Disinformation in Media



An example of the disinformation is an article in a news weekly which listed each of the supposed terrorist weapons and the cost of producing them. For -20,000, terrorists could supposedly kill hundreds of thousands of persons with botulism toxin, anthrax, nerve gas, etc. "60 Minutes" had an expert who said biological weapons could be produced in someone's back yard in a five gallon bucket. They said anthrax spores released from a boat on the Hudson River could kill four hundred thousand persons in New York City.



Anthrax is Trivial



Here's the truth of the matter. Anthrax will never be used successfully as a terrorist weapon, and probably never as a military weapon. It has to be converted to spores suspended in the air, which is technically very difficult; and the lethality is nowheres near the terror that it is made out to be. It is not 100% lethal as often claimed. Wool sorters inhale anthrax spores in small quantities continually http://www.emergency.com/anthrax.htm (150-700 per hour), and only if they get a large dose does an infection get started.



Only US and Russia can Weaponize it



To use anthrax as a weapon, it must be converted to a powder which can be inhaled. Only the US and Russian militaries have succeeded in doing that. Even Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form, which is totally ineffective.



Humans are Seldom Affected



Anthrax is a livestock pathogen. There are anthrax spores in the ground in rural areas, because they survive for about twenty years. They normally have no effect upon humans, because a few anthrax spores cannot create an infection, and they do not come up from the ground in large quantities.



Cellular Limitations



Anthrax is what's called a "gram positive" bacterium. This means it has the type of cell walls which are harmless, unlike the cell walls of "gram negative" bacteria, which attack tissue. Therefore, anthrax can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes. One cell or spore does not produce enough toxin to start an infection.



Studies have apparently determined that, typically, ten thousand anthrax spores must be inhaled to start an infection. That number might be someone's guess, but it is in line with the biology of the disease. It is the number which the military uses, and only the military has significantly researched such questions. It uses gas chambers for animal tests.



Anthrax normally attacks the lungs, because it must lodge in vulnerable tissue. It can invade through other routes such as cuts or undercooked meat, but it only does so under third world conditions, and those routes are not relevant to biowarfare.



Livestock eat from the ground, so they have their faces in the ground where the spores are, and they can inhale ten thousand spores. How does anyone get ten thousand spores into the lungs of humans?



Technical Obstacles to Weaponizing



The first requirement would be to aerosolize the spores. The spores would have to be converted to a dry powder, because a liquid would create globs which would fall to the ground rather than staying suspended in the air.



To create a powder, the spores would first have to be washed several times in an array of very large and expensive centrifuges. Then a drying apparatus would have to be used; and it would require spraying a mist into a vacuum, which is how powders are created from liquids. Otherwise, everything globs up into hard rocks.



How do workers clean the equipment without getting spores everywhere? A likely procedure would be to enclose the equipment in a pressure chamber and steam sterilize it for several days. Such an operation costs hundreds of millions of dollars, considering related facilities and development. Only countries do that, not radical groups, and not in five gallon buckets.



It won't stay in the Air



Even in powder form, the spores would fall to the ground rapidly in the absence of wind. Anthrax is not adapted for airborne dissemination. It needs to stay on the ground until inhaled by livestock. So it would not stay in the air like mold spores but would fall out easily, about like flour. In the presence of wind, the spores would be carried away rapidly and would not stay in one place long enough for anyone to get more than a few inhaled.



Once the spores were on the ground, they would not affect humans significantly, because they would not come up from the ground in large enough quantities.



Foggers are Propaganda



There is some talk about using liquids with fogging devices for dispersion of biological agents such as anthrax. It's not realistic. First, there is no mention of the purity that would be required to prevent globbing and plugging of nozzles. At least, a lot of expensive centrifuging would be required to remove debris.



Then agricultural spraying demonstrates that a mist drops rapidly to the ground. It does that because air can only hold a small amount of water, which causes sprays to precipitate.



Another problem is that spores would rapidly settle to the bottom of a liquid and form a gum due to sticky cell debris and their tendency to clump.



A chemical mist is different, because chemicals vaporize, while cells do not. Cells in a mist would clump together as the liquid vaporizes. To create free spores would require very clean material, high dilution, ultra fine mist and a vacuum for rapid evaporation. Foggers can't do the same thing.



