On Russia Today, former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts said there is “a concerted effort to nail him–to shut Assange up… If the legal attempt fails, he’ll simply be assassinated by a CIA assassination team. It’s common practice for the CIA to do that.”
This video is from Russia Today, broadcast February 25, 2011.
Source: Raw Story
Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.
U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States – studies that often involved making healthy people sick.
An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.
Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.
These studies were worse in at least one respect – they violated the concept of “first do no harm,” a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.
“When you give somebody a disease – even by the standards of their time – you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.
Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.
Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society – people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.
“There was definitely a sense – that we don’t have today – that sacrifice for the nation was important,” said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.
The AP review of past research found:
-A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine.
Some of the men weren’t able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were “senile and debilitated.” Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.
-In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes.
A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.
-Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn’t explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task.
-A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.
-For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.
-Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper.
The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn’t comparable to how men normally got infected – by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.
Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.
Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government’s Dr. Joseph Goldberger – today remembered as a public health hero – recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)
But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, “devitalized men” by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.
Newspapers wrote about Stanley’s experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.
“Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth – an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done … by a surgeon with a scalpel,” began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.
Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.
It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the “Nuremberg Code,” a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities – not to American medicine.
The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.
But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public’s attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.
The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.
The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need – the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital’s board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient’s written consent.
At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.
Those two studies – along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 – proved to be a “holy trinity” that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.
By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.
Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward “Yusef” Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.
“I said ‘Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this … off me!’” Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.
The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.
As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.
It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.
Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. “It’s not that we’re out infecting anybody with things,” Caplan said.
Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.
One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT’s use in the developing world.
The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.
Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it’s often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.
These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.
In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.
The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.
“It was unusually unethical, even at the time,” said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.
“When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today,” said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: In the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM’s sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.
So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.
The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.
Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. “They face a really tough challenge,” Caplan said.
Source: Associated Press
The Department of Homeland Security plans to begin testing a DNA analyzer that’s small enough to be easily portable and fast enough to return results in less than an hour.
The analyzer, about the size of a laser printer, initially will be used to determine kinship among refugees and asylum seekers. It also could help establish whether foreigners giving children up for adoption are their parents or other relatives, and help combat child smuggling and human trafficking, said Christopher Miles, biometrics program manager in the DHS Office of Science and Technology.
Only DNA can positively determine family relationships, Miles said Wednesday during a conference on biometrics and national security.
Eventually, the analyzer also could be used to positively identify criminals, illegal immigrants, missing persons and mass casualty victims, he said.
The machine, known as a rapid DNA screener, is expected to cut days or weeks and hundreds of dollars off the per-use cost of DNA analysis.
Using a process called digital microfluidics, the analyzer processes a DNA sample and provides results in less than an hour for under $100 per sample, Miles said. By comparison, it takes days or weeks and about $500 per sample to get results when DNA is tested in a laboratory, he said.
“We’re not about advancing the technology so much as integrating and automating it into a fieldable device,” he said.
Boston-based NetBio, which developed the rapid DNA analyzer for DHS, described it as a “game-changing technology” platform that “consists of instruments, biochips and analytical software.” It eliminates the need for a trained technician and special operating site.
The analyzer was designed for Homeland Security, the military, intelligence and police agencies, the company says on its website.
As with other DNA tests, the process begins with a sample collected on a swab, typically from inside the mouth. The sample is placed in a disposable cartridge, and the analyzer does the rest of the work.
“It’s the same process that occurs in the lab today,” Miles said. But “it will drastically make the system more efficient.”
DHS’ Citizen and Immigration Services bureau is first in line to begin testing the new equipment this summer. A likely priority is testing people who claim to be family members in refugee camps overseas, Miles said.
That’s important because when a refugee is allowed to come to the United States, parents, children and some siblings also could be eligible to enter. Citizen and Immigration Services wants to make sure those who claim to be relatives actually are, he said.
Similarly, the agency wants to make sure children are who their guardians claim them to be. Usually, that sort of identity check might be done with fingerprints, but fingerprints of small children can be unreliable, Miles said.
