King of Zembla: Something in the Air

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, DHS BioWatch sensors detected trace amounts of the deadly pathogen francisella tularensis near the D.C. mall on September 24 of this year, the same day that hundreds of thousands of protesters marched past the White House in protest of the war in Iraq. Salon reports that federal agencies from Homeland Security to the CDC are still struggling to figure out exactly where the bacteria -- described by government sources as "one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States" -- originated:

The biological-weapons detection system in Washington had never set off any alarms before. There are more than 150 sensors spread across 30 of the most populated cities in America. But this was the first time that six sensors in any one place had detected a toxin at the same time. The sensors are also located miles from one another, suggesting that the pathogen was airborne and probably not limited to a local environmental source.

William Stanhope, associate director for special projects at the St. Louis University School of Public Health's Institute for Biosecurity, has been closely following scattered government and news reports about the incident. He's convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. "I think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good," he says. "I am stunned that this has not been more of a story."