For these reasons, anthrax would be difficult to use; and it could hardly kill more than a few hundred persons under the most ideal conditions, not the hundreds of thousands which are claimed. On top of that, antibiotics are effective for it during the early stage of the illness. It is not contagious for humans.



Glib Journalism is Unrealistic



Innumerable journalists have been insisting that anthrax can be produced in a simple laboratory with little expertise. To the contrary, no countries but the U.S. and Russia can convert anthrax to a usable weapon. Iraq cannot.



Consider what the journalists fail to recognize. Growing a large quantity of anthrax would result in a fermenter full of slop which is extremely slimy and viscous with large amounts of debris and metabolic products mixed with the nutrient medium. That slop has to be washed and converted to a medium which will induce spores to form. Much research and knowledge would be required to get a reasonable yield of spores. Then the cells would have to be fragmented with something like a blender to get the spores out of the cells. Then much differential centrifugation would be required to separate the spores from the debris. Then spray drying of spores in a vacuum would be required.



Accomplishing all of that would require several Ph.Ds. and much developmental type research in addition to expensive equipment and a very large building. It isn't a matter of growing something in a kettle and pouring it into a rocket, as journalists and weapons inspectors seem to be assuming.



Grinding is Another Absurdity



The latest contrivance is that terrorists might weaponize anthrax by drying a slurry and grinding it to particles 1-5 microns in size. (The bacteria are 1 by 3 microns.)



The first problem is that the gunk would dry like glue; and after grinding, it would still be glue. Even if it were washed first, the bacteria would be sticky and would dry like glue.



The second problem is that bacteria do not tolerate grinding. They are as fragile as egg shells. Grinding is how they are broken apart for biochemical tests. Even if only 1% were broken, the result would be a sticky gum, not a powder; and more like 99% would be broken before getting 5 micron particles.



Journalists keep mentioning how many anthrax spores can be gotten onto the head of a pin. It's not a question of how many can be gotten onto the head of a pin but how many can be gotten into someone's lungs.



Planes cannot Dust a City



A scenario which is often mentioned is that someone might use a plane to dust a large city with anthrax during the night. It's unrealistic. First, no one in buildings would be harmed by anthrax. The few spores that entered buildings would settle on surfaces, and few would enter the air, and even fewer would be inhaled. At most, someone might inhale a few dozen spores per hour. That's not the ten thousand that are needed.



Secondly, anthrax spores would not diffuse uniformly through the air like a gas. They will either drop too fast or blow away. A few dozen persons might be killed, but that's not the terror that is being hyped in the media. And more than anything, nobody is producing the spores in powder form but the U.S. and Russia.



Journalists seem to assume that an anthrax cell anywhere will kill someone someplace. Putting words alongside each other on a page is not the same thing as getting cells into humans on the ground. There are millions of square miles of space on the ground which do not show up with the words.



Iraq did not Weaponize Anthrax



Saddam Hussein is said to have produced anthrax. If so, the reason is because it is stable and easy to handle, not because it is effective when used. Iraq is unsophisticated to a point of ineptness in its approach to biological weapons.



It is said that Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form and puts it in missiles in liquid form. In liquid form, anthrax is almost as safe as cotton candy. Therefore, Iraq poses no anthrax threat.



In fact, military and UN inspectors only found two Iraqi warheads with anthrax in them (in liquid form). If Iraq had anthrax in an effective form, it would have had it in hundreds of warheads, as they did with nerve gas. So Iraq knew its anthrax was useless.



For about a billion dollars, Iraq could probably get enough experts together to develop anthrax as a weapon. But the reason why it doesn't is that researchers already know that anthrax would be next to worthless after it was developed.



The Whole Concept is Flawed



Biological warfare is a flawed concept. The only route usually considered is airborne, because bombs and missiles create the delivery system. There is no disease in existence which is propagated in that manner. Even the airborne diseases require close contact with the source. The reason is because wind disperses the agents too thinly, and gravity brings them down too rapidly. Increasing the quantities massively will get a few persons, but only a few.



And then, very few of the diseases which are mentioned as biowarfare agents are suitable for airborne dissemination. Brucellosis is not. It is disseminated through body fluids. Plague is not. It is carried by insects from the blood of one animal to another. The insects do not pick it up from the ground.