On an average day, 400 refugees apply to enter the United States, 40 persons are granted asylum and 100 foreign-born children are adopted, according to DHS.
Although DNA analysis speeds identification of people, it raises concerns about privacy and civil liberties, Miles conceded. “We have privacy officers and civil rights and civil liberties officers who are working through all of those questions.”
As a precaution to protect privacy, the analyzer avoids sampling DNA that could identify genetic problems, Miles said. For years, privacy advocates have worried that DNA test results could be used to deny people employment, insurance or entry to the country.
But even the analysis DHS officials want to do could be problematic. DNA test results might reveal that a child is not related to the man thought to be his father. “Is it our role to tell them that?” Miles asked. In some societies, revealing such information could be dangerous to the child and its mother, he said.
Policy hasn’t developed as fast as technology when it comes to DNA analysis, Jim Harper, director of information studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Nextgov. “There are still a lot of unknowns. I’m not certain we know what all is being gathered when we examine DNA.” So far, there has been no comprehensive public discussion of what is being gathered, and how it should or shouldn’t be used has not occurred, he said.
The machines are expected to cost about $275,000 apiece, Miles said. “That sounds like a lot of money, but compare that to a laboratory full of equipment that would cost millions of dollars and a building that would cost tens of millions of dollars.”
After the rapid analyzers are in production, he added, the cost is likely to come down.
Gen. David Petraeus said Thursday that the Pentagon is preparing to investigate the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan for allegations that he ordered a ordered a “psychological operations” team in Afghanistan to manipulate visiting members of Congress into providing more troops and funding for the war there.
The probe comes after Rolling Stone magazine reported late Wednesday that Lt. Gen. William Caldwell “repeatedly pressured” a group of soldiers working in “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul to use their techniques on visiting dignitaries. The story was written by Michael Hastings, the reporter whose revealing profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal precipitated the general’s resignation last June.
Petraeus will appoint an officer to look into the facts in the story, said a top Pentagon spokesman, Marine Col. Dave Lapan, but he didn’t have any additional information about who will investigate or how long the probe will take.
Among the intended targets of the “psy-ops” tactics, the magazine reported, were Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at least five high-profile senators – John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.). The team was also asked to use psy-ops on Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan and influential think tankers.
“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” Lt. Col. Michael Holmes told the magazine. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.” Holmes said he has since been retaliated against with an Army investigation.
Holmes said Caldwell wanted the information operations unit to research visiting dignitaries and get a sense of their likes, dislikes and “hot-button issues.” In one e-mail message, Caldwell’s staff asked for assistance in crafting his presentations to visiting VIPs and how to “refine our messaging.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone, a spokesman for Caldwell said the general “categorically denies the assertion that the command used an Information Operations Cell to influence Distinguished Visitors.”
Lapan said that in a military command, “information operations officers” aren’t subject to any special firewalls when it comes to normal staff duties, so it might not necessarily be improper on its face for a commander to ask his IO team for research or other duties outside their formal job description. But Lapan would not address other specifics of the Caldwell case, saying that officials will wait until the results of Petraeus’s investigation.
Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Hastings’ only agenda is honesty. “Michael Hastings has the agenda of a good journalist – get out the news and information that’s important. Sometimes that news and information is something the Pentagon or the Defense Department would rather not get out, but he has an agenda in service of the truth.”
Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense, said Caldwell is a “wonderful human being” and would “not do anything to hurt the United States of America in any way.”
Source: Politico
The Obama administration is appealing the first — and likely only — lawsuit resulting in a ruling against the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless-surveillance program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.
A San Francisco federal judge in December awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their attorneys $2.5 million for the costs of litigating the case for more than four years.
