03/09/10 – Meryl Nass – The Scott Horton Show

All right, so our next guest on the show today is Dr. Meryl Nass.
Her websites are anthraxvaccine.org and anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com and she knew, I don't know how well, Bruce Ivins, the dead but accused anthrax attacker, and she's written a heck of a lot of great stuff criticizing the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Nass.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
I'm doing fine.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Okay, so first of all, can you just teach us the basics about anthrax?
It's a spore, which means it ain't a virus and it ain't a bacteria.
What's a spore?
Well, actually, most spores are from fungi, but in this case, it is a bacterium, an odd bacteria that makes spores.
Tetanus, by the way, is another one, or the bacteria Clostridium tetani.
So the bacteria, when it is in a, when it leaves your body or when a person or animal dies that has anthrax and it is no longer in a positive environment, the bacteria forms a spore.
And in the case of anthrax, that spore can last hundreds of years, potentially.
And it is impervious to changes of temperature and most changes of pressure.
And in nature, it lives in the soil.
So it actually does live, but it lives for that long?
And is it in suspended animation, basically?
It's metabolically very inactive, but can still, you give it some water and food and the right temperature and it will turn back into a, what's called a vegetative form.
All right.
So why is it so useful as a weapon?
Well, it has a niche.
It's not contagious person to person.
So if an animal eats another animal that died of anthrax, they may get it, but you won't get it from any of your neighbors so that it can be controlled.
So if you wanted to, you know, drop it in one place and affect the people there and not have it spread without control, anthrax is a good thing to use.
Although it generally takes, depending how much one inhales, if you were going to use it as an in the airborne form, it could take anywhere from a day to weeks to become sick.
All right, now, can you tell us how you knew Bruce Ivins?
I met Bruce Ivins 19 years ago at a conference when we happened to sit next to each other.
And I have done some other, I've done some research in anthrax for 20 years.
So we would keep in touch occasionally and meet at conferences.
We were certainly not close, but we did know each other.
We had a few letters and phone calls back and forth over, you know, about a dozen years.
Okay.
So you didn't know him that well personally, in the sense where you guys were kind of pals and talked about non-professional matters or anything like that?
No.
All right.
So I guess, would it be useful for me to ask you whether you thought he was a crazy person or a murderer?
Well, he never, no, he never acted like a crazy person.
He had a PhD.
He was professional.
He published a lot of papers.
He was very competent at discussing science.
He was actually- But not a mad scientist?
No.
He was not a mad scientist.
He was slightly awkward.
You know, he was a little bit nerdy, but he was extremely kind, actually, which is why I think his friends are upset about this, better friends than I am, by the way, because he always was out there to try and help other people.
In my case, he would always give me articles that he thought might be useful to the work I was doing.
And he played music at his church.
He would write songs for people who were leaving work at the place where he worked.
And whenever somebody new came to work in that lab or a nearby lab, he would assist them and really make himself available.
So I guess for those reasons, he was very warmly regarded.
Well, now, it's interesting to me, although I'm not certain of the importance, but you seem to say on your blog here, Dr. Nass, again, that's anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com, that the FBI's report mischaracterizes your relationship with him.
Is that right?
That's correct.
And how so?
Well, he and I had a very friendly relationship.
You know, we would laugh together if we saw each other.
The last time I saw him, I introduced him to my son, who was a juggler.
And Bruce was also a juggler.
So, I mean, we always had good times together.
We never, there was never a harsh word.
There was never an unwillingness to answer a phone call.
You know, we were professional friends.
And when the FBI said that he was upset about me, I think that's nonsense.
Because you just know of no reason why he would be.
Well, what the FBI claimed is that I have very widely spoken and written about anthrax vaccine causing illness, and that he was very distressed by this and this threatened his job.
The facts of the matter are that he agreed with me that anthrax vaccine probably caused illness.
He knew, he was actually working on newer vaccines that hopefully weren't going to cause illness.
And his job was in no way threatened.
So, you know, I'm guessing that the FBI chose to mention me in their report, along with two other people, probably because they didn't like my blogging on this subject and were trying to cast aspersions on my relationship with Bruce to make it appear that either I wasn't telling the truth in the blog, or that Bruce's other friends shouldn't talk to me, since we do talk, well, some of them do communicate with me regularly.