Motives Taylor the Truth at every Level



Biowarfare is promoted through a combination of ignorance and propaganda. The researchers, who should know better and often do, are getting paid to produce the agents, so they do not want to admit the futility of it. The nonresearchers cannot realistically evaluate the claims, and they have propaganda motives. They want to militarize society, and scare tactics go a long ways in that direction.



The point here is not that large countries cannot make a lot of persons miserable with biological weapons. It's that the small countries and terrorists cannot do so on their own; and it cannot be done on a large scale and in some magical way as described in the media.



Recent Events



Numerous persons have asked me how I interpret recent events. I think recent events substantiate my statements to the nth degree. Only half a dozen persons have been stricken by anthrax instead of the millions which authorities were predicting upon a terrorist attack. It shows that anthrax is almost impossible to use effectively.



The terrorists may have succeeded in creating a lot of fear, but for casualties, guns would have been more effective



The field tests of white powders are not credible. Anthrax powder is gray or brown, not white.



Some persons are claiming that maybe the terrorists have limited motives at this time, such as scaring people or testing their wares. Not hardly. They threw everything they could at the World Trade Center and went for body count. Why didn't they just fly by and scare people first? The CIA is behind the anthrax incidents.



There is no source for powdered anthrax besides the US and Russia, and the incidents follow the CIA style.

has not allowed weapons inspectors to do their job in his country since 1998, it is baseless to say that only the US and Russia can make weapons grade Anthrax.

The mere fact that he has been evading the inspections he agreed to in 1991, despite the resulting sanctions, creates an inference that Iraq has something to hide. Clearly, the possibility that he has a crude anthrax weapon available is a possibility that cannot be ignored.

But if Hussein has the capability of producting a biological weapon, the U.S.

is ultimately responsible for providing him with it, like his dictatorship (thank

his old homey poppa bush for that one). If Hussein has the technology to

deliver a bio-terrorist weapon to US soil, thank our deceitful military industrial

complex and its covert agencies again. Most of the threat of biological

terror currently facing the nation is primarily domestic. Most of the anthrax that is

a potential threat to US citizens is accessible at university chemistry labs, so

why the hell does it have to come half way across the world. Give me a break.

Such a delivery would surely be cut off by U.S. customs or other agencies,

unless they had some other agenda in letting it pass (like how they

allowed two jet liners to crash into the WTC)....

juice in Malaysian -- its America's fault for manufacturing the juicing machine.

The only good thing to come out of 9/11 is the implosion of the Left.

You folks are so flummoxed by the fact that peace love and understanding don't solve all of the problems of the real world that you have cooked up the wildest of conspiracy theories to make cram this square peg into the round hole of your worldview.

Area 51 is more believable than your conspiracy theories.

Go on telling people that Atta was a CIA patsy, leading this attack to justify the expansion of the US government. You're doing a better job of discrediting your movement than I could ever have dreamed of doing myself!

your false stements of October 23, year 2001 sicken our readers.

These pieces of baloney you hang for others to fall on broken pavement are similar to the lies that people need coal or wood in order to set fires.

Camel shit i.e. dung is used by many Bedoiuns, poor Arabs and others in Mongolia and parts of China to warm the human body and cook good foods.

Are you related to the people who started Legionaires Disease in a Philadelphia Hotel Room where members of our nation's veterans were sleeping?

FUCK ALL YOU RACIST, NATIONALIST, WARMONGERING MORONS!!!!!

interesting response -- who was it directed to? me? couldn't tell.

camel shit. . . interesting.

Chumba, I'm curious what "implosion of the left" you're refering to?

Based on what I've seen in the media and in my own personal experience, the left is growing stronger than ever since september 11. People are hurt and confused and angry about what happened, and they are finding answers and ways to take constructive action coming from the left. Fine, there are those who associate themselves with the left who have very flawed world views, that's certainly true. But also some on the left provide the only analysis based on careful consideration of facts. The right, including the media and the US government, relies heavily on emotion, using symbols like the flag to evoke emotional response rather than encouraging people to actually think about what's going on.

The right greatly fears people thinking for themselves, because its philosophy is based on people swallowing contradictory half-truths.

A good example is the kind of arguments that you've been making on this website, Chumba. Rather than directly addressing the issues and providing evidence to support your views, you make ad hominem attacks on "the left" in general. This doesn't do anything to support your arguments and makes you look foolish.

Most people find it very appealing to actually be considered able to think for themselves. The right does not and can never offer this.

you clearly want to see your movement taking off.

