Yeah, yeah. I have read with interest all the analysis and profiles of the sender, but I have yet to see a single comment on this: WHO writes "09"?????? The only reason one would EVER formulate the date this way to my knowledge would be online ordering, the inputing a credit card expiration date.
It is a very odd formulation, and I think it's even odder that the FBI wouldn't even note that.
I think they did when they noted that its probably a scientifically trained person - its the type of thing an engineer would do.
Hate to say it, M. But I do that. I am a computer programmer. I have two character buffer for the month and I am going to fill it.
You're only looking at half the oddity. Look again at the description of letters. All caps, but capitals a little larger. I work in printing and see that style of font regularly. It's mostly used in magazines with a snooty kind of attitude. (the New Yorker comes to mind, though I'd have to actually look at an issue to see if I'm right.)
The formatting of the dates is also a magazine-style affectation. This raises the possibility that the person who wrote the letters learned written English by copying a magazine. This doesn't rule out an American. Some of your weird loner types are at least partially self-educated.
Another possibility is that whoever it was used some kind of electronic (probably not online) translator that displays results in a similar format. That's less likely than the above idea, but it should be checked. Hope the FBI is reading this thread!
First off, the FBI was totally wrong on all of its advice and counsel regarding how the letters in question ended up in New Jersey. In some instances where it was impossible to explain how a "contaminated letter" got there, they threw up their hands in despair.
If they'd bothered to ask Postal Inspectors (who they hate for having demonstrated that Lon Horiuchi had no cause to fire at Ruby Ridge, and for many other things besides) they would have discovered that the mere fact a letter, or even a dozen letters, are cancelled in a specific facility, that's no reason to believe that the letters had to be entered into the mail at any serving post offices that may send mail to that facility.
The FBI could also have read FreeRepublic because I have covered this topic repeatedly. If they had done so they would have found that it is a trivial bit of analysis to discover that all of the letters were probably mailed at Boca Raton (where the AMI employee died), and were simply "lost" in a presumably empty flat tray, or trays, which were shipped from West Palm Beach P&DC to Philadelphia BMC and then out to Trenton, or a major mailer in the Trenton area (there are only 8 of them and not a single one of them has been reported to have been examined for anthrax contamination).
Once the anthrax letters were placed in a letter or flat tray, that tray itself became contaminated and could pass on the bacterial spores to anyone who handled the tray, or to any other mail placed in the tray.
It is more than likely the use of New Jersey references in the return addresses was serrendipitous than it was definitive regarding where the mail was entered and the route it traveled. In fact, my scenario - all the pieces entered in Boca Raton on or about September 8 - is really the only way you can account for the mail showing up at various times. A stack of "empty" flat trays would be worked down at a mailer's plant, and as each "lost letter" was discovered, it would be tossed into the mailer's own outgoing dispatch to the local post office. The trays, of course, would be refilled with mail at the mailer's plant.
Those trays might well have been used for different 5-digit sortations in the immediate Trenton vicinity. Although they didn't contain any anthrax laden letters, the bacteria would be "puffed out" through the polypropylene corrugations wherever the tray went and as it was used. There is a possibility that this action itself served to breakup the spore clumps into far smaller sizes.
Such a breakup would explain the "different qualities" of the anthrax mixture. As far as I know no one at the CDC has thought to "test the hypothesis". Of course, if they'd been reading FR 4 weeks ago they could have read about it right here.
There are more answers to all of the questions than are possible to put in this one thread.
I do, but I use "/" and not "-"... of course, sometimes if I'm in a weird mood, I'll write it like "dd mmm yyyy", where "mmm" is the three letter abbrev. for whatever month it is ;0)
"Yeah, yeah. I have read with interest all the analysis and profiles of the sender, but I have yet to see a single comment on this: WHO writes "09"?????? "
slashes of both kinds are used in directory and regexps... hypenating dates makes life a little easier for the programmer...
also it is easier for the programmer to put a 0 in front of the month or the day that is less than 10... presumably many programmers have worked with applications using dates and find it easier to do a 6 or 8 digit string... like today would be 11092001... a 1192001 would be unreadable by the computer
programmers also probably have had a lot of grief working with the lowercase l and the number 1... it wouldn't surprise me if the guy puts a slash inside the number zero, either for readability. I do that myself sometimes.
as for the block handwriting... he may just have been covering up his regular handwriting by writing in all caps.
Also to read this they say that the 3 letters were hand-written. As we determined on FR, 2 of the letters are identical in their layout (even though the paper size is different).
If one of the letters is not a photo-copy of the other, then it was manually duplicated using carbon paper. There are not 3 letters to compare hand-writting samples, however. Only 2 "unique" letters and 3 "unique" envelopes.
Also, this statement is a stretch:3. The author uses the words "can not," when many people prefer to spell it as one word, "cannot." Many more people prefer the contraction "can't".
Great detail is made to document that the author selected his 3 targets deliberately. Why aren't the Florida cases tied to this? Mere coincidence? An opportunist using the Florida attack to add confusion to the east coast attacks? Why have the Florida attacks been dropped off the "radar"?