It seems to me like perhaps a simpler explanation would be that it was one of the things that they wanted to use to build the idea or the concept of his motive, that his job was threatened.
That's what they said was his motive all along, right?
Right.
That his job wasn't threatened, because he had a contract extending to, I think, 2005.
So I want to get into this, and, you know, I'm sorry that we only have 20 minutes, and I'm sorry that I'm so ignorant about this case.
I've been, you know, trying to catch up with what's going on on your blog here, and you just absolutely deconstruct every, almost it seems like every single thing that they say building their case is in question.
Every premise that they build their argument on is just not right.
Scientific means, motive, opportunity, and the rest of it.
So I guess let's start with the means.
Can you talk to me about the silicone and the weaponization of the anthrax and the facilities at Fort Detrick and so forth?
Or better, you start wherever you want.
I want to...
Go ahead.
Thank you.
Well, I don't know about the specific facilities, and, you know, I think that's probably classified.
But as I pointed out, some people who knew Ivins have said there's no way he could have made this with the equipment available, and they have given their names.
And there's other people who have not given their names who say they knew Ivins, and they know the lab, and yes, he could have made it.
Now, it seems to me that we can't show that either of those two are correct, although I tend to prefer people who use their names, because the FBI has never found a way to reverse engineer the anthrax.
So if we don't know how it was made, we can't say whether he had the equipment available or not.
But it's certainly...
Almost...
Well, everyone I've spoken with who have given their names has thought that his ability to make the amount of anthrax required in that lab within a week, couldn't have done it in a week.
Now, could he have done it over a longer period of time?
Maybe.
Maybe he could have.
Could he have done it without anybody noticing?
Again, it seems unlikely.
This is a pretty high-powered government lab that is supposed to have a high level of security and people are supposed to pay attention to what each other are doing.
So I don't think he could have, but maybe he could have.
Could he have added silicon to it?
Well, initially, of course, the FBI denied that silicon had been added.
Later they admitted that there was silicon, but that it was all inside the spores and it was natural.
It was some component of the water that was used to grow the anthrax.
And for a long time, they wouldn't acknowledge how much silicon was in this, but eventually they said it was over 1% by weight.
Well, of course, that does not occur naturally anywhere in this planet.
And so somehow silicon was added to this preparation at some point.
Now pardon me for my extreme ignorance here, but is silicon different than silicone?
Silicone is an element and silicone is a plastic substance that you can make breast implants with and other...
So entirely different substances here?
Yeah.
Okay, pardon me.
I don't know anything about that.
Silicon is actually the element used to make glass, but it certainly can be a powder.
Well, it turns out that silicon can be used to produce, you know, weaponized spores.
And it was probably deliberately added to make the spores disperse better.
But FBI has never said they found any silicon in the lab, which would suggest, I mean, it's an element, right?
It's part of the earth's crust.
It's at the beach, it's everywhere.
But whether they found any powder in the lab that he would have had to have left some behind if he had put it into the growth mixture that they haven't found or they haven't admitted they found it.
There was also a bacillus contaminant called bacillus subtilis, a similar bacteria to anthrax, but not exactly the same, which was present in the early letters.
And the FBI has never found that contaminant at the Fort Detrick lab.
So without being able to show that these components of the anthrax were there, I don't think they can make a case that Bruce produced the anthrax that was in the anthrax letters at his lab.
Now there was this thing in the Wall Street Journal that said, basically, I think pretty much what you just said about they haven't been able to recreate a situation where the anthrax would somehow naturally incorporate all this silicon into it.
I forget all the percentages and so forth.
But then there was this thing by Dan Vergano in the USA Today saying, oh, come on, you people are just ignoring all the evidence that has come forward saying that, you know, that basically debunks those Wall Street Journal accusations or interpretations.
Have you seen that?
I haven't seen that piece.
I think what's important is that the FBI seems to have deliberately misrepresented the evidence in a lot of places.
So not only in terms of my relationship with Ivins or whether his job was in jeopardy, but they seem to have had a series of different stories about the silicon, about his movements, whether it was unusual for him to work in the lab at night or they said it was very unusual but he worked late in the lab the two weeks before each set of letters were mailed.
And yet again, his colleagues say he worked late all the time.
