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A L S O+T O D A Y
Justice in Jasper
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RUSSIAN ROULETTE | PAGE 1, 2,
Others, however, said critics should not be so quick to condemn the device. The field kits are relatively new, and most emergency teams are not yet adequately trained to use them correctly, said Lt. Col. Arthur Corbett, who until recently was the commander of the Marines quick response force for chemical and biological attacks. All field kits are "essentially rinky-dink," Corbett said. "They have to be backed up quickly by a complete examination in a fully equipped lab." The FBI has been working furiously to establish relationships with military labs all over the country, part of a $10 billion-a-year federal counterterrorism effort, Corbett said. "You've got to ask who's doing the testing, what's been their training, what's the nature of the bio-agent, how much lighter or heavier is it than air," Corbett said. "All these things come into play. So before you get around to damning the tool, you've really got to be sure that it's being employed by someone who knows how to use it." Making the task even more complex is that the New Horizons device analyzes a threat sample not only for anthrax, but for four other deadly pathogens as well -- the plague, staphlococcus B, ricin and botulism. Some experts think the company rushed the product to market before it was ready. Pressure to come up with something was intense following the Gulf War in 1991, a New Horizons official said. A worse problem than a false positive would be a false negative, which unfortunately is "entirely possible," according to Corbett. That, of course, would mean the test had failed to detect the presence of anthrax or some other deadly disease-bearing substance that actually was there. The threat at Summit Women's Center in Milwaukee was one of half a dozen anthrax scares at clinics around the country on Feb. 18. Four days later in Kansas City, several Planned Parenthood workers and firefighters were quarantined and doused with bleach after the clinic received an anthrax threat. As in Milwaukee, the hoax brought more than 100 emergency personnel converging on the midtown clinic, paralyzing downtown business and traffic in the process. Many of the threat letters in these cases have been postmarked Lexington, Ky., but to date the FBI has made no arrests. An FBI spokesman in Washington said the forensic crime labs will study the envelopes for fingerprints and traces of DNA on the stamps and try to determine the manufacturer of the envelopes for clues to the identity of the perpetrators. Women's clinics have been the prime target of the "anthrax" letters, amid a wave of shootings, bombings, gas and other attacks on abortion providers that have been blamed on anti-abortion groups. An expert on right-wing violence, however, suggested that the recent mailings may have originated beyond the circle of usual suspects. "Most of the [anti-abortion] hoaxes were caused by local people, which is why certain areas, such as upstate New York and Southern California, have been plagued by them," said Mark Pitcavage, a Justice Department consultant and curator of the Militia Watchdog Web site. "This is obviously a more elaborate sort of thing -- a spread of targets rather than a single target." "I know some of the recent hoaxes, such as one here in Iowa, where I am at the moment," Pitcavage added, "were sent to clinics at which abortions were actually not performed, which suggests that some of the spreaders had pretty limited knowledge of what they were aiming at, which suggests to me that they were not, for instance, hardcore members of the anti-abortion movement, who generally would have better intelligence." Pro-choice activists successfully pressured the Clinton administration to establish a Justice Department task force on anti-abortion violence last year, although several federal agents investigating clinic violence told Salon they have never been contacted and have no idea what it does. Scientists, meanwhile, are working on better field tests. The U.S. Navy's Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., has developed a superior field kit but it is not yet commercially available outside the federal government, a source said. It's now in use by the FBI, CIA, Secret Service and clandestine military units, the source said. The University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania, has also received a Pentagon grant to develop a detection kit using DNA. But that won't be easy. "Transferring what you do in the lab to the peace officer on the street is an immense challenge," says Dr. Vito Delvecchio of the university's Institute of Molecular Biology and Medicine.
Washington writer Jeff Stein is a frequent contributor to Salon on criminal justice issues. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. |
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