Posted on 04/28/2003 10:28:14 AM PDT by Shermy
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - A crew member of an Egyptian merchant ship has died in northern Brazil, almost certainly from anthrax, after opening a suitcase suspected of containing the substance which he was taking to Canada.
A spokesman for Brazilian federal police in the Amazon state of Para said on Monday an autopsy of the Egyptian man, whom he named as Ibrahim Saved Soliman Ibrahim, showed that he had died after vomiting, internal bleeding and multiple organ failure.
"He was the victim of anthrax," said Castro, adding that police were 90 percent certain that Ibrahim had died of anthrax.
Ibrahim died in the hotel were he was staying on April 11. Several health workers who found his body were taken to a hospital after becoming ill but are now out of danger.
Ibrahim had traveled to Brazil from Cairo to join his ship, the Wabi Alaras, which loaded bauxite in the Amazon to take to Canada.
"We imagine that this is about bioterrorism and Brazil was just used as a point of transfer," said Castro.
Ibrahim died before his ship sailed to Canada, where it was quarantined by authorities last week.
Canada was alerted about the ship through Interpol.
Castro said Ibrahim had been given the suitcase in Cairo by an unidentified person and was due to deliver it to somebody in Canada. But he doubted Ibrahim knew what the content of the bag was otherwise he most likely would not have opened it.
"He opened it because he was curious," Castro said.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, five people died in still-unsolved anthrax mailings.
Unnamed source. Heck, they don't even say an "unnamed source" said it.
Anyway, the Canadians seem very fast to say "non" at every stage of this investigation.
They would only know this (after his death) if the hotel room was infected. I wonder where he stayed in...Sao Paulo?
It makes perfect sense. Saddam refused Bush's exile deal before the war because he thought we were bluffing. He thought we wouldn't risk a WMD exchange in the end game. (Perhaps he also thought he could pull off a Stalingrad in Baghdad -- we don't know.) Bush decided we had no choice but to take that risk, given the magnitude of the provocation and the threat, so he upped the ante and went in -- but taking care to leave Saddam with something to play for all the way to the end (faux "decapitation strikes" notwithstanding). Don't forget, we had a back-channel through Putin for 18 months before the war and during the war -- a channel to communicate with Saddam, to confound him, perhaps, to keep him on the realistic, pragmatic plane (not that hard, I suspect, despite the public rhetoric), to feed us info on his psychological state, whether he was making backup plans in case his deterrent failed, etc. That was an enormously powerful tool for keeping this thing under control.
If you just conceptualize Saddam as a gangster -- a clever, ruthless, hedonistic thug -- then he really doesn't seem quite so scary, even with WMD. If you deal with him like that, and not like the reincarnation of Saladin or Nebuchnezzar, he's probably going to react on the same level. I recall being relieved when I realized it was Saddam who made the anthrax, not al-Qaeda, because I knew that meant that we were dealing with an opponent susceptible to rational calculation and normal human considerations of self-interest.
At one level, this war was a far more dangerous operation than most people understand -- fully comparable to the Cuban Missile crisis, at the very least. OTOH, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most likely outcome was always that reason and self-interest would prevail.
Now, what about my idea that Bush would stall to give us a chance to build up biodefenses, so we could have gone in shielded against any doomsday retaliation? Well, there could be several reasons why Bush eschewed a further delay, but my own post mortem analysis is that any improvements we could make to our civil defenses in the next year or two would still leave the whole apparatus hopelessly leaky. If we waited a year, or two years, maybe Saddam couldn't take out New York or Washington, but he could still kill a million people in Manchester or Melbourne, and that's still not within the realm of "acceptable" losses. That's where my argument got real handy-wavy, and that's where it failed. If Saddam attacked us and a non-leaky defense against his WMD takes ten years to put in place, then what are our options: let 9/11 go unpunished, or risk a miltary showdown, offering Saddam only his own skin to play for? Well, I guess we know now what option Bush decided to go for.
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