On September 10, a Canadian study issued re Dugway simulant — reporting on a study done after an anthrax threat was received in connection with Bin Laden’s farm manager in Sudan. It found that leakage occurred prior to opening and immediately dispersed. Only an estimated 16 people in the USG were aware of it at the time of the anthrax mailings. Al-Timimi shared a fax with famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Charles Bailey. If Seikaley were better informed, he would have realized that Hatfill was a crummy candidate. Sekaily’s brother and his wife (at the time he was leaking to the press) were publicly formally arguing that after 9/11, folks shouldn’t assume that Arabs are behind terrorism. Well, one would hope that it is the evidence, not Thanksgiving dinner table talk by self-described Palestinian nationalists such as his sister-in-law, that guides decisions in these matters. But given that he reports he didn’t read anything and briefings were all done orally, it’s a wonder any serious analysis was done at all.
A copy of the Canadian report was mailed by the Canadians to Bradley, head of the CDC investigation, but he says he didn’t open the email. He says it would not have had caused them to do anything differently, but some at Brentwood may disagree given that they object that the facility was not closed earlier. In the Canadian report, I believe reference was made to leaking from the corners, in addition to the pore size of the envelope (but I don’t have it in front of me).
“end to end, front and back”...
So do you mean along the outside edges of the rectangle?
Or was there a tape on where it sealed. The place where an envelope’s adhesive sometimes fails is at the corner.
Daschle somewhat ambiguously says it was not heavily taped, leaving it open that it was taped, just not heavily taped.
The envelope was made of recycled paper (and that was apparent from writing noting that on the envelope.
A Postal Inspector deduced that you could make a photo of the envelopes, front and back, (after they were sterilized) and see if the tape edges (at the tears) matched up.
He did the photos; matched all the tears; and concluded all the tape on all the envelopes came from the same roll.
The envelopes were taped front and back lengthwise (according to materials I read concerning the matter), leaving the "corners: and top edge (and maybe the bottom edge) exposed. Daschle is not an expert in taping but I believe that what he saw was a very carefully and methodically taped envelope that was designed to feed anthrax spores out into the environment as a steady rate beginning on a date certain.
Without going into the details, the terrorists appeared to believe USPS gives very good service to hand addressed single-piece rate First-Class letter mail dropped into corner collection boxes on Friday evening (after prayers).
Turns out USPS gives such mail just about the worst possible service. The consequence was the envelopes were transported to the wrong places. This screwed up the timing and made them all start shedding anthrax spores in vast quantities right in the first postal facilities where they were handled.
That wasn't their plan.
Oh, yeah, although this stuff would ordinarily go via air and thereby travel through BWI, or DIA or DCA (shutting them down), it ended up on trucks and went directly to Brentwood.
Air transportation in and out of Washington DC was NOT disturbed at all by this attack.
No doubt Ken was having irregular heart palpitations when he found out the envelopes were taped, and announced the idea that the way the anthrax spores were "weaponized" was by action of the mail processing equipment which had a shake and hammer effect on the envelopes (with the tape serving to enhance transmission of the blows from the outside of the envelopes to the inside where the anthrax was contained). Not that the Soviets would have come up with such an idea, but they probably did.
Someone else came up with it too.
In fact, it's an obvious application.
I think if you dig back through everything ever posted on the Anthrax Attack you'll find that I built on Ken's idea about mail processing equipment and noted that Saddam Hussein himself had LOOTED the main post office in Kuwait where several state of the art single position LSMs (letter sorting machines) had been put into operation. Those machines had been taken to Iraq along with the vast warehouse of Kuwait collectible stamps.
Saddam's guys had plenty of time practicing the use of LSMs to smack Anthrax spores inside taped letters and see if they could "weaponize" them.
Personally I think they succeeded. Doesn't mean they did this attack, but someone in Saddam's operations at the Baghdad main post office was probably an AlQaida informant.
._.-.