The letter left a trail of spores from New Jersey through various post offices until it reached Boca Raton. There's a chart on my site showing the trail of spores left by the letter.
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Posted on 01/19/2004 11:00:30 PM PST by flamefront
Ed, I appreciate the very considerable effort you clearly put into researching the anthrax case and formulating your opinions as to what may have happened. I did go to your site. For the first link I wanted to look at, I chose "Three Mailings?" Then I scrolled down from there.
There is no reason for me to doubt the facts you put up, such as that chart that shows when each victim became ill. On the other hand, much of the information is your assessment — opinion — as to what all the facts you gathered mean. There's nothing I can do to challenge your viewpoint, nor do I want to. However, there are other facts that may or may not be covered on your site. (Don't know as I post this since I haven't had time to look at it in depth.)
The Florida case was the first to make news. It initially was thought to be an isolated incident. In fact, it didn't even make much national news early on due to the then very immediate 9/11 coverage. The gentleman who passed away initially was thought to have been exposed while on a trip out of state. Early news reports from Florida media did say that AMI employees recalled that a letter containing a brownish white powder arrived sometime around 9/8/01. Perhaps their memories were faulty (understandly given all that was going on then). Or perhaps that was not THE letter that contained the anthrax. But the fact remains that early reports pointed to it as the source.
It is also a fact (actually a series of facts) that Atta and one or more hijackers rented an apartment from the real-estate-agent wife of the head of AMI. That Atta had looked into taking flying lessons in a crop duster at a local airport in the Boca vicinity. That Atta and one other hijacker went to a pharmacist seeking something to treat what appeared to be chemical burns. That another hijacker had gone to a physician in South Florida for a black lesion on his leg, and that the physician believes it was an anthrax lesion. That Zacarias Moussoui also was to have taken crop-duster lessions, and that he has admitted in court that he was supposed to either carry out or participate in a second wave of attacks, the nature of which he has not specified.
How can anyone say with certitude that the AMI letter(s) was postmarked on 9/18 when it was never recovered? Or that there was definitely a letter sent to Peter Jennings when none were recovered there and (if I recall correctly) no one remembered receiving a letter at ABC. Or that the Dan Rather letter was mailed on the 18th when it was never recovered?
There are still many more questions than answers as regards the anthrax case. Perhaps we will never discover what happened. But with so many questions still unanswered, it seems to me to be poor investigative technique to close one's mind to all possible scenarios.
Perhaps. But when evaluating data, you eventually have to come to some conclusions. Otherwise, why even attempt to evaluate the data?
The fact that someone comes to some conclusions does NOT mean that person has "closed one's mind". To suggest so is to go down to personal attacks instead of looking at evidence. Whether your believe it or not, it is possible to come to conclusions about existing evidence while still keeping an open mind for new evidence.
The section on my site titled "Three mailings" refers to the threatening letters mailed from Indianapolis" reportedly received by Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. At one time I thought they might be related to the case because O'Reilly and Hannity said the handwriting was "virtually identical". But since then I've received dozens of handwriting samples which people think are "virtually identical", and I see virtually no similarity whatsoever - other than that the writing is printed by hand. As a result, I now think it's only a very remote possiblity that the Indianapolis letters were connected to the case.
While the ABC, CBS and AMI letters were never recovered, the evidence says those anthrax letters were sent to Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and The National Enquirer because of the anthrax cases which resulted. Dan Rather's assistant got anthrax, and so did a 7-month-old child who attended a party at ABC. It would be totally illogical to assume that they were just random "cross-contamination" cases. If the cases were "random", why would random events only hit the offices of the anchors at the two other major networks?
The evidence says that the letter opened by Stephanie Dailey on the 25th of September, 2001, was mailed in New Jersey. The letter left a trail of spores from New Jersey through various post offices until it reached Boca Raton. There's a chart on my site showing the trail of spores left by the letter.
The timing of all the cases says that there were 7 letters, 5 mailed on the 28th of September and 2 mailed on the 9th of October.
