Posted on 10/13/2001 9:03:35 PM PDT by OKCSubmariner
EXCERPTED:
A broadening national bioterrorism investigation turned toward St. Petersburg late Friday after NBC officials disclosed that a New York employee has contracted anthrax.
A woman who opens the mail for news anchor Tom Brokaw was diagnosed with a skin form of anthrax several days after she opened a letter that contained white powder and was postmarked from St. Petersburg.
The New York Times on Friday received a letter with a white powder and the St. Petersburg Times received one earlier in the week. All three letters were postmarked in St. Petersburg.
Federal law enforcement officials said late Friday that all three letters postmarked St. Petersburg tested negatively for anthrax.
[However, the test for the letter sent from St. Petersburg to the Brokaw aide must have been unsuccessful (too small a sample size?) because the aide in fact did contract Anthrax. This point was made by Ted Kopel on ABC Nightline last night. This calls into question the negative test results for the other two letters since they were also sent from St. Petersburg and may not have had inadequate sample size].
• An assistant to NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw contracted the skin-based form of anthrax after opening a "threatening" letter to her boss.
Officials quickly said there was no known link to either the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or the more serious inhaled form of anthrax that killed a supermarket tabloid editor in Florida last week. The 38-year-old NBC employee was being treated with antibiotics and is expected to recover. The letter was postmarked in St. Petersburg on Sept. 20 and opened Sept. 25, authorities said.
St. Petersburg Times columnist Howard Troxler opened his letter at his desk Tuesday. As he did so, a white powdery substance, resembling sugar or salt, spilled out.
Troxler stopped opening the letter. Authorities were called to the newspaper's offices in downtown St. Petersburg. Police put the envelope in an airtight container and drove it to a state health lab in Tampa for analysis. Firefighters covered Troxler's desk with a plastic sheet and yellow emergency-scene tape reading "caution."
Health officials found no signs of anthrax or bacteria in the powder. The envelope and a letter inside also tested negative.
The letter had no return address and was postmarked St. Petersburg. It bears a code 337, then a space, then 1.
Anything that is mailed in Seminole, Largo, Bay Pines, Gulfport, Pinellas Park or any St. Petersburg neighborhood goes through the main post office on First Avenue N and is stamped with a 337. [Actual envelop shown in article and the zip code is visible as 33701 and the postmark can be made out as early (“0?”) October 2001 for St. Petersburg]
The cryptic letter misspelled Troxler's name and had little punctuation. It said:
"Howard Toxler ... 1st case of disease now blow away this dust so you see how the real thing flys. OKLAHOMA-RYDER TRUCK! Skyway bridge-18 wheels." [Oklahoma-Ryder Truck capitalized for emphasis by FR poster, original version did not use capital letters]
I also think you are right that the person in St. Petersburg who is mailing these letters is involved in the terror campaign, regardless of whether his particular letters happen to carry anthrax. Even this latest letter, the one to the local paper, was mailed before Brokaw was identified publicly as a target. To believe that this was just a coincidence would imply that the mailer sent a threat referencing anthrax ("1st case of disease now blow away this dust so you see how the real thing flys") and a threatening letter to Brokaw, who was, unbeknownest to the public, already the target of an anthrax-laced letter, by chance. That is, on the face of it, fantastic.
brigette, thanks for your conttribution.
What is this telling us? That the anthrax attacks to date are not the "real thing," just warnings. And that the real anthrax attack(s) will involve blowing anthrax through the air (crop-dusters, the A/C of a skyscraper or plane, truck bomb?).
I'm driving over it later this morning. Ugh...
Or dispersed by blowing it off a boat that is sailing down a river. (I remember that scenario from a fiction book I read once, though I can't remember the title or the author.) If you put the spores into some kind of a tank (compressed air, helium, or paint or insecticide sprayer), you could open the tank while sailing close to shore on a breezy or windy day and let the wind carry the spores where you wanted them. (Assuming the contents of the tank doesn't kill the spores.)
Now wait a minute. The racists and the xenophobes on FR (almost all of them newbies) have been saying for weeks that since we all know just what the terrorists look like, all we have to do is round up and intern or deport anyone who looks or talks funny, and everything will be OK.
If McVeigh were an OBL surrogate, will these newbies offer to intern themselves, I wonder?
Many of us who have participated on those threads about the OKC bombing have long worried that something would (sooner or later) come back to haunt this country. The Clintons wanted a "white militia" face on the incident, not a Middle Eastern face--Clinton was trying to get the Nobel Peace Prize for peace in the Middle East, after all. The problem with this was that although they did catch a couple of the perps, they let a lot of (in my estimation) much more dangerous men walk away and continue their work. Some of them have turned up in the September 11th investigation.
OKCSubmariner, Jayna Davis, BlueDogDemo, and several others have tried to warn not only Freepers, but the authorities, and for the most part received only insults, stonewalling, and threats in return.
It may have been licked to seal and the stamp too...and that gives a sample of DNA in the saliva for cross matching when they arrest the perp.
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