The following chart might be relevant. It's apparently from the CDC. I found it on Ed Lake's web site; I haven't seen the original CDC source (nor do I have a reference to the original).
Posted on 08/16/2003 4:44:47 PM PDT by genefromjersey
Scientist Found Slain In His Loudoun Home
Otherwise, their attack letters will go right through the system untracked.
One of the folks arrested was a letter carrier in Staten Island. At the time he was described as "message central" for AlQaida in North America. We haven't heard much about him lately.
If AlQaida had but had him place the anthrax letters in a 5-digit tray we'd gotten none of this information. Even worse, if he'd seeded a Carrier Route Presort mailing, the amount of information we'd had for tracking the mail and the route of infection would be almost non-existent.
That may be because he is, in fact, a member of AlQaida itself. This constant return of the focus to Dr. Hatfill is definitely reminescent of AlQaida's obsession with destroying the World Trade Center.
We know they tried it twice.
We're lucky they stuck with the collection box, instead of mailing the 500 pieces required for bulk rate! LOL! If it was just daubed instead of canceled, and put in a tray, would it have gotten ID-tagged anywhere along the way? If it weren't pre-barcoded, it probably would have been run on an MLOCR to be upgraded (bar coded) and would have gotten an ID tag there. If it were put in a manual tray, it would depend on how diligent any downstream facility was about trying to upgrade (automate) manual letters. Could have been the luck of the draw... On the other hand, the letter carriers generally only send mail to the plant loose - so they don't see the presort and 5-dig trays, so maybe the risk wasn't quite as great as it appears. Maybe Al-Qaida should have gotten their messenger to be a clerk in a plant in order have had that opportunity; of course, then they would never see the public, or get to scope out potential terror sites.
This is getting too complex for this hour of the day! LOL!
Why wasn't this evidence in the possession of the Postal Inspectors? THEY actually have to protect their co-workers lives, unlike the FBI. The FBI is Yet-Another-Rogue-Federal-Barony-Answerable-To-None (YAFBATN)
CAMBRIDGE, U.K.--Earlier this week a senior judge was appointed to lead an investigation into the reported suicide of biological weapons expert David Kelly, a veteran of numerous inspections of former Soviet bioweapons facilities and of 37 inspections in Iraq during the 1990s. Kelly had become embroiled in an ugly spat between the government and the BBC over controversial news reports that officials had "sexed up" intelligence reports on Iraq prior to the war.
Kelly's death closely followed the revelation last week that he was the principal source of the BBC reports. The tragedy has left Kelly's colleagues not only saddened but perplexed that someone who proved so quietly determined in dealings with evasive officials in Russia and Iraq could have become so boxed in.
Kelly, a microbiologist by training and a senior adviser to the Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat of the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence, was widely respected for his expertise and his courteous, but forceful, dealings with adversaries bent on hiding illicit bioweapons activities.
As one of the chief weapons inspectors in Iraq, Kelly made one of the biggest discoveries of his life. In the early 1990s, searching for evidence of an offensive bioweapons effort in Iraq, Kelly and U.S. colleague Richard Spertzel noticed something suspicious: A few years earlier, Iraq had gone on a buying spree, importing 39 tons of bacterial growth media.
Officials produced documents claiming that the agar was for hospitals to diagnose infections. But when the inspectors compared Iraqi imports with those into neighboring countries Iran and Syria, figuring they should be similar, "it was clear that Iraq's imports were way too high," Kelly said in an interview with Science shortly before his death.
In addition, the agar's bulk packaging did not correspond with its intended use. The inspectors accused Iraqi officials of forging the documents and importing the agar for the production of anthrax and other strains, forcing them in 1995 to acknowledge for the first time that Iraq had pursued a clandestine offensive bioweapons program.
Important preparation for his later roles came during his tenure, from 1984 to 1992, as head of microbiology at the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment in Porton Down. When Kelly arrived at the former weapons laboratory, it had only a skeleton crew of microbiologists, and they were primarily involved in the decontamination of Scotland's Gruinard Island, where Great Britain had conducted tests with weaponized anthrax during World War II.
Kelly made a scientific case for doubling the division's resources to step up biodefense R&D and in 1986 was granted 2 years' funding to demonstrate that it would work. Kelly recruited several young scientists and, "through his enthusiasm, energized the team," says Graham Pearson, head of Porton Down at the time. The division got high marks in the 2-year review, and by the 1991 Gulf War, Pearson says, "we were in a position to deploy a limited biodefense capability." It's thanks to Kelly, Pearson says, that "Porton Down today has world-class facilities."