Although U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker had called it “unlawful surveillance,” he went soft on the government because the authorities, the judge said, believed they were protecting the country in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
Walker did not declare the administration’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program unconstitutional, and he declined to issue punitive damages to punish the government for wiretapping in the country without warrants. Instead, the judge granted the two spied-upon lawyers for the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation charity $100 a day for each of the 204 days their telephone calls were wiretapped beginning in February 2004, an amount they sought. In addition, they requested about $200,000 each in punitive damages, and the same amount to be awarded to the charity — all of which was denied.
The government lodged what is known as a notice of appeal (.pdf) with the judge’s court late Friday. The government has about three months to file its opening brief with the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“That’s when we’ll know for sure what they are challenging,” Jon Eisenberg, counsel for the Al-Haramain attorneys, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Under Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, which The New York Times disclosed in December 2005, the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans’ telephone calls without warrants if the government believed the person on the other end was overseas and associated with terrorism. Congress, with the vote of then-Sen. Barack Obama, subsequently authorized such warrantless spying in the summer of 2008.
As part of that program, the NSA in 2004 was intercepting the telephone communications of Al-Haramain lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, who worked for an Oregon branch of the charity. The plaintiffs learned of the eavesdropping after the government mistakenly sent them records.
Both the Bush and the Obama administrations declared those records state secrets, so the documents were removed from the case. Walker allowed the case to proceed, based on other evidence of eavesdropping.
Source: Wired
An undercover TSA agent was able to get through security at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport with a handgun during testing of the enhanced-imaging body scanners, according to a high-ranking, inside source at the Transportation Security Administration.
The source said the undercover agent carried a pistol in her undergarments when she put the body scanners to the test. The officer successfully made it through the airport’s body scanners every time she tried, the source said.
“In this case, where they had a test, and it was just a dismal failure as I’m told,” said Larry Wansley, former head of security at American Airlines. “As I’ve heard (it), you got a problem, especially with a fire arm.”
Wansley said covert testing by the TSA is commonplace — although failing should be rare.
The TSA insider who blew the whistle on the test also said that none of the TSA agents who failed to spot the gun on the scanned image were disciplined. The source said the agents continue to work the body scanners today.
Wansley said that is a problem.
“This was only a test, but it’s critically important that you do something, because if that person failed in the real environment, then you have a problem,” he said.
The TSA did not deny that the tests took place or the what the results were.
The agency would only provide the following statement:
“Our security officers are one of the most heavily tested federal workforces in the nation. We regularly test our officers in a variety of ways to ensure the effectiveness of our technology, security measures and the overall layered system. For security reasons, we do not publicize or comment on the results of covert tests, however advanced imaging technology is an effective tool to detect both metallic and nonmetallic items hidden on passengers.”
TSA agents who spoke to a reporter agreed that the body-imaging scanners are effective — but only if the officers monitoring them are paying attention.
The US army is planning to field “rubber bullets” for machine guns. Military officials claim the ammunition will allow them to more effectively quell violent protests without loss of life, but human rights campaigners are alarmed by the new weapon.
The final design for the XM1044 round has not been selected, according to an order placed on the Federal Business Opportunities website last month, but the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has been working on a ring aerofoil projectile for some years. The round is a hollow plastic cylinder 40 millimetres across, looking something like a short toilet-paper roll. In flight its shape generates lift, giving it a longer range.
The army’s existing crowd-control rounds are single shots fired from handheld grenade launchers with a range of about 50 metres — the XM1044 would double this range. It would be supplied in belts for the Mk19 grenade launcher, a truck-mounted weapon that can fire almost six rounds per second. The Mk19 has been exported to some 30 countries, including Egypt.
“The US army has a requirement for a rapid-fire non-lethal capability,” says Ken Schulters, project manager for close combat systems at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. “All currently fielded non-lethal ammunition is single shot.”
Read more at: New Scientist
Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland over fears he could have been arrested on torture charges.
Mr Bush was due to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish charity gala in Geneva on February 12.
But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the country.
Criminal complaints against Mr Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials said.
Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against him in the Swiss city tomorrow for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay.
