Posted on 10/13/2006 3:46:10 PM PDT by Shermy
Nobody has been arrested for the anthrax mailings of 2001, but many people have paid for the crime.
Five died and at least 17 others got sick.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been frustrated. Careers have crumbled. Taxpayers have gotten socked for billions of dollars to shore up bioterror defenses that some experts say still fall short.
Now, an analysis from the FBI itself, buried in a microbiology journal, is raising more questions about the investigation.
In the August issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, FBI scientist Douglas Beecher sought to set the record straight. Anthrax spores mailed to politicians and journalists in September and October 2001, Beecher wrote, were not prepared using advanced techniques and additives to make them more lethal, contrary to "a widely circulated misconception."
The notion the anthrax spores were "weaponized" had fueled conjecture that only a government insider could have carried out the operation.
Beecher's article suggested a much wider universe of potential suspects -- who showed they could kill without highly refined spores.
"A clever high school student" could make such a preparation, according to Ronald Atlas, former president of the American Society for Microbiology and co-director of the Center for Health Hazards Preparedness at the University of Louisville.
The Beecher paper has left Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., wondering if the killings, which further shook a nation already reeling from the Sept. 11 terror attacks, will ever be solved. He blames the FBI for "botching" the case.
Agents spun their wheels chasing a small circle of weapons experts, Holt said.
In the anthrax attacks, Steven Hatfill, a virologist who had worked for the government, landed in the cross-hairs. Labeled a "person of interest" by officials but never charged, the scientist claims the public probe has made him unemployable. He is suing the government and media outlets.
Kenneth Berry's career also unraveled after the FBI searched a Dover Township, N.J., summer home he was visiting in 2004. Berry was a doctor from upstate New York who started an organization for training emergency workers to deal with biochemical attacks. He never was charged, either.
Holt also chides authorities for taking nearly a year to discover anthrax traces in a mailbox near Princeton University. That mailbox, where letters laced with anthrax bacteria may have begun their journey in 2001, is on a route that feeds the Hamilton Township postal center where anthrax letters were processed.
In a letter to Holt, FBI Assistant Director Eleni Kalisch declined to give a closed-door briefing to the House Intelligence Committee. Kalisch claimed sensitive information was leaked from classified briefings more than three years ago, and described the anthrax case as a criminal matter not subject to the committee's oversight.
Some cases take time to crack, Kalisch wrote. Seventeen FBI agents and 10 postal inspectors remain on the "Amerithrax" beat. The FBI said the anthrax investigation has spanned six continents and generated more than 9,100 interviews, 67 searches and 6,000 subpoenas.
Early on, the FBI hoped that analysis of the spores would point to the lab that prepared them. But Beecher's article underscores difficulties of such microscopic sleuthing. Particle sizes, for instance, may not yield as many clues as some expected.
Over time, after being handled and exposed to different conditions, particles "may not resemble the initial product," Beecher wrote.
Yet the FBI is confident, and has forged scientific ties and advances to help prevent future biological attacks, said Joseph Persichini Jr., acting assistant director in charge of the Washington field office, on the FBI's Web site.
Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist, still thinks the anthrax attacks were an inside job because they used a virulent form of the Ames strain of Bacillus anthracis, which only a few biodefense- or intelligence-related labs were thought to possess.
"Whoever did it is an insider," said Ayaad Assaad, a toxicologist with the Environmental Protection Agency, who formerly worked at an Army biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md. "It started with anthrax. Now it's ricin, and God knows what's coming."
Ed Lake has tracked the case closely, self-publishing a book, "Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks, The First Three Years" and moderating a Web site. Lake is convinced the FBI knows the perpetrator but lacks evidence to prosecute. He believes the killer is a scientist from central New Jersey who wanted America to gird for an al-Qaida bioterror attack in the wake of Sept. 11.
"So he sent a warning to the media, saying this is next, there's a biological attack coming next, and be prepared: Take penicillin," said Lake, referring to hand-printed letters, bearing New Jersey postmarks, sent to NBC and the New York Post.
Leon Harris retired last year from the Hamilton Township postal center. He too suspects the bad guys are home-grown and will be caught.
"I don't care if it takes 10 years," the Air Force veteran said. "They're going to find them."
Ernesto Blanco agreed. He survived inhalational anthrax that killed his friend Bob Stevens, a colleague at a tabloid in Florida, five years ago this month. Blanco, now 79, returned to his mailroom job at American Media Inc. in 2002.
"I am positive they will catch them," Blanco said. "I have faith in what they are doing."
