Posted on 09/15/2002 11:32:25 AM PDT by knak
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the most likely source of Stevens' exposure was the so-called "J-Lo" letter. Published reports are sketchy and somewhat contradictory, but suggest this package was received about a week before 9/11, set aside as "kook mail" until later, and Stevens was exposed to the contents on 9/19. Even if the reports of a delay between the package's arrival and Steven's exposure to the contents are accurate, it is still not clear whether the package was opened on arrival, or whether it was simply set aside in the mail room unopened, until it piqued somebody's interest.
Seems kind of iffy to me. The reams of paper are sealed, by more paper and some glue. I could see the spores settling onto the outside of the reams, but not much getting onto the sheets on the inside, there to be "aerolized" by the fans and other moving parts. The wrappers end up in the trash or recycle bin, not in the copier.
While I would take anything the FBI says with a grain of salt, bear in mind that this copier contamination may have been very, very light. It's seems almost certain that the anthrax letter was opened, based on the pattern of exposure, which would make it odd if the real letter was completely unremembered. The more important question is how Bob Stevens received a lethal bolus, and how his keyboard came to be contaminated. That strongly suggests -- but does not prove -- that he was directly exposed to the opened letter. All of which is, again, consistent with the J-Lo letter being the likely source of the exposure, just as the New England Journal of Medicine reported last November.
What if a person picked up the top open ream of contaminated paper and loaded the copy machine? Many people fan the sheets they load into the machine to prevent them sticking. He then goes to his keyboard and does his normal work and contaminates the keyboard from his hands.
Wasn't there a mail-room clerk/intern of middle eastern descent that was initially under suspicion?
Aside from the fact that the J-Lo letter was inferred to be the source of Stevens' exposure by his co-workers and treating physicians, there are other interesting factors pointing to it as the source. One of the Delray Beach hijackers, Ahmed Alghamdi, reportedly subscribed to an AMI publication called Mira! devoted to Latin celebrities:
The Sun is a rather obscure target for an anthrax attack, whatever the source, but it is notable that the main hijacker nest in Delray Beach was rented to the hijackers by Gloria Irish, the wife of The Sun's editor, Michael Irish. Gloria Irish had multiple contacts with the hijackers over the months preceding 9/11. Michael Irish is a private pilot who flies out of the small Lantana airfield where Mohammed Atta brushed up his skills for knocking down the WTC.
The J-Lo letter was reportedly received on 9/4, seven days before 9/11. On that basis, if it had been opened immediately, people would have been coming down with anthrax at AMI just about the time of the attack.
Mohammed Atta had a sick sense of humor and apperantly enjoyed giving Americans a veiled heads up on what was coming -- see reports of his interview with the USDA loan manager. He also had a penchant for visual metaphors and riddles, viz:
"It was August 29 and my phone rang. It was Mohammed Atta. He said "I need your help with a puzzle". A puzzle? I said. Is this the right time to be talking about a puzzle? He replied "But only you can help me with this puzzle. What dooes 2 sticks, a dash and a cake and a stick mean? And he was talking about September 11."In addition to the lewd letter addressed to Jennifer Lopez, the "J-Lo" letter also apperantly contained a tobacco tin holding a Star of David buried in powder, a cheap cigar in its cylinder, and a laundry detergent package (presumably of the small, coin-op dispenser type). The brand of the latter is unknown, but if it looked like this, it would make a certain amount of sense:
All in all (no pun intended) I don't think the publicly-available evidence is definitive. But for myself, I regard the J-Lo letter as guilty until proven innocent.
It's possible, but I think the levels of contamination we are talking about on the copier sheets must have been miniscule. You can grow a culture from a single bacterium, but you have to breath in about 10,000 spores, typically, to contract an infection. If we didn't already have a good candidate for the means by which Stevens was exposed, I might go for it as an explanation, but we do: it's called the J-Lo letter. That seems like a much better candidate.
That the static charge on the copiers would attract anthrax spores sounds like a more reasonable proposition to me than spores being spread by the copy paper. As pointed, the reams of copy paper are wrapped and sealed -- and the wrapping isn't placed in the copier. Moreover, wouldn't only the top packages on the storage racks be exposed to the spores?
In any event, what we're really looking for is probably referenced in these sentences:
"FBI investigators, working with scientists from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, removed nearly 5,000 pieces of evidence during their search of the building."The property seizures included more than 800 letters tainted with anthrax as well as shelves and folders from AMI's mail room.
5,000 pieces of evidence...including 800 letters. How the anthrax was spread is an incidental issue, compared to how it came to arrive...
There have been contradictory reports on that. The fact that Stevens got inhalation anthrax and that the anthrax was widely distributed (even if it hopped a ride on a mail cart or copy paper ream) tell you it was weaponized, unlike the brown, granular anthrax sent to the NYC media outlets, which caused only non-life-threatening cutaneous anthrax. That is, in itself, rather remarkable, because it makes AMI even more of an odd-man out in the media-directed letter campaign. Why send lethal anthrax to a Boca Raton tabloid, but innocuous granular anthrax to the New York media? I believe the resolution to that question is provided by the fact that the AMI hit was a completely separate leg of the anthrax campaign -- it came from the 9-11 hijackers themselves, and was mailed before 9-11 as a kind of sick joke calling card from Mr. Atta. The two New Jersey waves were to remind us that the sleepers are still here, and they still have "THIS ANTHRAX."
Once a single spore got onto the copier glass, it was replicated onto each copy thus distributing it around. Of course, as each copy was recopied.. and so on. :)
Note that, having taken almost a year to get around to searching the building, they can now plausibly spin the investigation out for many more months without providing us an answer, and still pull a rabbit out of a hat should it be deemed necessary to do so down the road. This is a play in three acts, remember...
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