Anthrax, Ten Years After

In the spring of 2010, I put together a blog of news and commentary, scraped together from what had been published in the news about the anthrax attacks. It didn’t take long to find contradictions and inconsistencies but it took weeks and months of scouring the sources to pull out a narrative about what did and did not happen, and after all that there was still less than half a story– just enough to say with certainty that the first victim in five deaths could not have been contaminated at his Florida tabloid office by an anthrax letter. There was enough evidence to say that none of the next four fatalities had plausibly traceable infections either. Survivors each had anomalous details of time and place in their individual accounts that made the sequence of events impossible. The executive staff at the Florida tabloid were allowed to come and go in hazmat suits and do their own cleanup at the “crime scene” before the FBI started their investigation 10 months later. The contaminated letters that the government took into custody, it turns out, could not have been the source of lethal infections, and these are just a few of the problems.

   The missing half of the “Amerithrax” picture, which leaves only an impression that the biological attacks were calculated murders, hovers like a phantom over the memorials of September 11. If you turn and look for it, nothing is there. The propaganda about anthrax from Iraq, with Colin Powell holding up his little vial of powder, also seems to have vanished with it.  Bruce Ivins, the ‘lone nut’ who suicided the day before his official indictment (in 2008, while under surveillance), was posthumously declared guilty. Case closed. No public memorials for the anthrax victims. Nothing sexy here. Flush it all down the memory hole. Who wants to be reminded of how dirtied we felt by the uncontrolled spread of disease and mental filth after the shock of watching the towers fall again? Not me.

–but this is not really about that.

   I learned from 9-11 and the anthrax attack how easily the public can be hoaxed –how willingly we take the word of authority in times of confusion, even if that authority is the ‘because I said so’ kind making claims to analyses and logic. What I saw was the whole 2001 anthrax story running desperately short on information and because of the anthrax attacks, lawmakers were hustled around in Washington during those critical days of passing the Patriot Act and a phony link was forged between Iraq and the hijackers. Because of anthrax, airports are shoving people through bodily x-rays. Because of anthrax, biological reality is divorcing medical expedients and becoming a way of life.

   In a speculative moment of comprehension, I’d say the anthrax attacks were the largest and longest case of hearsay ever broadcast over the national media. There was no perp video, no audio, no testimony about credible threats. Just the slow, rumor-ridden dropping of The Other Shoe. Bad things must come in twos.

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According to the CDC final report,  “22 cases of anthrax (11 inhalational, 11 cutaneous) were identified.. in..seven states” http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/10/02-0353_article.htm

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The half-story is still hanging at www.thirdring.wordpress.com . If I can find the time, I’ll amend this post with a review.

Anthrax Revisited

This article is preceded by two others, American Anthrax and Anthrax Addendum, and supplemented by the blog www.thirdring.wordpress.com

https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/american-anthrax/

https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/anthrax-addendum/

“American Anthrax” offers historical background for the 2001 attacks noting a correspondence with previous outbreaks and mass radioactive contamination, tending not to support a contention that nukes where involved in the demolitions on 9/11 if real spores had been dispersed. “Anthrax Addendum” gives some details about the 2001 victims as context to the terror events, important in the consideration of ‘who’ and ‘how’ the anthrax was spread.

Let’s review what happened:

On the seventh day after September 11, 2001, two letters filled with an unusual powder were mailed in central New Jersey, bound for the New York City offices of NBC, addressed to Tom Brokaw and an Editor at the New York Post. At that time, only the perpetrator(s) knew that the second wave of domestic horror begun on 9-11 was underway. Public attention to the “anthrax attacks” did not accrue for another two weeks when a Florida photo-editor, working for American Media Incorporated in Boca Raton, collapsed into a coma and died within 3 days after his admission to the hospital (Oct. 2-5).

   On October 7, 2001, the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan’s Taliban for harboring Public Enemy #1, Osama bin Laden. Two days after that, on the 9th, another pair of powdery missives were stamped by the automated sorting machines in the Hamilton, NJ, mail center outside Trenton. These two envelopes were headed for Washington, D.C. bearing the names of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. They arrived for processing at the USPS’s Brentwood Road distribution center where at least one of them, the Daschle letter, was confirmed to have passed through at 7am on Oct.12, three days after mailing. From Brentwood, mail going to Capitol Hill was merely a few hours away from personalized delivery.

   Perhaps the Daschle letter went unnoticed nestled in a stack of mixed material, awaiting the hands of a staffer who fatefully sliced it open on Monday the 15th and released a cloud of aerosolized spores that spilled onto the carpet and even into the neighboring office suite. In the minutes and hours that followed, garbage bag-wielding agents demanded the return of unopened Congressional mail which was whisked away to an impromptu quarantine facility where it sat in isolation for weeks to come. It was not until mid-November that the unopened Leahy letter was found among the quarantine collection, “leaking like a sieve” with a needle-like hole through its paper sheath. Deadliest of the four “recovered” envelopes, the Leahy letter was said to contain a super-weaponized grade of highly refined spores –a powder so dangerous, in fact, that a robot was required to handle it. The ‘opening’ proceedure was delayed an additional month, to mid-December, until it could be done remotely in a special-made vacumn containment – a box within a box within a box.