TIMELINE
Key dates in the 5-year-old investigation of the anthrax attacks:
2001:
Sept. 18: Postal facility in Hamilton Township, N.J., processes anthrax-laced letters to NBC News in New York and the New York Post.
Oct. 5: Bob Stevens, photo editor at Florida tabloid the Sun dies from inhalational anthrax.
Oct. 9: Hamilton Township facility processes anthrax letters to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Both letters have return address of fictitious "Greendale School" in Franklin Park, N.J.
Oct. 16: U.S. Senate closes; employees are tested for exposure to anthrax microbes.
Oct. 17: The House shuts down.
Oct. 18: Hamilton Township facility is closed.
Oct. 21: Washington postal worker Thomas Morris Jr. dies from anthrax.
Oct. 22: Washington postal worker Joseph Curseen dies from anthrax.
Oct. 31: Kathy Nguyen, who worked in a New York City hospital supply room, dies from anthrax.
Nov. 21: Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Conn., dies from anthrax. Authorities suspect her mail was contaminated by other mail.
[snip - more at link]
Ed, ALL the letters were mailed in Boca Raton. Do not mistake downstream contamination in New Jersey with a "mailing".
Or, if you are 90 years old, it can take only a single spore. But you have to breath deep.
There was a trail of anthrax contamination in three postal facilities in West Palm Beach/Boca Raton. The route taken by the anthrax letter from deposit through processing to another facility where it was forwarded to a third building from which it was delivered was readily tracked (and cleanedup).
Anyone who knows postal operations couldn't have missed that particular finding ~ tells you everything you need to know about "where" the letters were "mailed".
Friday evening ~ at Boca Raton. Next day, the rest of the letters would need only to be dropped in street collection boxes to end up "lost in the mail".
It could well be the latter, plus the bonus of all the attention he apparently gets from members of the press.
The best way to get attention from the major left-wing media is to reinforce their biases and stereotypes. And in this case, we know that the media desperately wants the anthrax attacks to have been perpetrated by a conservative American type. Anyone crying out "hey media, do you think perhaps it could have been Islamist terrorists" will just simply be ignored, because it doesn't fit well with the agenda.
But personally, I'm much more interested in why elements of the government are lying than why Ed Lake is lying.
That's FUNNY! I guess it proves you can dream up any absurd story you want, and no one can prove you wrong.
But the FACTS say that the letter was most likely postmarked on September 18, just like the other media letters. It went by truck to Atlanta and then to West Palm Beach where equipment tested positive for anthrax. Other post offices tested positive due to cross-contamination: Green Acres, Blue Lake, Lake Worth and the Boca Raton main substation. Other post offices in the area were NOT contaminated. The pattern shows that the letter was most likely addressed to The National Enquirer's old address at Lantana.
The letter most likely arrived at AMI in Boca Raton on Friday, September 21, Saturday September 22 or Monday September 24. Stephanie Dailey remembers opening a letter containing a powder on or around Tuesday, September 25, when she returned from vacation. It was her job to open letter addressed to The National Enquirer. She would NOT have opened any letter addressed to the Sun.
She was on vacation when the J-Lo letter arrived and was opened and passed around, so she couldn't possibly have been contaminated by that letter. The pattern of spores in the AMI building show that the J-Lo letter couldn't have contained anthrax.
This is what the FACTS say, but obviously you are just going to believe whatever you want to believe because you know there's no way to prove you wrong.
Ed
And of course this is totally based upon your beliefs. Clearly it doesn't bother you that the letters were all postmarked in Trenton, that a mail carrier in that area contracted cutaneous anthrax, that a mailbox was found to contain spores. You can just rationalize explanations for all this in order to believe what you want to believe. But why should anyone accept your baseless beliefs?
Ed
Can we assume that you believe that anyone who doesn't agree with you is lying?
Ed
I'm inclined to agree !
I hate to break the news to you, Ed, but the FBI labs have a history of lying. You believe them because you want to believe them. What have they done recently that makes them believable? Are there any scandals at AFIP of wrongdoing in the labs? The wrongdoing list at the FBI labs is endless.
http://www.aci.net/Kalliste/fbilab.htm
Misconduct Allegations Arise in FBI Lab Probe
Inquiry: Workers tell of pressure to lie about their scientific findings.
http://www.amazon.com/Tainting-Evidence-Inside-Scandals-Crime/dp/0743236416
Two crusading journalists investigate the FBI's forensic crime lab and deliver a strong indictment against what goes on there. Federal agents regularly dupe the public into accepting "scientific" findings that aren't based upon science at all, they charge, and the lab is infected with a troubling culture where truth plays second fiddle to prosecutorial interests, with information potentially useful to defendants withheld. The book's hero is FBI-scientist-turned-whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, and most of the chapters focus on the crime lab's controversial role in high-profile cases involving O.J. Simpson, the World Trade Center bombing, the Unabomber, and others. The authors at times appear to have a pro-prosecution bias of their own, but their conclusions shouldn't be ignored. They probably won't be; as one attorney tells the authors, "No defense lawyer in the country is going to take what the FBI lab says at face value anymore."
