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Note that the spider in your picture is a Brown Recluse Spider.

One of the hijackers, Ahmed Al-Haznawi, went to the ER on June 25, 2001 with what now appears to have been cutaneous anthrax and not a bite of a Brown Recluse Spider, according to Dr. Tsonas, the doctor who treated him, and other experts. It was his souvenir from Kandahar where virulent anthrax was later found.

“No one is dismissing this,” said CIA Director Tenet. Alhaznawi had just arrived in the country on June 8. His exposure perhaps related to a camp he had been in Afghanistan. He said he got the blackened gash-like lesion when he bumped his leg on a suitcase two months earlier. Two months earlier he had been in camp near Kandahar (according to a videotape he later made serving as his last Will and Testament). His last will and testament is mixed in with the footage by the al-Qaeda’s Sahab Institute for Media Production that includes Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. There are some spiders that on rare occasions bite and cause such a blackened eschar (notably the Brown Recluse Spider found in some parts of the United States and most famous for terrorizing little Miss Muffet).

Dr. Tara O’Toole of the Biodefense Center at John Hopkins concluded it was anthrax. The former head of that group, Dr. Henderson, now director of the office of public health preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, explained: “The probability of someone this age having such an ulcer, if he’s not an addict and doesn’t have diabetes or something like that, is very low. It certainly makes one awfully suspicious.” The FBI says no anthrax was found where the hijackers were. (The FBI tested the crash sites where the planes came down and found no traces of anthrax). Although no doubt there are some other diseases that lead to similar sores, it is reasonable to credit that it was cutaneous anthrax considering all the circumstances, to include the finding by the 9/11 Commission that “In 2001, likely that the John Hopkins people are correct that the lesion was cutaneous anthrax.” Wait a minute - did the 911 Commission really conclude that? Wow!

At the time, CBS reported that “U.S. troops are said to have found another biological weapons research lab near Kandahar, one that that was eyeing anthrax.” But CBS and FBI spokesman further noted that “Those searches found extensive evidence that al-Qaida wanted to develop biological weapons, but came up with no evidence the terrorist group actually had anthrax or other deadly germs, they said.” Only years later did we learn that there was in fact extremely virulent anthrax at Kandahar. (Though some senior officials at the CIA and FBI knew this in Autumn 2003 and just didn’t tell Ed that was why they called off the conspicuous Hatfill surveillance). Thus, a factual predicate important to assessment of the John Hopkins report on the leg lesion needed to be reevaluated.