Posted on 08/12/2002 7:55:13 PM PDT by B-bone
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. postal inspectors investigating the anthrax mailings linked to five deaths have discovered a mailbox that tested positive for traces of the bacteria, a postal official said on Monday.
The mailbox was found on Thursday night in Princeton, New Jersey, and has been sent to a U.S. Army facility in Aberdeen, Maryland, for forensic analysis, U.S. Postal Service spokesman Dan Mihalko told Reuters.
He said the mailbox was discovered as investigators checked hundreds of boxes from which mail is funneled to a postal sorting center in Trenton, New Jersey, where four anthrax-laced letters were postmarked last year.
"We've been looking at all the mailboxes that feed into the Trenton facility," Mihalko said. "One of them did test positive."
The mailbox was sent to the army laboratory for more conclusive tests, he said, adding, "We've seen in the past, field tests that turn up false positives."
Five people died and 13 were sickened last year as anthrax-tainted letters were sent to government officials and media outlets in Washington, Florida and New York. The letters were mailed in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The FBI launched an investigation in October to find the person responsible for the anthrax attacks. Authorities are offering a $2.5 million reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.
Interesting, the only cases apparently that were found at targets, or among postal workers, was this woman, Mrs. Nguyen who worked in the ear, nose and throat facility in NYC, and the elderly lady in Connecticut.
Not hardly, as the circumstantial evidence surrounding Hatfill is fairly significant, such as:
Hatfill owned property and rented a storage area in Florida, the site of the first attack. Read rest of article here.
Hatfill had medical school training in Africa and a connection to biological weapons training programs run by the CIA. Hatfill graduated in 1984 from the Godfrey Huggins Medical School in Zimbabwe, which was known as Rhodesia until 1980.
Not far from the medical school in the nation's capital, Harare, is the upper-middle-class suburb of Greendale. The anthrax-laced letters to Daschle and Leahy each contained the same fictitious return address: 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J. There is no Greendale School in New Jersey. But there is a grade school by that name in the Harare suburb.
In the late 1970s, when Hatfill was in Rhodesia, an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers. In 1993, an African news agency reported that a former officer from the white minority army's special forces claimed that the anthrax outbreak that killed 182 and sickened more than 10,000 people between 1978 and 1980 was launched by the army.
On his college biography and his resume, Hatfill says he worked with the Rhodesian army and a group called the Selous Scouts during the time frame of the anthrax outbreak. The Selous Scouts were an elite unit of the white Rhodesian government's army that specialized in tracking and killing enemy units in the back country.
Hatfill has been immunized against anthrax and had access to the bacteria while he worked as a research fellow at the Fort Detrick lab in the late 1990s. He is also very comfortable working with extremely hazardous material. Hatfill studied the deadly Ebola virus in the Army's highest level "hot suite" during his stint at the Maryland lab.
Rest of article here .
This is Case 18 by UCLA's reckoning. The patient is a bookkeeper and thus handles quite a bit of mail; the presumption is that she tore open a piece of mail cross-contaminated by the 10/9 (Leahy and Daschle) letters at the Hamilton Township processing facility where four postal workers were infected.
I thought that anthrax spores passed through envelope paper like sand through a sieve, but apparently the paper acts more like a sponge. Spores were absorbed by the Leahy and Daschle envelopes, then were squeezed out by the postal handling machinery. Other envelopes absorbed these spores in turn; when those cross-contaiminated envelopes were ripped, the spores along the tear became aerosolized. For Case 18, that meant contracting cutaneous anthrax through a small break in her facial skin (such as a pimple); for poor Otillie Lundgren, who habitually ripped her junk mail in half, that meant dying of inhalation anthrax. So the lesson for today, kids, is to use a letter opener, the sharper the better.
Wouldn't this have been undertaken last November/December?
If I'm right, this is old information that has been released as "new". Which would serve as proof that the anthrax story is being "managed". It would also mean, in turn, that the time has come for the "managers" to start releasing such information.
Which means something is underway...
I've no doubt the two events are related. But I'm not sure how...
Was Hatfill Step 1 and the mailbox story a counter-step? Or was Hatfill Step 1, the mailbox story Step 2, further steps to follow...???
She really wants apprehending the anthrax crew to be her "win" but if you read her from beginning to end, she doesn't come up with anything out of the ordinary.
Sac
What are the chances that they're really investigating YOU???
Sac
What are the chances that they're really investigating YOU???
Sac
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