There are just numerous, probably at least 10 or 15 different mischaracterizations, misrepresentations or outright lies that are in the FBI report.
And that's a problem.
The way the FBI pursued this case is another problem.
There were a number of, you know, well, initially there, of course, probably hundreds of suspects.
But the FBI was really not interested in Stephen Hatfill until Congress got interested in him.
And then they pursued him with great vigor.
And eventually he won a settlement for five point eight million dollars.
He was never arrested.
He was.
But his career was ruined.
Well, there's some indication that he was set up.
Right.
I mean, the letters had they were what the Greendale or the Greenville school, something like that, which was right near where he had worked in South Africa.
Yes.
In Zimbabwe, it was right near his medical school.
One letter, one hoax letter was mailed from England when he was in England.
And there were other ways in which it seems he may have been set up.
So he was a he was sort of the perfect Patsy in that he had a history of being a right wing sort of neo-Nazi person who had been a bodyguard of Eugene Turblanch, who was a well-known white supremacist in South Africa.
He had claimed to work with the Seles Scouts, who were a sort of notorious group that sometimes actually would would get black guerrillas and turn them and then send them back to.
They were responsible for most of the deaths of black people during the Zimbabwe war.
He claimed to do other things that made it easy for him to be disliked and made it easy to point the finger at him, because, for instance, on his curriculum vitae, his resume, he claimed to have adeptness with weaponized dried anthrax.
So he if you were looking for a Patsy, he was the perfect Patsy.
Well, now, I want to get back to well, I want to ask you about the mysterious letter that was sent.
I forget.
See, it's been a long time.
And there's a timeline here that I think shows that this letter came between two different anthrax letter mailings.
Isn't the letter blaming Dr. Assad?
Right.
Exactly.
Yes.
That was interesting.
A letter came to the FBI at Quantico, Virginia, claiming that a former virologist at Fort Dietrich was a terrorist.
And this letter was mailed after the first set of anthrax letters were mailed, but was actually opened and read before any of the anthrax letters had been identified.
And Assad had been treated very badly, allegedly treated very badly by colleagues at Fort Dietrich because he was from a Muslim country.
I think he might have been from Egypt.
And they wrote poems about him.
They passed around a plastic camel that everyone would joke about.
And he wound up suing Fort Dietrich.
So here's this guy that hasn't even worked there in years.
And suddenly a letter comes alleging that he's a terrorist.
And I think there's something else about that letter that links it to the case.
They said it was written by a female because of the handwriting and that there were at least indications of who it was, the specific woman at Fort Dietrich that he had the problem with.
Something like that?
Well, I'm not sure about that.
Certainly the writer seemed to know intimate details about Assad.
But what was interesting was the FBI wouldn't give him a copy.
They may not have even let him look at the letter.
They read it to him.
And they didn't let Donald Foster, who was doing the initial work on the anthrax letters as a sort of linguist, a forensic linguist isn't the right word.
He worked with writing to try to identify who wrote documents.
And he had done a number of cases with the FBI.
And he had identified the author of a book, maybe more than one book.
So he was given the original anthrax letters, but the FBI would not give him this letter implicating Assad.
In any event, it looked like somebody might be trying to set up Assad also as a patsy.
And then there were other people the FBI had gone after.
And at the time Bruce Ivins committed suicide, there were actually other people at Fort Detrick who were also under close surveillance by the FBI.
So they hadn't actually narrowed it down to Bruce.
Yeah, I mean, it really does look like when after they successfully hounded him into killing himself that someone in the Department of Justice or the FBI just said, all right, that's it.
Build a case that this was our guy and we're going to close this thing.
I mean, just to read whatever's on the front page of your blog this morning is enough to make you see how basically all the evidence is kind of constructed after the fact to fit.
Like they say, you know, him working late.
That doesn't mean anything unless you're trying to prove that Ivins is the one.
Then you go, look, Ivins was working late or whatever.
And of course, we saw we had George Machke from antipolygraph.org on the show a couple of weeks ago talked about how they say that when they look at his polygraph, that they can tell that he used classic countermeasures to defeat them and and pass the polygraph test.
And obviously there are classic countermeasures, but there are no ways to look at a polygraph result that you twice said he passed with flying colors years ago and then go back and look at it and say, oh, look, here's where the classic countermeasures were kicked in.