You can speculate about possible other scenarios, and you can twist facts to support other scenarios, but this is what the evidence says.
I'm always open to discussion of new evidence. But old theories about some unidentified member of al Qaeda somehow mailing the letters is just theory. There is no evidence to support that. The evidence says just the opposite: al Qaeda was not involved.
Ed Lake
The letter left a trail of spores from New Jersey through various post offices until it reached Boca Raton. There's a chart on my site showing the trail of spores left by the letter.
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Yes, there were lots of bad reports early in the case. Many of them have been tracked down to show how they happened.
The report that the J-Lo letter arrived around the 8th came from Newsweek's web site. I have a copy of the Newsweek article HERE. The article says,
Several are focusing on a letter that arrived at the company about a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. It was described by sources as a “weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez”—similar, outwardly, to the types of mail the tabloids often get.
But that article from the Newsweek web site never actually went to print. The article that they actually printed is HERE. It says,
In Florida, investigators focused on a one-page, handwritten love letter addressed to Jennifer Lopez, NEWSWEEK first reported on its Web site. It was sent to The Sun, says a source, in Lantana, Fla. It reportedly arrived sometime after Sept. 17. Staffers laughed over it and passed it around the third-floor editorial offices.
But most authoritative source is The National Enquirer. Their report is HERE. They also believed that the J-Lo letter contained the anthrax, but they did a better job at defining the date. They said,
The anthrax nightmare that has gripped the nation began on September 19, investigators believe, when mail for the Sun was delivered to Managing Editor Joe West – and he immediately became suspicious of a bulky manila envelope he picked up.
While these articles all state that the J-Lo letter opened and examined on the third floor is suspected of having contained the anthrax, the contamination charts of the AMI building say otherwise.
Ed
This may be news to you, but mail is placed in heavy canvas bags before shipping. There would be no anthrax found at those places or on the trucks or planes because the bags were not opened at those places or on those trucks and planes. The bag shipped from Hamilton would not be opened until it got to West Palm Beach.
Ed
The CDC say the exact opposite of this, and there is no evidence that they have ever changed their minds from that conclusion.
You are right. The CDC says the exact opposite. But are you so blind to authority that you cannot conceive of the CDC making a mistake?
The CDC's report is totally based upon the fact that "witnesses" reported seeing two letters containing powder - the J-Lo letter and the letter opened by Stephanie Dailey on the 25th. Does that mean that both letters contained anthrax? NO. The evidence says otherwise.
What the CDC's report says is that the CDC uses a different standard for evidence. They don't concern themselves with the criminal case, only the medical case. And if people say there were two letters with powder in them, that's good enough for them. They evidently don't have the time or desire to figure out if both had anthrax. They leave that to the FBI.
Ed
This may be news to you, but mail is placed in heavy canvas bags before shipping. There would be no anthrax found at those places or on the trucks or planes because the bags were not opened at those places or on those trucks and planes. The bag shipped from Hamilton would not be opened until it got to West Palm Beach.
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What's your source on that? An old chart from the CDC HERE says that his onset date was the 26th. And the source I use is the database at UCLA, and they use September 28 as Blanco's onset date.
However, even if the anthrax was in the J-Lo letter, Ernesto Blanco wouldn't have been around when it was opened by the people on the 3rd floor - particularly since it was first tossed unopened into a trash basket and then dug out again.
Ernest Blanco evidently inhaled anthrax spores when he dumped the mail bag containing the anthrax letter onto a sorting table, then checked the bag to make certain it was empty, and then folded the bag so it could be returned to the post office. That probably happened on Friday, September 21, 2001, or Monday, September 24.
Ed
The evidence may not be "conclusive" by your standards, but there is certainly a lot of circumstantial evidence indicating that the Florida anthrax came from New Jersey.
On the other hand, there is absolutely NO evidence of any kind that the anthrax was sent from Florida.
Ed
P.S. The only reason I'm spending all this time on this site today is because I'm snowed in. It's been snowing all day and it's still coming down like crazy.
Stay safe from the blizzard.