Word of Kelly's achievements reached Rolf Ekeus, the first head of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to investigate Iraq's illicit weapons programs. He tapped Kelly to lead the first bioweapons team in Iraq in August 1991. Pearson, who wrote an authoritative account of the UNSCOM years, says that Kelly's knowledge, coupled with "his persistent yet polite questioning" of Iraqi personnel, "helped to uncover much of what was being hidden by Iraq."
Kelly also was a key player in efforts in the early 1990s to ferret out the extent of the Soviet Union's offensive bioweapons efforts. After key details of the program emerged from two defectors in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a grudging Russia signed a trilateral agreement in 1992 that called for inspections at facilities suspected of being engaged in recent bioweapons activities. The initiative unraveled in the mid-1990s due to Russia's reluctance to come clean on its past activities and refusal to permit inspections of military labs. Kelly, the only expert to have taken part in all the trilateral site visits, had warned recently that Russia has yet to demonstrate convincingly that it has abandoned its offensive bioweapons program.
It's unclear whether the forthcoming inquiry will provide closure for Kelly's colleagues. "He was one of the finest and most dedicated men I have known," says former UNSCOM inspector Debra Krikorian, who also worked with Kelly on the trilateral initiative. Adds Pearson, "He will be sorely missed, as his knowledge and expertise were truly unique."
Saturday, August 16, 2003
BY KEVIN COUGHLIN
Star-Ledger Staff
Anthrax sent through New Jersey during the deadly attacks of 2001 has turned up in Arkansas -- in an FBI evidence locker, authorities said yesterday.
Agents came upon the sealed letter while cleaning out the locker, and decided to have it tested by Arkansas health officials as a precaution before forwarding it to the FBI in Newark, said Special Agent William Temple in Little Rock.
A swab-test of the letter produced a positive finding Monday. The result was confirmed Thursday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is doing further analysis to determine the strain of anthrax and other details, said Nancy Rosenstein of the CDC.
Authorities believe the letter, bearing a Trenton postmark of Oct. 9, 2001, was cross-contaminated by anthrax-laced letters processed there that day.
Nobody in Arkansas appears to have been infected, officials said yesterday.
The 2001 anthrax attacks killed five people, sickened 17 others -- including seven who lived or worked in New Jersey -- and disrupted postal operations in a nation that was still reeling from the Sept. 11 terror strikes.
At least four tainted letters to government and media offices were processed in September and October 2001 in Hamilton Township, near Trenton. The FBI and postal authorities hunted for letters that were processed there around the same time as the anthrax letters.
As part of that search, an FBI agent and a postal inspector retrieved a letter in April 2002 from a resident of Beebe, Ark. *
Details of the letter were relayed to FBI investigators in Newark, Temple said. The letter itself, triple-bagged for safety, then was stored in the locker.
"We did not have any reason to think this was an anthrax letter," said Temple, who runs that office.
"We were asked to find these random letters. The purpose was not to test for anthrax, but to determine information from these letters that would help in the investigation -- the senders of the letter, that type of thing," he said.
Temple said the belated decision to forward the letter to Newark was "just an effort to get rid of that piece of evidence. It was a routine thing." The letter, for now, remains with the Arkansas Department of Health.
One expert suggested that the discovery, nearly two years after the attacks, proves the hardiness and potency of the bioweapon.
"If they swabbed it and were able to grow a culture from it, that's fairly strong contamination, I would think," said David Siegrist, a bioterrorism researcher at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
The anthrax case has frustrated the FBI and fueled its critics. Some have questioned the agency's focus on Steven Hatfill, a former federal virologist called a "person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Hatfill maintains he is innocent.
In June, the FBI drained a Maryland pond near Hatfill's former home. A search for anthrax-processing equipment came up empty.
Through a spokesman, Hatfill has complained about FBI harassment. But yesterday a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered Hatfill to pay a $5 traffic ticket, issued after he was struck by an FBI vehicle that was tailing him. Hatfill had tried to photograph the vehicle.
A $65 million decontamination of the Hamilton Township postal center, closed since October 2001, is scheduled for November.
One year ago, officials announced they had found a trace of anthrax in a Princeton mailbox, prompting speculation that the attacks originated there. The case has yielded few developments since.
The following chart might be relevant. It's apparently from the CDC. I found it on Ed Lake's web site; I haven't seen the original CDC source (nor do I have a reference to the original).
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