No, dear child.
From your own post in this very thread, no anthrax letter was ever recovered from the Florida AMI building.
This means that the AMI building may have been contaminated via other means, and the AMI landlord of two of the 9/11 terrorists would certainly hint at tainted cash used to pay their apartment rent as being one such potential non-postal channel.
But whatever the route taken, you can't claim to know the postmark. No letter was found there. The contamination may not have been delivered via the post office.
What you are doing is pushing a theory regardless of facts. Your theory demands a September 18th postmark, so that's what you will push from here on out even though no fact in hand supports such a view.
No letter was found, after all.
Bob Stevens, photo editor at The Sun died on October 5, 2001 from inhalational anthrax. In your imagination, you've got him coming into contact with airborn anthrax, getting infected, and dying in *less* than 11 days (Sept 25 to Oct 5).
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the incubation period of anthrax which can be as long as 2 months or as short as 4 days (NOTE: always longer for males in every stage).
The median incubation period is 10 days: http://www.bepress.com/jhubiostat/paper22/
After the incubation period you then have 1 to 5 days of low-grade symptoms followed by 1 to 3 days of improvement. This is followed by the onset of high fever and death within 1 to 2 days of non-treatment.
All the letters were mailed in the same place by the same folks. That place is Boca Raton. In fact, with respect to one of the letters the complete track from the point of entry to delivery was found, including a "backtrack" in the route necessitated by way of the fact National Enquirer had changed their address.
There was anthrax the whole way. However, the envelope's had just then been filled, so they weren't leaking as bad as they would be a month later when they hit New Jersey and DC.
Your concern with where the letters were postmarked (which applies ONLY to those letters which were recovered) means nothing when it comes to single-piece rate First-Class letter Mail being sent by an individual using a handwritten address to another individual who is not a utility nor a creditor.
These letters were exceedingly rare types in the modern postal system.
The USPS handles such mail poorly. In fact, if these pieces were mailed anytime from 6 PM Friday, September 7 to 9 PM, Sunday, September 9, they would be just about the only mailpiedes in the collection boxes were they were dropped. If we but assume for a moment that the folks who carried out the attack sought to "hide" what these pieces were by dropping them in individual street collection boxes, the letters would, in fact, constitute the ONLY mailpieces in each collection box. That is, they'd be nearly alone, and readily missed due to the way the MVS or collection route drivers pick up mail during that Friday thru Sunday "dead zone".
The driver stops, opens the box, pulls out the flat tray into which all the mail has dropped, puts in another, empty flat tray, and returns to his vehicle placing the flat tray from the box in the back of his vehicle. At the end of his route he will have several such trays stacked up.
If he didn't see any mail (handling this in the dark can be a problem you know), and a single piece being readily overlooked, these trays will be stacked together and thought of as EMPTY.
When the collection vehicle returns to the post office the trays will be dropped at the backdock for later disposition.
If it looks like there's a stack of empty trays neatly nestled into each other, there's a good chance they will be categorized as empty equipment and end up stacked with others, wrapped in plastic, and dispatched on an empty star route (Highway Contract Route) for transportation North to someplace that generates mail. In this case, they'd go to Philadelphia from West Palm Beach, and from there they'd be sent to major commercial mailers in Eastern Pennsylvania and Central New Jersey.
Once the pieces were discovered in the trays at the mailer's letter shop, they'd be set aside for separate entry in a letter tray. This happens every day at every major mailer's operations ~ there's always live mail (a piece here and there) found in empty equipment. Mailers complain about it constantly.
In New Jersey there was no contamination of the equipment used to separate collection mail by size, so that meant this stuff entered into the 010 operation in a tray all prepared for cancelation.
Now, remember those trays that these letters sat in during their long trip by truck from Florida? They contaminated the trays which, after being used to transport the commercial mailer's mailings to the post office for further distribution, were then sent into other operations for further use. At least one of them ended up in a collection box near a New Jersey university. The contamination was detected. Another was sent over to a carrier route at Trenton, possibly a direct from the commercial mailer to that route. She got contact anthrax from handling the contaminated tray.
