grams of anthrax ・enough, in other words, to make about 200 million lethal doses, assuming it could be distributed to victims with perfect efficiency.
Analysis of the Daschle powder has been hampered by the small amount recovered after an aide opened the letter, and by technical missteps as the investigation got under way, making some conclusions iffy. That is why investigators are taking great care in opening the anthrax-contaminated letter sent to Patrick J. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The aim is to scrutinize the evidence as closely as possible.
Spore concentration is just one factor experts will examine in the Leahy letter, and their findings could significantly alter their picture of the powder. Other factors that reflect the quality of anthrax production include whether the powder has been ground to a size that easily lodges in the lungs and whether it has been treated to make it static free and free-floating. Investigators will look for antistatic additives that might be a possible hallmark of a particular government's weapons program.
Mr. Patrick, in his risk assessment, sketched out both what the American military achieved and what a terrorist might do. His 28- page report, dated February 1999, was written for a federal contractor advising the government on how to handle the growing number of anthrax hoaxes and what to expect if real anthrax were to be sent through the mail.
"When these hoaxes first came up, we assumed none of the bad guys" could achieve high-grade anthrax, said a contractor official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
It is unknown publicly exactly how makers of anthrax weapons achieve high spore concentrations, but the black art is said to involve precise drying, sifting, milling and removal of impurities.
In his assessment, Mr. Patrick drew on personal knowledge acquired while working in the nation's offensive biological weapons program from 1951 to 1969, when it was dismantled, at which time he was chief of the division of product development. He won five patents with his colleagues for ways to make biological weapons.
His 1999 report focused on what kinds of contamination terrorist anthrax would cause when a letter was opened and what the requirements for decontamination were.
Mr. Patrick postulated that the concentration of anthrax would be 50 billion spores per gram. "This assumes a dried powder of moderate ability to generate into an aerosol when the envelope is opened," he wrote.
He predicted that an envelope would hold 2.5 grams of anthrax ・an amount strikingly close to what is thought to have been mailed to Senator Daschle.
In his report, Mr. Patrick said the American program had achieved a concentration of one trillion spores per gram ・what scientists today say is near the theoretical limit of how many of the microscopic spheres can be packed into a tiny space.
Today, no terrorist or scientific maverick is known to have published anything that comes close to describing how to make concentrated anthrax powders. Timothy W. Tobiason, a habitu・of gun shows who sells a self-published cookbook on how to make germ weapons, including "mail delivered" anthrax, sketches out only the most rudimentary steps.
Experts judge Mr. Tobiason's recipes as flawed in spots and at best capable of producing only low-quality anthrax. His book deals mostly with the production of wet anthrax, though it does suggest a way to grind clusters of dried anthrax into microscopic pieces, which can settle into the lungs.
It is unclear if any foreign nation has achieved high anthrax concentrations. The United States suspects that more than a dozen countries are clandestinely studying biological weapons, with anthrax among the top agents.
Ken Alibek, a former top official in the Soviet germ weapons program who is now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas, Va., said that it was routinely possible to create dry anthrax that contained 100 billion spores per gram and that, with some effort, 500 billion was possible.
"The infectious dose," Dr. Alibek said, "can be quite large."
Still, the 500 billion figure is half the concentration that the American government and whoever sent the letters are said to have achieved.
"I don't think they're manufacturing this in caves," Dr. Alibek said of the terror anthrax. "It's coming from another source."
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