[TrebleRebel]

anthrax ping

[Beck_isright]

I'm so relieved to know that our Homeland Security boys are on top of things. </coughing up blood sarcasm off

[Lucy Lake]

Ping.

[LibKill]

And some people wonder why I bitch about paying taxes.

[FairOpinion]

ping

[ThirdMate]

How can the G-men track down a letter that went through a post office before the alarm was raised? Are they scanning or photgraphing every piece of mail that goes through the system?
Do I understand this article correctly? After it was realized that the anthrax letters passed through Hamilton, they were able to track down mail that had previously been processed? This is weird.

[genefromjersey]

By the way, if someone knows exactly how a piece of mail, originating in Princeton,NJ would reach Boca Raton, Florida, I would appreciate the input.

I don't need web pages or accusations against whoever. Just facts: for example- goes from Princeton to mail center in Hamilton Twp., NJ. Goes from Hamilton via _____ to______;and from there by ______ to Boca Raton.

I realize 99% of what is going to be posted will be comments about the FBI, etc.,and that You Know Who will post thinly veiled accusations against certain Freeper names; but the exact postal routing would be appreciated. Thanks !

[Donna Lee Nardo]

I wonder if one letter that was missed was the one that killed that nice old lady in Connecticut...and another missed letter which may have killed that woman in the Bronx who worked in a health related field.

[csvset]

Another case for the Mueller Files.

[FairOpinion]

"Authorities believe the letter, which has an October9,2001-Trenton,NJ postmark,passed through the Hamilton,NJ regional processing center at the same time as the "anthrax letters": acquiring a taint as a result."

---

From an article in Nov. 2001:


The Brokaw and Post letters arrived at the Trenton, New Jersey, processing center, in Hamilton Township, on September 18 and had their postage canceled within three hours of each other. Still, officials could not say definitively whether the letters arrived together at the post office.

Those two letters passed through the same letter canceler, and a worker who did maintenance on that machine later contracted cutaneous anthrax.

The Daschle letter arrived in the Hamilton Township facility October 9 and was canceled at 5:45 p.m. It arrived October 11 at the Brentwood facility in Washington, where four postal workers contracted inhalation anthrax and two of them died.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/11/09/rec.fbi.anthrax.letter/

===

I am wondering that out of the thousands of letters that probabably passed through at the same time approximately, why did they save this one as evidence. Who was it from and to whom?

[Mo1]

Who was the letter addressed to?

[piasa]

Arkansas?

[LurkedLongEnough]

"The Killer Strain" by Wash Post investigative reporter Marilyn W. Thompson has many of the possible answers to questions posed here, such as how the old letters hung around so long. If you can stand the blame-making tone of the writing, it's informative and not too sensational. She also covers the Hatfill connection in depth.

[keats5]

This is proof positive that Saddam could have simply misplaced all his anthrax.

[piasa]

Speaking of letters:

Beligium Finds Nerve Gas Ingredients in Letters

[bvw]

[lying long forgotten in an] FBI evidence locker

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)

[Those_Crazy_Liberals]

who was it addressed to? Roger Clinton?

[xm177e2]

Great, we can't even find WMD in FBI evidence lockers... how are we going to find it in Iraq?

[piasa]

FBI letter shows anthrax taint 2 years later

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.

---

* My note : Beebe, Arkansas is associated with Arkansas State University

[First_Salute]

No doubt, Saddam Hussein is sitting in a jail in Iraq, but his jailers are ignoring his pleas, that he is in fact Saddam Hussein. "Yeah. Sure buddy!" they yell back to his cell. "Everybody's Saddam Hussein."