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."
I am not sure how you test the sterilized anthrax.
Saddam's problem is atomic - not biological.
Antitoxin would make much more sense than a vaccine, because (1) the vaccine doesn't work against all strains of anthrax, and may not even work against inhalation anthrax, period, and (2) the antitoxin, besides working against all anthrax, can be used into the late, terminal stages of the disease.
Do you recall who this was?
Ali Ayub Khan had apartments in both Chicago and Jersey City. The Chicago apartment was in the same building that Sabash Gurung was staying in. Khan shared the Jersey City apartment with Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Mohammed Pervez. Pervez is also said to have shared an apartment with the potential anthrax suspects from the Greenwood Village Apartments in Hamilton, NJ.
Khan and Azmath were the two Pakistanis who were flying when all planes were grounded on 9/11. They then took a train to San Antonio, and they were subsequently arrested with box cutters, $5000 in cash, and hair dye; their bodies were apparently shaved. (The suspicion, of course, was that they were about to hijack the plane when their plans were thwarted by the quick decision to ground all airliners. I think they have been charged with credit card fraud and are officially no longer under suspicion of terrorism, if you believe the public press releases.)
Gurung is the Nepalese who was arrested at O'Hare Airport with a stash of weapons.
Sorry, I don't. I wish at the time I had recorded the name.
There was a long report about him on one of the Alphabet Channels.
Officials were extremely puzzled over what he was up to.
Saddam's anthrax has a signature not found here. That didn't mean he didn't provide Mr. Atta with anthrax stolen from an American lab. Unfortunately, we haven't traced such materials through the lab to Iraq. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but the federales are still focusing on an atom bomb and not anthrax!
Must be a reason for it, eh?!
I would really like to know if yesterday's public revelation that one of the 9-11 hijackers sought treatment for cutaneous anthrax is the result of an intentional tip from government sources, or whether it represents true investigative journalism by the NYT. If it's the former, then we might infer that the administration feels it has a handle on the threat, and that there is no further benefit to delaying an attack on Iraq. That would dovetail with the ramping up of anti-Iraq rhetoric, and the US and British government's recent warnings to Saddam that we are willing to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for attacks with non-nuclear WMD. On the other hand, this could just be an example of a journalist stepping off the reservation and doing some real digging around, in which case, unfortunately, no such optimistic inferences follow.
Has the FBI shared what info the garnered in the Trenton PO's roped off area with the Postal Inspectors or the NJ State Police -- or is it still just the summary statement?
Where is "here," if you don't mind my asking?
are out searching for an atom bomb, you will have to explain that to the federales complaining about the task to me - -
Do you care to elaborate? What are they doing, and why are they complaining to you?
Either that or he just had trouble getting a date.
Either scenario is not difficult to believe.
No one knows why they dug up the boxes when all they had to do was use cotton swabs to pull samples, then spray them out with bleach to make them safe pending results.
Contamination in various postal facilities was found by special bio-hazard companies under contract to the USPS!
Top postal managers have publicly stated that the FBI did not communicate its findings to the USPS.
This sort of behavior is, unfortunately, typical of the FBI.
The official report (of the NJ Dept of Health, as I recall, which was coordinating this part of the investigation) says that no anthrax was found in any mail drop or any receptacle in which mail was placed. Preliminary reports of such contamination proved incorrect. Anthrax was only found in those parts of postal facilities used for mail in transit. (This is in contrast with Boca Raton.)
Muawiyah's theory that all the anthrax letters were mailed from Boca Raton is strange, but I'm leaving open the possibility that something like that is the truth. They've searched the mailboxes in the Trenton area exhaustively and found nothing; it's hard to explain that.
The thing is, the various "possibilities" were never equally matched up to begin with. Rosenberg's theory, like the preceding Woodward "militia" theory, and the original "mountain stream" theory, is enormously improbable and borderline ridiculous but not completely impossible, i.e. it doesn't violate the laws of physics. The correct theory -- that the anthrax letters were exactly what they purported to be, followups to the 9-11 attacks -- had the enormous advantage of being fully supported by the evidence and prior probability. Any "helping hand" the Feds offered to keep the correct explanation "in play" would only have made it painfully obvious how absurd the red herring theories were, nullifying the whole purpose of the stall.
Sorry, I didn't mean to pry -- you're the one who brought it up in your earlier post.
All this sexual anger and frustration builds up in periods of fervent denial, collapse in sinful behavior, the self hating guilt, followed by more fervent denial etc.
In the end, all this self hate gets redirected at the world.
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