Posted on 03/22/2002 11:41:11 PM PST by kattracks
he two men identified themselves as pilots when they came to the emergency room of Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., last June. One had an ugly, dark lesion on his leg that he said he developed after bumping into a suitcase two months earlier. Dr. Christos Tsonas thought the injury was curious, but he cleaned it, prescribed an antibiotic for infection and sent the men away with hardly another thought.
But after Sept. 11, when federal investigators found the medicine among the possessions of one of the hijackers, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Dr. Tsonas reviewed the case and arrived at a new diagnosis. The lesion, he said in an interview this week, "was consistent with cutaneous anthrax."
Dr. Tsonas's assertion, first made to the F.B.I. in October but never disclosed, has added another layer of mystery to the investigation of last fall's deadly anthrax attacks, which has yet to focus on a specific suspect.
The possibility of a connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax-laced letters has been explored by officials since the first anthrax cases emerged in October. But a recent memorandum, prepared by experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, and circulated among top government officials, has renewed a debate about the evidence.
The group, which interviewed Dr. Tsonas, concluded that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax, which causes skin lesions, was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available." The memorandum added, "Such a conclusion of course raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks."
A senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, had recently read the Hopkins memorandum and that the issue has been examined by both the C.I.A. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"No one is dismissing this," the official said. "We received the memo and are working with the bureau to insure that it continues to be pursued."
In their public comments, federal officials have said they are focusing largely on the possibility that the anthrax attacks were the work of a domestic perpetrator. They have hunted for suspects among scientists and others who work at laboratories that handle germs.
The disclosure about Mr. Alhaznawi, who died on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, sheds light on another front in the investigation. Senior law enforcement officials said that in addition to interviewing Dr. Tsonas in October and again in November, they thoroughly explored any connection between the hijackers and anthrax. They said the F.B.I. scoured the cars, apartments and personal effects of the hijackers for evidence of the germ, but found none.
Dr. Tsonas's comments add to a tantalizing array of circumstantial evidence. Some of the hijackers, including Mr. Alhaznawi, lived and attended flight school near American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla., where the first victim of the anthrax attacks worked. Some of the hijackers also rented apartments from a real estate agent who was the wife of an editor of The Sun, a publication of American Media.
In addition, in October, a pharmacist in Delray Beach, Fla., said he had told the F.B.I. that two of the hijackers, Mohamad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, came into the pharmacy looking for something to treat irritations on Mr. Atta's hands.
If the hijackers did have anthrax, they would probably have needed an accomplice to mail the tainted letters, bioterrorism experts knowledgeable about the case said. The four recovered anthrax letters were postmarked on Sept. 18 and Oct. 9 in Trenton. It is also possible, experts added, that if the hijackers had come into contact with anthrax, it was entirely separate from the supply used by the letter sender.
For his part, Dr. Tsonas said he believed that the hijackers probably did have anthrax.
"What were they doing looking at crop-dusters?" he asked, echoing experts' fears that the hijackers may have wanted to spread lethal germs. "There are too many coincidences."
In recent interviews, Dr. Tsonas, an emergency room doctor, said Mr. Alhaznawi came into the hospital one evening in June 2001, along with a man who federal investigators believe was another hijacker, Ziad al-Jarrah, believed to have taken over the controls of United Flight 93.
They used their own names, he added, not aliases.
"They were well-dressed foreigners," he said. "I assumed they were tourists."
The men explained that Mr. Alhaznawi had developed the ulcer after hitting his leg on a suitcase two months earlier. Dr. Tsonas recalled that Mr. Alhaznawi appeared to be in good health, and that he denied having an illness like diabetes that might predispose him to such lesions. The wound, he recalled, was a little less than an inch wide and blackish, its edges raised and red.
Dr. Tsonas said he removed the dry scab over the wound, cleansed it and prescribed Keflex, an antibiotic that is widely used to combat bacterial infections but is not specifically recommended for anthrax.
The encounter lasted perhaps 10 minutes, Dr. Tsonas said.
He took no cultures and had no thoughts of anthrax, a disease at that time was extremely rare in the United States and was unfamiliar even to most doctors.
In October, amid news reports about the first anthrax victims, Dr. Tsonas, like other doctors, threw himself into learning more about the disease. An incentive was that his hospital is relatively near American Media, so victims there might come to Holy Cross for treatment.
Dr. Tsonas said he forgot entirely about the two men until federal agents in October showed him pictures of Mr. Alhaznawi and Mr. Jarrah, and he made positive identifications.
Then, agents gave Dr. Tsonas a copy of his own notes from the emergency room visit and he read them. "I said, `Oh, my God, my written description is consistent with cutaneous anthrax,' " Dr. Tsonas recalled. "I was surprised."
He discussed the disease and its symptoms with the agents, explaining what else could possibly explain the leg wound. A spider bite was unlikely, he said. As for the hijacker's explanation a suitcase bump he also judged that unlikely.
"That's a little unusual for a healthy guy, but not impossible," he said.
After his meetings with F.B.I., Dr. Tsonas was contacted early this year by a senior federal medical expert, who asked him detailed questions about the tentative diagnosis.