And you actually do see that.

But that doesn't mean its happening.

BTW: Do you know what ad hominem means?

You say:

"The right greatly fears people thinking for themselves, because its philosophy is based on people swallowing contradictory half-truths."

But you're just talking the merits -- not actually attacking anyone. Okay.

I like Anti-Fascists posts more. He just says "your a poopy head" -- and doesn't try to dress it up like you do.

only people on the left are able to think for themselves. Anyone who disagrees with you is obviously incapable of rational thought.

You've got the makings of a holy warrior.

Good! It's probably part of their New World Order Plan (the ruling class elites in control of us all). They don't need money, since they print it. They now want power and control. There is enough oil. They have so much they don't know what to do with it all. Who's part of this New World Order plan? I'll bet the enemies they say we should be afraid of are part of the New World Order plan (and the stupid ones that don't know what's going on, so they believe the propaganda and join in to the evil plan).

While I agree with statements like

"FUCK ALL YOU RACIST, NATIONALIST, WARMONGERING MORONS!!!!!"

I'm not exactly sure how that kind of statement actually helps to get people to think more critically. If anything you are saying that the people who are against us could never agree with us. And lets be clear in order to win we need a lot more people on our side, especially with the right wing coup going on right now in Washington. My suggestion would be that we try to engage people in dialogue rather than calling them names. At least real people posting to indymedia. George Bush and other government and corporate types are clearly guilty of supporting genocide and terrorism and engaging directly in it at times and so of course there are labels that should be applied to these folks. Whatever, I don't want to start a big debate about this, its just my two cents and i'm not into censoring people from saying what they want to say. But I'd say that there's probably a good chance that it was a right winger who posted this in order to respond to it. One thing about anonymity is that you never know who anyone is.

Before you all go making your anti-facist rants because someone pauses to question an equally hegemonic statement (that if Saddam has anthrax, its the US's fault anyway-the hegemonic thought being that the root of all bad is in the US) think for a moment!!!

Look, this dude has a point, yeah the CIA supplied some technology and power supports to Saddam and whoever else, but that does not absolve those people from having weopons of mass destruction. Look, they are just as dictitorial as anyone else in power. Of course the US has all this stuff too, but...

Instead of making this debate an inane conversation about who is a poopyhead or who is blinded by ideology, why dont we think about that all power has criminal elements that aim towards death of particular populations.

In addition, we are not going to understand this world anybetter by only looking at the many wrongs that the US has done, we have to see this as a part of the global situation-

ie; what sort of politics and ideologies in foriegn countries arrise to supress their people-what sort of tactics do they use and what drives them to make short-term alliances with countries like the US? This is beyond a naive blame everything on Daddy, its a much more complex blame everything on those in power. And then, whoa, it shifts to- how did these people get in to power. Of course we can look to the US partially, but there are OTHER REASONS AS WELL.

This is so deep and you are calling eachother names. Any "movement" if characterized by this level of conversation unfortunately can go nowhere quickly.

all power to all people

"George Bush and other government and corporate types are clearly guilty of supporting genocide and terrorism and engaging directly in it at times and so of course there are labels that should be applied to these folks."

But you go on saying that -- and see how many people show up at next years O22 rally!

Actually, people on the left are more rational than people on the right. The evidence for this comes from Canadian political psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who has spent several decades studying rightwing authoritarians (RWA). ("Rightwing" in a socio-political sense. This means submissive to established authority & aggressive toward those singled out by established authority, regardless of the official ideology.) I'll be posting something more detailed on this on the newswire in the next few days.

But the point I want to make here is that this is a *statistical* relationship. That means that (1) it's a tendency, not an ironclad certainty, and (2) there are plenty of individual exceptions.

Altemeyer also found that Republican officeholders in the US represent a very extreme sample of RWAs. So it's not surprising that they are noticeable less rationale than the larger population of conservatives you meet in everyday life. Message: Don't jump to conclusions. Give people a chance & help them along if you can.

If you can't, then try to help others along by making the reasons clear why one particular person is hopeless irrational, bigoted or whatever.

"Are you related to the people who started Legionaires Disease in a Philadelphia Hotel Room where members of our nation's veterans were sleeping?"

Say what?

Just in case you didn't follow the investigation of the 1976 Legionnaire's outbreak in Philadlephia, the bacteria responsible were trace to the hotel's air-conditioning system, which happened to provide a near-perfect habitat for them.