I'm not sure the FBI ever felt that the culprit was some "right-wing" guy. I dropped that idea back in November or December of 2001. I think the anthrax mailer is probably right of center on some subjects, but definitely not a true "right-winger".
The evidence tells me that the FBI has a suspect in Central New Jersey who has been their suspect since December of 2001. But he may not be their only suspect. Someone else may have furnished him with the anthrax.
The FBI has said again and again that Dr. Hatfill is NOT and never has been a "suspect" in the case. As far as I can tell, the only reason they spent so much time investigating him is because of Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's campaign to point the finger at Dr. Hatfill. She got the media, the public and members of Congress believing that Dr. Hatfill was the guy and the FBI was "covering up for him". The FBI had to investigate him just to prove they weren't covering up for him. The Dr. Hatfill situation will go down in history as an example of how a private citizen with powerful "credentials" can make the FBI jump through hoops and turn an innocent person's life into absolute hell - all for her own political motives.
Ed
And whatever you might think your evidence shows you, at the moment there is no suspect, person of interest, or whatever other label you wish to use in the anthrax case. In fact, it's been made pretty clear by both the CIA and the FBI that the whole entire investigation has proven fruitless. The CIA has in fact dropped not-so-subtle hints that they now believe that it was Muslim terrorists that mailed the letters. The "Amrithrax" investigation has really been a cold case since last August, which is why there have no reports of any substance since that time.
I guess that makes you wrong again, doesn't it? It wasn't I who said that, it was William Patrick III and the ESD (Electro Static Discharge) Journal. I just found their statements much more compelling and believable than the nonsense in Gary Matsumoto's article in Science.
Here's the USPS statement again:
If the powder were derived from a highly sophisticated process, however, it would contain very small particles and be highly charged with static electricity. A less sophisticated process yields a course-appearing powder comprised of large particles (10-20 microns) and is not particularly difficult to handle.
Here's what I say on my site:
Static charges in the spores probably saved lives by keeping the spores from being easily dispersed. A Dec. 3, 2001, article in the Wall Street Journal described the effect this way:
According to scientists who have made anthrax for use in weapons in the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, the presence of an electrostatic charge may have saved American lives. While some of the charged particles can still become airborne -- where they are the most deadly -- much of the material tends to cling to surfaces.
And:
The sticking tendency may have made cross-contamination of mail more likely, according to one senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official involved in the investigation, because the spores would have been prone to attach themselves to envelopes and surfaces.
However, the spores would be less likely to float. "Electrostatically charged materials are very hard to disseminate," explained Bill Patrick, a scientist who helped develop anthrax-loaded weapons for the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Science article [by Gary Matsumoto] says just the opposite:
The Senate anthrax spores carried like electrical charges, and some experts believe that they were added deliberately to aid dispersal.
And:
[Stuart] Jacobsen says that friction would add static electricity only to surfaces: "If anything, the sorting machine's pinch rollers and the envelopes should get charged," he says, "not the spores inside."
But according to the ESD (Electro Static Discharge) Journal:
The Anthrax may have had its static charges removed before mailing. However, normal handling may have reintroduced electrostatic charges. We in the ESD industry know that mail-sorter machines could have created triboelectric charges by jostling the letters containing the powder.
So, the static charge was created by "jostling the letters". The powder inside was jostled around, and that's what caused the spores to pick up the static charge. And,
These static charges also promoted contact cross-contamination with mail and mail sorting machines. However, they also helped to keep the spores from becoming airborne which would have posed a much greater threat.
So far, there doesn't seem to be anything in the Science article that holds up under close examination. It seems to be totally based upon rumor and speculation - while ignoring facts and direct observation.
The USPS statement is very general and clearly isn't intended to be some official US statement about how the anthrax was made or anything like that. It just warns the USPS employees about the dangers of anthrax - particularly the most dangerous kind of anthrax. Some of the spores in the Senate letter were highly charged with static electricity as a result of their handling by postal machines. The USPS statement doesn't say where that charge came from. It just says it's something to be careful about.
Ed
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