New Contamination Points to Undiscovered Anthrax Letter

FOXNews.com ^ | Nov. 13, 2001 | Fox News

[Mitchell]

WASHINGTON - Eight of 55 tests came back positive for anthrax contamination at a State Department remote mail facility in Virginia Tuesday, indicating a spore-laden letter remains to be found.

One State Department mail handler became ill with inhalation anthrax last month, a case that officials speculated resulted from cross-contamination with a letter mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

[Sabertooth]

What if one bad guy on antibiotics, mailed an anthrax envelope to another bad guy on antibiotics, or even to himself. As long as the envelope wasn't lumpy or scattering visible dust, it would secretly contaminate the postal system en route and then conveniently disappear.

Plausible, even more than you think, from a medical standpoint... The guys could be vaccinated.

But they'd have to be mighty dumb to put their own address on an anthrax letter, on the chance it might get detected before getting back to them.

[mfulstone]

Simple scenario- Mail the letter to a fake address. It goes thru the mail and winds up in the dead(ly) letter office or whatever they do with them these days.

[unspun]

Sometimes "wake turbulence" can literally blow pieces off jets - engines, vertical stabalizers, you name it. Happens all the time. No need to panic - go to the mall, by a new car. Don't let the terrorists win.

I'd prefer to let the truth win, thank you anyway.

[Neuromancer]

Much more likely scenario: Bad guys drop anthrax laden letter into box with a phony address and a phony return address. Pin holes in the corners or such would allow for the dispersal of the spores.

The letter(s) then go to the fake address - are returned and then sent back to the fake return address. Eventually ending up in a dead letter file in some Post Office. Very effect delivery system - hard to trace back.

These are bright and evil perps. Hope we get them soon...

[Shermy]

Hate to bring up an old issue...not!

Anyone have a memory if this "fourth letter" idea panned in or out?

[Shermy]

Also this thread:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/570959/posts

[genefromjersey]

Shermy, as recollection serves,there was another contaminated letter-but it was secondary contamination.

It wound up in Iowa (or somewhere in the midwest-sorry Iowans, I forget !)and was found in an FBI safe-all wrapped up in 2 layers of plastic.

It seems the Bureau had picked it up, had it tested by the state health dept., which found at was positive. Nobody seemed to know what in hell to do with it.so they stuck it in the evidence safe.

About 2 years later, while inventorying the safe,they came across the letter,and queried HQ;which, after some initial dithering,had it rushed to them, so they could ....(You guessed it !) put it into an evidence safe.

[muawiyah]

What happened is engineers at the Postal Service figured out that a single anthrax laden letter could express enough spores to contaminate yet other letters.

That's about the time they figured out the Brentwood facility was hopelessly contaminated!

The letter sent to the New York Post or to Tom Brokaw was never found, although they did discover "traces" it probably left behind.

So far the only good detective work done by any of the various cops involved in this investigation involved the discovery that the sealing tape wrapped around each of the discovered letters came from the same roll.

The clear implication was that the envelopes were prepared at the same time.

This discovery supports my own contention that all the letters were mailed in Florida, probably on the Friday evening before 9/11, and through the normally catastrophically poor handling USPS gives single-piece First-Class Mail being sent to a non-corporate address, all but one managed to get "delivered" several weeks late, after being processed in the wrong places!

[Shermy]

Thanks. But why the NJ postmarks?

[Wolfstar]

If memory serves, the Leahy letter was subsequently found, and it was believed to be the source for the State Dept. contamination. There were four recovered letters: two from NYC and two from Washington. I believe they were the Brokaw letter, the NY Post letter, and the letters to Daschle and Leahy. There were at least two known unrecovered letters: the one from AMI in Florida, and the one that went to Dan Rather's office. It's possible, but uncertain if there were other unrecovered letters.

[muawiyah]

Sheer accident. What happens is that South Florida is one of those places where postal equipment piles up.

Tens of thousands of trays, sacks, containers, etc. have to be shipped to places where they are needed.

The West Palm Beach facility serves as a collection point for surplus MTE (Mail Transport Equipment) going North.

The Philadelphia, Central New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania areas have a myriad of mail manufacturing companies. Much of the South Florida equipment is sent to them through the Philadelphia BMC (Bulk Mail Facility).

They then enter mail in those trays and sacks or other containers at facilities like the Hamilton Township facility.

Because the Arab Terrorists thought the USA had a really fantastic mail service, they confidently dropped the anthrax letters into local collection boxes in South Florida on the Friday or Saturday before they took off on their mission of death.

Little did they know that NOBODY mails anything in those collection boxes on Friday night, or Saturday! As a consequence, when the MVS collection route driver pulls the tray out of the bottom of the collection box and places it in the back of his vehicle, it's possible (probable) that he's not going to see one or two loose pieces of mail.

When he drops the trays on the operations platform, they will be mistaken for empty MTE, and end up being stacked, wrapped and dispatched to someplace else with the letters securely inside.

Later on, as the trays are used somewhere else, the letters would be found and get dispatched with other corporate mail directly to the 010 operation at the Hamilton Facility (where it just happened to get postmarked.) The letter that ended up at AMI could very well have been routed to NJ and then sent back to Florida.

Large companies, particularly those in the business of generating large volumes of mail, take their own mail to the post office. They don't wait around on a carrier to pick it up!

These things seem not to have been explained to the FBI during the initial stages of the investigations, or ever for that matter. They spent millions of dollars digging up mailboxes and draining lakes for no purpose whatsoever.

Their incompetence frightens me!

[muawiyah]

I may be thinking of the little kid who got anthrax. They never found that letter. The postal trays get circulated through corporate offices. If one were contaminated, it could shed spores just anywhere.

[oceanview]

A couple of quick questions:

- why do postal facilities in NJ need equipment sent from Florida, don't they have their own infrastructure of mail processing equipment in place already?

- the letters prepped in florida by the hijackers, where was that done? in their apartments? wouldn't there be traces of material collected from their apartments that would have indicated this?

[muawiyah]

Trays, sacks and other containers run out in places where huge volumes of mail are generated for nationwide delivery.

Trays, sacks and other containers pile up in places where huge volumes of mail are received for delivery from mailers elsewhere.

New Jersey "manufactures mail". Florida "consumes mail". In a similar manner, Florida grows oranges. New Jersey eats oranges.

Empty equipment (sacks, trays, and other containers) are shipped from Florida to New Jersey on a regular basis.

Say, you aren't with the FBI are you?

[muawiyah]

Where were the letters filled with anthrax? So far, no one knows, but they could have done it outside. Since anthrax bacteria can be found everywhere there is dirt and decay, odds are it would be impossible to find the site.

[oceanview]

no, I am not with the FBI.

OK, so this mail processing equipment is what flows with the mail itself, I thought it was part of the permanent infrastructure - boses, post offices, etc.

they loaded the letters outdoors? sure, anything is possible I guess.

[oceanview]

boses=boxes

[Shermy]

You know a lot about postal matters for sure. I've read some theories about the mailing and I've always wondered whether 9/11 itself messed up the postal system, say with delays and reroutings.

As for being mailed at the same time - I'm no expert like Mr. Foster who can detect an "urdu lilt", then a "red, white and blue" tone in the letters language. But the letters were different. And the second set were written neater, and explicit about anthrax, as if the sender or senders were upset their first wave of letters didn't achieve the desired notoriety, and arguably, didn't get the letter's message across.

[muawiyah]

Three or four guys, none of whom was all that good in English, probably could come up with slightly different but otherwise "identical" messages.