Legionella bacteria have since been found in a great many other similar places. They're simply another of the speices we share the planet with.

There's even more- once the CDC realized that they had found a previously unknown species, they started looking into its history. Legionella were found in preserved tissue sample taken from people who had died of an unusually severe bacterial pneumonia long before the 1976 Legion Convention.

Noone had realized that they were dealing with a new species because previous cases had been isolated, not epidemic, and the deaths were among people who were most at risk of succumbing to any sort of pneumonia.

Not until a clearly identifiable group of people who all had a single factor in common came down with the same disease at the same time was a serious epidemiological investigation triggered.

Nobody "started" the Legionnnaire's epidemic. About the only human responsibility that could be assigned to this incident would be the negligence of the hotel managment in not properly maintaining their A/C system.

my one cent (inflation):

rational/irrational is no doubt worthy of close examination in how people engage others in discussion.

what concerns me though is the (mis)use of the concept of "rational" in order to push faulty logic and emotional, misinformed rhetoric dressed up as "rational" and "fair" information. Bill O'Reilly is a supreme case in point. according to Bill, he is fair, logical, and rational in his interviews and presentation of information. and for him, and anyone operating inside this circular "reasoning" structure and worldview, all these things are indeed true.

and this is what bothers me most about such structures -- built into its very design (regardless of ideology) is the inability to examine that structure. in dealing with those who operate in these kinds of structures, i find it frustrating and actually impossible most of the time to truly engage on any meaningful level or in any constructive way for this very reason. open rational discussion seems to require the ability of both parties to fairly examine and challenge one's own belief system as thoroughly as that of someone else.

these are closed systems of communication; they have their own built-in ironclad circular security systems based on things like "rationality" and "logic" and "reason" and "facts."

and most disheartening is the awareness that it's not so much a matter of people not knowing the "facts" or "truth" or whatever, but rather, of "rationally" constructing ideologies and outlooks to support a given set of interests. if I identify with the elite agenda, whether as an elite or not, then my worldview will most likely construct itself around this agenda. and i will encase this view in all kinds of logic and rhetoric and information that supports this. so it won't matter that i realize Unocal wants to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan etc and that this is the real reason for a U.S. military presence in the region; the fact that I make the conscious choice to keep filling up my SUV tank and living the "American" way of life means that this won't matter to me, and I will therefore form my political views around this choice.

how do you circumvent and constructively engage a closed, circular system of logic and communication that claims itself "rational" and "logical" etc?

i'm reminded of kids drowning each other out ad infinitum: "I know you are but what am I, I know you are but what am I, I know you are but what am I,..."

i:i makes a very good point about closed belief systems.

However, from years of experience debating people on the internet, I can say that I've rarely run into situations in which conservatives (religious, libertarian or what-have-you) even TRY to respond with facts or rational argument. A handful of fallacies pervade most of the arguments I've encountered, and the "facts" they provide are generally sourced from places like the Heritage Foundation (at best) or Rush Limbaugh's larynx (at close-to-the-worst). In the former case, it's usually possible to find some really good debunking of the Heritage methodology. Or even do it yourself.

This doesn't mean that all conservatives are like this, however. The ones who pugnaciously debate on the internet are a self-selected subgroup that's highly unrepresentative. Much more typical, I'd wager, are the two guys I ran into at McDonalds, getting some cream for my coffee in the midst of a 350-mile trip. They were joking around about spilling the coffee and getting lots of money. So, I casually clued them into the whole story. I took the "What THEY don't tell about that" approach. It took about 90 seconds & they thanked me for cluing them in as I left. It made perfect sense to them that there was more to the story, as did the way I filled it out. It matched with their own experience.

So, yes, the people who are psychologically committed are pretty much unreachable. But they are only a very tiny minority. Other folks will continually surprise you by how open-minded they can be.

I'm guessing a lot more people will show up .. or we'll all be dead.

If you say something long enough and loud enough, people believe. Regardless of the truth.

Just like a large number of people currently believe that we are in a justified war. Because they have been told so, repetedly, by our Corpo-Gov Puppet Media.

Dear Chumba,


Maybe the CIA DIDN'T cause or disregard the attack, but has anything come of it OTHER than the expansion of the US government, both here and abroad?


Stephanie