That's completely fictional and complete, you know, and it goes on and on like that.
Right.
This whole thing is built after the fact to try to prove the case.
And it's blatant.
It really is blatant.
But let me ask you this, because I think here's presumably this could be, you know, the toughest part of your argument here is this is that USA Today.
And I'm sorry you haven't.
I didn't send it to you before the show to look at or anything.
But this USA Today article is called Anthrax Myth Persists Despite Evidence.
And he's quoting a researcher at Sandia National Laboratory named Joseph Michael, saying one of my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data and it doesn't matter.
And he says he's present.
He's presented his electron microscope results that show that the 2001 anthrax attack wasn't weapons weaponized for two years, but still the idea refuses to go away, he says.
And then apparently he looked at an electron microscope and the silicon in it, the content, and he decided that it wasn't a suspicious big deal at all or something.
Right.
Well, you know, most people in the know would disagree with him.
That's all I can say.
Anthrax nowhere else is what is made of silicon 1.4%.
What he's referring to is that it wasn't put on the outside of the spores.
It was actually incorporated into the spore coat.
Well, that's interesting, but that doesn't mean it wasn't weaponized.
Because when you grow anthrax, normally silicon is not incorporated into the spore coat, because you just don't have that much of it in the medium.
And Joe Michael, by the way, he is a consultant for the FBI.
He's done a lot of work for the FBI.
And I would say that he has confused this issue on several prior occasions.
Well, I mean, they say he's with Sandia Laboratories, that the same guy you're saying is a consultant for the FBI.
But then there have been other tests at Sandia.
I thought they were the same ones who were unable to reverse engineer this stuff, right?
Correct.
I saw you put on your blog this, what, Aerosol Today or whatever, some journal from Aerosol Science and Technology.
What did they say?
What did they say?
That was a very interesting piece.
Actually, I'm sorry, but I can't...
I'm sorry to put you on the spot there.
There's a lot.
Yeah, there are so many things that he said.
I guess in a couple of seconds, let me ask you this.
What do you know about the Gulf War illness and of the first Gulf War and the possibility that anthrax vaccines had to do with all these men getting sick?
Definitely, anthrax vaccine causes an illness that meets the CDC definition of Gulf War syndrome.
And in fact, on the label, on the package insert that FDA approved for anthrax vaccine is a mention that some people have described a syndrome involving pain, fatigue, and cognitive or emotional disorders, which is the CDC definition.
They actually used the exact CDC definition for Gulf War syndrome in the anthrax vaccine package insert.
Now, it's not the only contributor to Gulf War syndrome.
I gave a Senate testimony in September 2007.
If you go all the way back on my blog to September 2007, you can click on it.
And it was 20 pages of detailed information, over 100 footnotes of all the different exposures soldiers had that could have made them sick.
And it seems like the more exposures people had, the more likely they were to get sick.
Sure.
I mean, you had a counter-Sarin pills and you had the Kamasuya detonation and...
Exactly.
Oil well fires.
Yeah.
All sorts of things.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because we should really get back to the anthrax thing, but I'd love to maybe interview you all about the Gulf War illness sometime.
That's a very interesting topic.
But first of all, I found the aerosol today thing.
And this is where they went through and talked about how difficult it was to make this stuff and all the different pieces of equipment that you would have to have.
Oh, that's right.
But you see, that wasn't a reverse engineer of the anthrax.
I mean, that was a similar...
They may have been trying to reverse engineer it.
They didn't.
But the way they were able to make something similar required a lot of steps and equipment that Ivan's didn't have.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry for saving this till the very end.
Maybe don't even tell me what it is, but just yes or no, if you have your own kind of working theory as to what really happened here.
Because, of course, everybody wants to point fingers and accuse everybody.
You've got to be one of us.
Well, I think that there's no question that the FBI has not done the logical, the police, you know, the police work.
And so I think the FBI was directed not to do the right kind of investigation on this case.
Now, who had the power to cause that to happen?
I don't know.
But, you know, you might assume it was somebody at a high level.
Okay.
But you don't you're not working on your own theory as to no more than that.
No.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fair enough.
And and that's probably better for what it is that you have to say in terms of, you know, the way the media would want to construe it, assuming they pay any attention at all.
So that's good.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
Dr. Nass.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, everyone.
We'll be right back.