Left-wing groups have also called for a protest on the day of his visit, leading organisers at Keren Hayesod’s annual dinner to cancel Mr Bush’s participation on security grounds.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said the cancellation was linked to growing moves told him accountable for the use of torture, including waterboarding.
He had admitted in his memoirs and TV interviews to ordering the use of the interrogation technique which simulates drowning.
Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, said: ‘He’s avoiding the handcuffs.’
The action in Switzerland showed Mr Bush had reason to fear legal complaints against him if he travelled to countries that have ratified an international treaty banning torture, he said.
Mr Brody is a U.S.-trained lawyer who specialises in pursuing war crimes, including Chile’s late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad’s ousted president Hissene Habre.
Habre has been charged by Belgium with crimes against humanity and torture and is currently exiled in Senegal.
He said: ‘President Bush has admitted ordering waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law.
‘Under the Convention on Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush.’
Swiss judicial officials have said that the former president would still enjoy a certain diplomatic immunity as a former head of state.
Dominique Baettig, a member of the Swiss parliament from the People’s Party, wrote to the Swiss federal government last week calling for his arrest if he came to the neutral country.
In his ‘Decision Points’ memoirs, Mr Bush strongly defended the use of waterboarding as key to preventing a repeat of the September 11 attacks on the U.S.
Most human rights experts consider the practice a form of torture, banned by the Convention on Torture.
Switzerland and the U.S. are among 147 countries that have ratified the 1987 treaty.
Source: Daily Mail
Using the available scientific evidence “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion” about the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks which killed five people, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings come two and a half years after the FBI said Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins was allegedly behind the anthrax mailings, and the spores could be genetically traced to a flask labeled RMR-1029 in his lab.
The scientific panel said the anthrax used in mailings to news organizations and members of Congress was the Ames strain Bacillus anthracis, and spores from those letters shared “a number of genetic similarities” with spores in Ivins’ flask. But the findings say the FBI did not fully explore other possible explanations for those similarities.
Ivins knew he was under suspicion by the FBI and committed suicide in July 2008 before any charges were filed against him. Ivins was involved in anthrax vaccine research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins, said that since August 2008, the Justice Department has maintained it had a “smoking gun” in the case against Ivins, citing the flask.
“Their smoking gun just turned into smoke and mirrors,” Kemp said of the report. “They said they had a smoking gun that would have convicted him (Ivins) in court and this report shows they didn’t.”
Kemp later added: “Over 200 people had access to the anthrax that came out of that flask.”
In response to the report, the FBI said, while the scientific investigation could not pinpoint the source of the anthrax, it helped its agents and the Justice Department to focus resources and conclude that Ivins was behind the attacks.
“Ultimately, the late Dr. Bruce Ivins was determined to be the perpetrator of the deadly mailings. The FBI and Department of Justice were preparing for prosecution at the time of Dr. Ivin’s death,” the FBI said.
Ivins maintained his innocence up until his death, Kemp said, adding that Tuesday’s report “just casts doubts” on the FBI’s conclusion that his former client was responsible.
The FBI praised the report for highlighting the value of what the FBI called “microbial forensics,” which it said “proved significant” in solving the case.
“Although there have been great strides in forensic science over the years, rarely does science alone solve an investigation. The scientific findings in this case provided investigators with valuable investigative leads that led to the identification of the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks,” the FBI said.
Throughout the anthrax probe, investigators grappled with questions about how much experience the perpetrator would have needed to make the anthrax and whether the material was “weaponized” with a silicon dispersant to allow it to float through the air, thus making it more likely the deadly spores would be inhaled.
The National Academy of Sciences panel said it found “no scientific basis on which to accurately estimate the amount of time or the specific skill set needed to prepare the spore material contained in the letters.” The panel said the time required to make the anthrax could range from two to three days to several months depending on the methods used to make the anthrax.
The group said it found no evidence the perpetrator intentionally added silicon-based dispersants to increase the flow of spores in the air. The panel said silicon was not detected on the outside of the spores which would be necessary as a dispersant. Silicon was found only inside the spores.
