Posted on 03/09/2007 8:41:11 AM PST by jpl
The government's stories about how effective anthrax could be were very successful and distracted terrorists around the world into futzing around with the wrong bacteria.
Still, I believe the context of my discussion of the postal workforce took place within the framework of the TARGET population from the terrorist point of view.
A Japanese terrorist group got caught with its pants down using sarin gas. Even though they'd done extensive testing themselves, it proved harder to handle and control than they'd been led to believe.
We can only hope the next batch of terrorists go into the jungle seeking ebola samples.
That's primarily because the terrorists were stupid people, generally uninformed (and maybe misinformed), so they planned an attack that was impossible.
Rest assured tat "they" planned to kill you even if they didn't succeed and their plan was actually incapable of getting that highly desirable result ~ from their point of view eh.
More like Friday, September 7, 2001, at the Boca Raton FL post office.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, though, has to be on anybody's target list. She's far enough on the left to have friends who were among those in the Young People's Socialst League (YPSL) who got caught up in the strike at the USPS Bulk and Foreign Facility in New Jersey, and then later caught doing an assassination attempt on then Postmaster General Bill Bolger.
Although she's gained some respectability through the years I have always been of the impression her job in this has been to distract attention from YPSL remnants.
I haven't said otherwise. I'm just posting FACTS to dispute your totally insane belief that the anthrax letters were mailed in Florida. I'm trying to show how you ignore FACTS and rely totally upon an absurd BELIEF that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That's all.
Think back, out of the last 100 pieces of misdelivered mail you've ever received, most of them met the characteristics for this particular category.
In today's modern postal system, such mail is a very tiny and diminishing volume of mail. If it can get lost it will.
Other than a handful of newsletters misrouted and lost in "supposedly empty postal equipment", in 4 decades of experience involving hundreds of USPS facilities, and the observation of tens of billions of pieces of mail at some stage or the other in processing, just about all the "lost mail" I've seen was of that type.
Major mailers regularly "present" such materials to Postal Executives at MTAC (Mailer's Technical Advisory Committee" meetings.
I'm not saying no one in USPS cares of course. They care a lot. You betcha!
I think you've got some kind of bizarre, distorted hangup about the postal system resulting from your experiences there. And it alters your perspective about everything -- to the point of total absurdity.
I haven't received "100 pieces of misdelivered mail" in my entire life -- and I'm 70 years old. I can't even remember the last piece of "misdelivered mail" I received, but I'd have to guess that it was something addressed to someone who once lived at the same address where I currently live. I don't recall EVER receiving a hand-addressed letter that was misdelivered. (Of course, that doesn't include the 17 pounds of magazines I received via air mail from Auckland, New Zealand, a couple weeks ago. That wasn't the post office's fault. The sender in New Zealand sent the magazines to the wrong person.) If I've received misdelivered mail, it was almost certainly something from some bulk mailing like a magazine or a flyer.
You can't escape it. I found a couple of pieces the other day in fact.
Still, for each piece misdelivered, there are even more pieces missorted, but subsequent sortations correct those errors.
My basic argument is that everything that happened with those letters was "normal" and "expected", and they got delayed because of when they were mailed, where they were mailed, and how they were mailed.
There are facts to back up what you say -- to a degree, but they don't even remotely suggest that the letters were sent from anywhere but Central New Jersey. And the letters show that the mail was NOT delivered incorrectly.
Because the person addressing the envelopes wrote the number 1 with serifs, and because he wrote at a slight angle, the computerized ZIP CODE reader read the ZIP on the Leahy letter incorrectly, and, as a result, that letter was misdirected to ZIP 20520 instead of to 20510. The error was caught BEFORE delivery.
And the ZIP reader couldn't even read the ZIP on the Daschle letter, so a human had to type it in -- doing it correctly.
There were no such problems with the media letters. Part of the explanation for this also disputes your beliefs. The writing on the media letters was nearly TWICE THE SIZE as the writing on the senate letters, further indicating that the letters weren't all addressed and mailed at the same time.
That's how a single piece got entered at the letter drop in the Boca Raton post office finance station. The others went into various street collection boxes on Friday evening before 9/11.
However, they used the same tape roll to wrap all of them.
I believe every handwriting expert who has looked at the handwriting agrees that ALL the letters and envelopes were written by the same person. The FBI's experts do. I'm the only one who claims that one item -- the date and only the date -- on the first letter was written by someone else.
The reason for the difference in the size of the writing is explained in my book.
You can rationalize things all you want, but the FACTS dispute just about everything you say.
That BS was NEVER believable not from day one.
on this point - I use holiday cards as a barometer. they are single piece first class handwritten mail, I can never recall getting a christmas card from a relative/friend in florida/boston/california/north carolina, delivered to me in NY, with a postmark someplace else. am I just lucky?
I saw that. And for the record you're still completely full of it.
If the amount of antrax used had been divided equally and then deliberately planted directly inside the lungs of every person from Boca Raton to NYC there still wouldn't have been the number of fatalities you mentioned.
You're post was hysterical BS devoid of any factual information whatsoever.
You couldn't even get the number of Postal Service employees correct. You stated 800,000 of them would have died. For the record, there aren't that many Postal Workers in the entire United States.
Also there's no possible way that the anthrax powder in question could have made it from those envelopes into the lungs of every single Postal worker from Maine to California to Alaska and then killed every single one of them. It's simply not physically possible.
As to your claim that 'millions' on the Eastern seaboard would have died, well that's simply ludicrous. There weren't enough active spores contained in that sample. In order to bring about that level of fatalities. Kilograms of the stuff would have had to be used.