Last month, experts at Johns Hopkins also called Dr. Tsonas, saying they, too, were studying the evidence. The Hopkins analysis was done by Dr. Thomas Inglesby and Dr. Tara O'Toole, director of the center in Baltimore and an assistant secretary for health and safety at the federal Energy Department from 1993 to 1997.
In an interview, Dr. O'Toole said that after consulting with additional medical experts on the Alhaznawi case, she was "more persuaded than ever" that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was correct.
She said the Florida mystery, as well as the entire anthrax inquiry, might benefit from a wider vetting.
"This is a unique investigation that has many highly technical aspects," she said. "There's legitimate concern that the F.B.I. may not have access to the kinds of expertise that could be essential in putting all these pieces together."
John E. Collingwood, an F.B.I. spokesman, said the possibility of a connection between the hijackers and the anthrax attacks had been deeply explored.
"This was fully investigated and widely vetted among multiple agencies several months ago," Mr. Collingwood said. "Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been. While we always welcome new information, nothing new has in fact developed."
Curious 'coincidence'?
The pucker factor is really getting up there for someone.
I bumped Osama bought a batch for 10 Gs
Scientists Confirm bin Laden Weapons Test
And here's another article in my list...
What does it take the NY Times five months for?Well now that is the question isn't it. If any Freeper can figure out before their first cup of coffee that the anthrax attacks followed the hijackers' itinerary and stopped when they hit the buildings - and that the likeliest source for the anthrax was Atta's contact with Iraqi spies, you can only conclude that the NYT was being a team player in not asking questions about something this obvious.
The next question is how obvious is it - after we now know about Richard Reid - that AA587 was bombed?
and the crop dusters....Thanks for the reminder! Remember: There is still a State Department owned Ayers cropduster with a armoured cockpit and long-range capbility that went missing between spraying cocoa in South America and it's return to Florida.
So there are really two mysteries I'd like solved before I check out, who sent the anthrax (were there two sets of perps--the terrorists in Florida and a domestic nutcase in New Jersey?) and then the most fun mystery, who is Deep Throat? I have a private bet going with my husband on that one.
Then, agents gave Dr. Tsonas a copy of his own notes from the emergency room visit and he read them. "I said, `Oh, my God, my written description is consistent with cutaneous anthrax,' " Dr. Tsonas recalled. "I was surprised."
The FBI was apparently on top of this before this doctor even remembered it -- it doesn't seem that they could find any trace of anthrax in places where the hijackers had been, which perhaps indicates that there had to be a separate facility involved. What if these guys had anthrax that was totally unrelated to the letters? What if there were multiple agents with anthrax? That might explain the inability to connect the dots between New Jersey and Florida.
It is impossible for the FBI to know where the hijackers were minute by minute for the months they were here. All they can do is check out known places. It's not also out of the realm of possibility that they could've passed on the anthrax to an associate from another al Qaeda cell or an al Qaeda operative with instructions to mail out the anthrax post-9/11 to cause more chaos and terror.
Every one else in this article is referred to using a professional title or full name. The low life terrorist is referred to as Mister who was killed in the crash which he and his terrorist cohorts orchestrated. Only in the NY Times, and perhaps the Washington Post, the two most liberal rags in the country ... would you see such convuluted PC crap.
Clinton's a Rapist (are you the same guy, Great Satan?) pretty clearly was right in his theory that the blackmailed U.S. government was unwilling to pin the blame on Iraq until we were ready to go to war with that country.
I would also say it is likely that, just by the number of arrests made after 9/11, we messed up the schedule on at least a handful of ops under way.
IMHO, it could be - from all these breaking news items connecting anthrax to 911 - that many Freepers will be vindicated. We've been suggesting that the government already knew Iraq was the state behind the WMD attack of al Queda but were not ready to tackle them until the Afghanistan problem had been mostly resolved to free up the military and put together the battle plan.
The timing of these "leaks" supports that idea. Cheney is completing the whirlwind tour to drum up support against Iraq following Dubya's state of the union address formally equating WMD development to terrorism.
In this week's issue, Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, where, in the late nineteen-eighties, Saddam Hussein waged a devastating chemical and, possibly, biological war against the Kurdish people. Today, the Kurds have achieved limited autonomy, thanks to the U.S.-British no-fly zone, but they still face the threat of ethnic cleansing. Goldberg's report also raises questions about fears of future biochemical attacks against America or Israelas well as Iraq's possible links to Al Qaeda.
IMHO
But this story is completely new, with new information. Let's review:
Previous stories have mentioned that Two of the hijackers, Marwan Alshehhi and Saeed Alghamdi, rented an apartment from the first anthrax victim.
We also know that Mohamed Atta went to a pharmacy in late August for treatment for skin and chest irritation..
This is more than just a series of coincidences. At any rate, it is beyond dispute that the cell was involved in the Florida anthrax attacks.
It seems to me that any qualified journalist or media outlet out to crack the anthrax case in the early stages, after the Florida death, would have jumped all over this lead. That's the problem with reporting these days, they report these bits and pieces of stories with news flashes and no follow up. Here at FR all of the reports seem to be investigated and pieced together so well that it puts the so-called investigative reporters to shame.
It's the New York Times style; always has been -- a leftover quaintness from its beginnings as a "polite" newspaper. Nothing to do with PC and everything to do with hidebound tradition.
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