BTW, my "belief" is based on 38 years of virtually full time examination and evaluation of postal operations and the preparation of regulations for use by postal employees and the general public for proper use of the postal system in this country. If it's "my belief" it's a pretty good one, and much more educated than that of a mere layman such as yourself.
Inasmuch as my thoughts on the matter are far from baseless, may I encourage you to pay attention to them since they explain every particular from the attack in Florida to the attack in New York, to the attack in DC.
BTW, when USPS left contaminated equipment in the system, a letter or two got contaminated and ended up infecting a lady in Connecticut who died.
The mailing tray into which it was tossed, or maybe a piece of mail in that tray, was then contamined by one of the primary anthrax letters.
Remember, the secondary contamination of postal equipment was more deadly than any primary contact with the letters. Most of the letters got trapped. Only the stationary equipment that got contaminated was stopped in place. Hundreds of thousands of letter and flat trays that were potentially contaminated managed to get back out into the postal system before the anthrax attack was known to have happened.
"IF the anthrax arrived at AMI other than the US mail, why then would Stephanie Daily and Ernesto Blanco be the only two other persons who tested positive."
Hard to argue with that. And the concentration of spores found in the mailroom area too.
Ed has interesting idea about spread by vacuum, but how about shoes? And did successive vacuuming clean up some of the spread, and were all the floors cleaned as much? And what were there surfaces, carpet, flooring, etc. Many variables.
My idea on a possible "two letter" solution depends on the Ms. Dailey. It is reported that it was her duty to open mail addressed to the National Enquirer. OK, who opens mail addressed to the other publications? Isn't it plausible that the perp went two letters, one to the National Enquirer, one to say, The Sun, and the Sun one was opened first, the Enquirer later when Dailey returned from vacation?
As to the mailer (not necessarily producer) being a sophisticated scientist, wouldn't that kind of person more likely target The New York Times and Newsweek rather than the New York Post and National Enquirer?
I think your ideas about the trays and cross-contamination are very interesting. However I'm not quite following you about the postmarking. Are you saying that mail with pre-printed stamps are handled differently, I presume, than other letters would? If one mailed a letter from Florida with a pre-printed stamp to New York or D.C. addresses it would not be post-marked in Florida but in Trenton NJ?
I don't strongly endorse that idea. In fact, my original take was that they'd made up one letter (to AMI) and decided to trot down to the Boca Raton post office to buy another packet of 6 letters to send to the other addresses.
BTW, these people were normally very frugal in their behavior so they didn't have a large box of envelopes or a sheet of postage stamps. Instead, they could buy embossed envelopes as needed at the post office and avoid waste.
That's why the AMI letter took one route while the others simply got "lost in the mail" until they were discovered in supposedly empty equipment in New Jersey (and on different days no less demonstrating they were in different containers, and in a size where the commercial mailer only needed a few per week).
Now, why the AMI letter? This gets to the heart of why a letter went to the New York Post as well, and none went to Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post and so forth.
These guys are from the Middle East. There the premier newspapers are TABLOID SIZE. Same with India, Pakistan, China, etc., etc. The THIRD WORLD lives on tabloids.
In America the premier newspapers (if you think tabloids are "it") are sold at grocery store checkout lines. AMI dominates the racks.
To an outsider with a limited command of English, and limited time to read newspapers, these tabloid newspapers stand out as "the thing" to read. And, in the Middle Eastern mind they really must be considered to be America's foremost newspapers.
They are everywhere. Everyone knows what they are. People who've never seen a NYTimes have read Star.
If you want to make a truly massive biological attack on America's news media, it's pretty obvious to me that you'd attack AMI itself, and there it was, conveniently located right where they lived in Boca Raton!!!!!
I really do wonder if any of these guys had any idea what the NYTimes is.
The letter directed to Tom Brokaw, if mailed in Florida, would be routed through a major airport and main post office for the financial capital of the world. The letter directed to the two Senators would be routed through a major airport and the main post office supporting mail service for the entire United States government (insofar as headquarters/cabinet operations were concerned), and into the Congress itself.
In sort, the attack went after the major media (AMI), the center of world Capitalist enterprise, and the capital of the United States.
Makes a lot of sense.
And to the funny little foreign guys, the New York Times means nothing whatsoever. they can't read it easily, it has no cartoons, and they never publish any pictures of scantily clad women.
A little harder question is "why Leahy, Daschle and Brokaw"?
Here the answer is remarkably simple. A few weeks before the attack a website called "www.jewsforlife.org" ran a newsletter type piece that had their names and addresses in them, and in the same format those addresses were used in the attack letters.
I think the terrorists wanted us to believe that "the Jews did it".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.