It's not that I'm dense.
What 'it' is is the fact that you were either deliberately fearmongering (possible) or that you are completely igmorant of any of the facts surrounding the clinical aspects of anthrax yet still decided to post what you did anyway in some kind of pathetic attempt to appear like you knew what you were talking about. (Much more likely IMO) In short you were talking out of your backside.
People who spread fantastically impossible rumors of what 'could have' happened engage in reprehensibly irresponsible behavior. It's because of people like you spreading goofy nonsense like what you posted that hospitals and first responders become overwhelmed because with panicky people who are ignorant enough to believe your nonsense.
Even if their attack had gone off exactly as planned, no where near the numbers of people you wrote would have been killed. The only damage they would have suffered would have come about from idiots spreading falsehoods.
Do yourself a favor. Get some facts on Infectious Disease Transmission Dynamics or Bioterrorism Agents or what the Bioterrorism Public Health Threat actually is before you start spouting off irresponsible bull**** designed to do nothing more than frighten people and make yourself look more knowledgeable than you already are.
L
If, instead, you have a bunch of 9/11 type terrorists, they have only a surface knowledge of what they are doing, and might well have thought they could kill everybody if they turned this stuff loose.
The FBI profile has totally failed to turn up the slightest bit of evidence leading to the terrorists themselves, so it's time to cut loose from it and broaden your horizons.
It's just possible the ignorant barbarians at the gate know how to use fire even if they don't know how to use matches.
Given my many years of being highly sensitized to what the mail was doing, I've noticed getting a piece of cancelled mail from a place other than the point of mailing almost every week.
At the moment I'm preparing to write a letter to the Postmaster General concerning the un-readability of the 6 pt font some idiot has allowed for use in permit imprints. It's getting difficult to tell standard mail from FCM.
You may also have noticed that mailers no longer have to show the date of mailing on bills they send you. At the same time they've shortened the time between the actual mailing and the due date of the bills. Target and JCPenney have dropped the actual lead time to under two weeks (for example). If you are not in the practice of writing checks to pay credit accounts the day you receive them you should begin to do so!
I'm going to start looking at the postmarks more carefully.
I fell for nothing. I was responding to what you wrote here:
If the attack had gone off as planned, at least 25,000 people on Capitol Hill would have died of anthrax. Another 800,000 people in the USPS would have died. Tens of millions of postal customers, particularly in the East Coast, would have died.
This paragraph is patently and demonstrably false. To begin with there aren't 800,000 USPS employees. There are slightly more than 600,000. You're implying that a couple of envelopes contaminated with with a few grams of anthrax could somehow magically kill more USPS personnel than actually exist in the entire United States!
As far as "tens of millions" of postal customers dying, this is certified 100% unadulterated hysterical ignorant uninformed bull**** from the word go.
The LD50 for aerosolized anthrax spores is around 8000 colony forming units. LD50 means that 50% of the people exposed to 8000 colony forming units of anthrax will die if it's left untreated.
Now considering that the stuff used in the attacks was nearly 90% dead to begin with and that at most a few grams were present in all the letters combined your assertions above become ridiculous on their face. There simply wasn't enough material involved to affect the numbers of people you claimed.
When one adds up the numbers in your original post one comes up with a figure of something like 20-30 million fatalities from just a few grams of the stuff having contaminated a couple of office buildings and postal facilities.
Even if by some miracle the terrorists had managed to contaminate directly the lungs of 60 million people with an LD50 of 'refined' anthrax there's no way on Earth the fatality level would have approached the numbers in your absurd assertions.
Anthrax is easily treatable with standard off-the-shelf antibiotics once it's identified.
Do you begin to see why I called BS on your post?
It was hysterical fear mongering of the very worst sort. In fact what you posted was in my view reprehensibly irresponsible.
I deal with planning for and responding to catastrophic events for a living my friend, including things with scary sounding names like 'bioterrorism'.
For the most part everything you've heard in the major media is incorrect, and that's putting it charitably. I'll go so far as to say that the 'casualty figures' put out by the mainstream media and parroted by people like you are nothing more than made up horsecrap designed to make the ones saying it look less ignorant and foolish than they actually are.
Do yourself a favor. Click on those links I provided you earlier and run through the information contained in the coursework. Then you'll have some facts on which to base some sort of rational conclusions.
But to continue to toss around words like "tens of millions would have died" is not only false, it's inflammatory and almost criminally irresponsible.
Public Health workers have to work uncountable hours to counteract the huge volume of sheer bullcrap slung by people like you when they should be dealing with other much more important matters.
Posts like yours aren't helpful in the least. In fact they're a very real part of the problem.
So knock it off.
L
This site looks pretty good:
http://www.lunewsviews.com/postal-employees-stats-at-a-glance.htm
The count was 891,005 employees of all types in 2001.
I'm afraid YOU LOSE.
Ed, you may now release all the other secret information everyone involved in turning over the anthrax case traces has acquired over the last 6.5 years. This guy seems to need "REDUCATION".
Yes, fur shur, we were fear-mongering when we implied that the TERRORISTS planned to kill lots and lots of people. No, they certainly didn't ~ they just wanted to be our friends but they were mis-understood. Poor dears.
/SARC
Lurker, the problem is there are entirely too many people like you who continue to think that our response to the Islamofascist threat should be merely proportionate and narrowly tailored to go after only the individuals who might have been involved in the airplane attack of 9/11.
Irrespective of the fact that they only killed 3,000 people (none in your neighborhood obviously), their intent was to kill many more, and they will attempt to do so again and again until we exterminate them.
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