The FBI conducted a security review of the academy’s draft report in October 2010. The FBI subsequently asked to provide the panel some additional information. That material included an analysis of environmental samples taken from “an undisclosed overseas site at which a terrorist group’s anthrax program was allegedly located.” Investigators looked at the overseas site as part of the anthrax letters investigation. The Academy of Sciences report said samples from the site had inconsistent evidence of Ames strain B anthracis and further review was recommended.
The FBI also told the panel an analysis was done on human remains identified as belonging to 9/11 hijackers from United flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. One test came up positive for anthrax but all other results were negative. Remains from the other 9/11 flights were not tested for anthrax.
The National Academy of Sciences report offers no opinion on Ivins’ guilt or innocence. It looks only at the scientific underpinnings of the FBI’s investigation. The scientists also did not have access to classified information.
The FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an independent review of the science used in its investigation. That review began in 2009. The FBI’s investigation of the anthrax attacks was closed in February 2010 and some critics have said the bureau should have delayed that move until the release of the National Academy of Sciences report.
Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey who had criticized the FBI investigation, said he’s re-introducing legislation calling for a 9/11 style commission to look into the anthrax letter attacks.
“It would take a credulous person to believe the circumstantial evidence that the FBI used to draw its conclusions with such certainty,” Holt said in a press release. “The FBI has not proiven to me that this is an open and shut case.”
The anthrax letters were mailed from New Jersey, the state Holt represents.
Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said the report “shows that the science is not necessarily a slam dunk.” Grassley called for an independent review of the FBI’s investigation.
At one time the FBI used Ivins as one of its scientific consultants in the anthrax investigation. After clues led investigators to focus on Ivins, the FBI performed surveillance on him, executed search warrants and studied lab records showing he had spent late hours alone in his lab prior to the time the anthrax letters were mailed. After his death, Justice Department and FBI officials released numerous documents from the investigation and said they believed Ivins bore sole responsibility for the attacks.
The anthrax-laced letters were mailed in fall 2001 — shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks — to then NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, the New York Post, Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle, who was the Senate Majority Leader at the time.
Five people died from inhalation anthrax which officials say was caused by contaminated mail. Two of those people were Washington area postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. The other victims were Bob Stevens, a photo editor at American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida; Kathy Nguyen, a New York City hospital worker; and Ottilie Lundgren, an Oxford, Connecticut, widow. Seventeen other people became sick from either inhaling anthrax or skin exposure.
Source: CNN
Prison guards could soon stop fights with a harmless tool that shoots a laser-like beam, video game-style, down into a room where trouble is brewing. The Assault Intervention Device (AID), funded by the National Institute of Justice, is still large and unrefined but will soon be installed for trial in at least one prison, the Pitchess Detention Center in Los Angeles County.
The AID directs an energy beam, which is in the invisible millimeter wavelength, that penetrates just deep enough beneath the skin to make the target’s pain receptors shout. The sensation is a burn like touching a hot stove or an iron. It only lasts up to 3 seconds – the AID controls automatically shut the beam off to prevent shooting for longer without resetting the trigger finger. The beam can hit a target about 100 feet away, and is about as wide as a CD.
According to Raytheon, the device’s manufacturers, it causes no actual damage to nerves or skin. This video shows the sharp reflex caused by an AID hit, and the unscathed hit receivers.
Watch The AID in action:
If you watched, you probably also noticed how big and clunky that device is. Indeed, it stands at seven and a half feet tall and is controlled by joysticks. The shooter aims using a computer screen linked to the device. Seems like it would be an easy transition from Xbox user to AID shooter.
Though it’s better than the current options, batons or pepper spray, Cmdr. Bob Osborne of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department tells TechNewsDaily that its efficacy still needs to be proven in real assault situations before anyone should bother making it smaller and easier to use. I wonder, if it could eventually become hand held, would this compete with Tasers?
Source: Discovery.com