    But something more was not right with the Leahy letter. CDC investigator Jim Hayslett had been dispatched to Washington with the task of tracking down this letter which had been “misread” by the Brentwood scanning machine and redirected to the State Department’s mail center. It should have received a coded State Department stamp as it returned into the automated routing system –it did not– but spores from the envelope allegedly dirtied the State’s mailroom and severely sickened a worker there. It was Hayslett who later learned that the “undelivered” Leahy letter actually did arrive in the Senator’s office. A staffer remembered it, he said, and handed it in for collection. Not one single spore was left behind in Leahy’s suite.

    Florida’s American Media Inc., similarly, showed no anthrax spores in the likeliest of places: the air ducts leading directly from the mailroom “hot zone”. The victims’s homes were free of spores.  It was reported that the attack’s last fatality of five, in Connecticut, died as a result of thrice cross-contamination, emanating from the Leahy letter as it entered the system in New Jersey. A federal panel of medical experts, who were stymied in their deliberations, finally concurred that the 94-year-old must have exposed herself by tearing up her junk mail. They had no evidence, but seldom do inconvenient facts stop official panels from constructing conclusions: that’s why we pay them.

The official story goes something like this:

Four (4) anthrax-laden letters were sent through the U.S. mail; two, post-marked September 18, went to newsmedia outlets in NYC and two, post-marked October 9, went to Washington Democratic senators. Three of them ‘hit the mark’ and one was intercepted on its way.

Does this scenario sound like the planes on 9-11?

   A great deal of effort was expended by the feds to forge connections between the hijacking terrorists of September 11 and the anthrax attacker(s). In the months immediately post-911, anthrax became the leading suspect highlighting complicity on the part of Iraq, but it could not be proven –so, it must have been an inside job! Months turned into years, the investigation was dubbed with a catchy name (Amerithrax), and the circus focused on a bioweapons researcher who worked for the government and had helped the investigators track the source of the pathogen. The FBI launched the largest investigation in its history –over 9,000 interviews and 5,000 subpeonas– and Dr. Bruce Ivins was the last man standing scrutiny until his suicide on July 29, 2008, on the cusp of a federal indictment. Shortly after, his guilt was posthumously declared and the case was officially closed.

End of story, almost.

   Details of how the bureaucratic negligence of U.S. agencies and contractors which led to the anthrax attacks could be forthcoming any year now. The ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit concerning  photo-editor Robert Stevens, filed on behalf of his family in 2003, has been permitted to proceed by the courts and is scheduled for another round at the bench sometime in 2011.  If Armageddon and the Dimension Shift don’t interrupt the court proceedings, we might get to hear the bitter end of this (approved) tale.

                                Review the evidence at  http://thirdring.wordpress.com/case-by-case-2/

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CHALLENGING THE BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

The most basic assumption of all is that “powerfully poisoned” anthrax-filled death threats were sent through the U.S. mail “to kill the American people”, as Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer announced. But is it true?

Weighing in on the reported news highlights a very strong probability that it is not! A U.S. Postal Inspection Service chief, Roy W. Geffen,  said on October 24 that forensic analysis gave them “confidence that only three letters” were circulated by mail. Details are unavailable in this embarassing circumstance of having four letters officially in hand. But, if the PO was right, which one should we delete?

LETTER #1– (mailed 9-18-01 to the New York Post) The “index patient”, who was exceptional among victims for a startlingly brief incubation time, had no memory of the letter. Nobody at the Post knew anything about it until it was “found in the trash”, unopened, on October 19. Two more people acquired cutaneous infections 4-6 days later, for a total of 3 victims at the Post.

LETTER #2– (mailed 9-18-01 to Tom Brokaw at NBC, Rockefeller Plaza) was the most confirmed to have arrived but nobody said when or how. Two employees were made sick, and the staffer who opened it was also an exceptional victim in the attack for having her home contaminated.

LETTER #3– (mailed 10-09-01 to Sen. Daschle), opened Monday 10-15 in the Senator’s Hart Bldg. office, bore the automated stamps from the Brentwood Rd. center in Washington, and was called “the Face of Satan” by the Ft. Detrick examiner John Ezzell, but was curiously included in this remark: the “tiny amount of material in the first three letters makes the task [of identifying the spore source] even tougher…”. There was no illness among Daschle staffers.

LETTER #4– (mailed 10-09-01 to Sen. Leahy), referred to above, and in continuing the remark of the expert investigator on the Daschle letter: …”That’s where the letter to Senator Patrick Leahy could come in handy”. Indeed. The Leahy letter was full of anthrax, none of it left behind in his office but officials said there was enough powder to infect tens of thousands of people.

Can they explain why there were 22 victims (5 fatalities) and the closure of 22 post offices?

                       Review the evidence at  www.thirdring.wordpress.com/the-letters/

“Tiny amounts” of anthrax, usually called “trace” and “medically insignificant” amounts, were all over the place except, in many cases, where they should have been! The situation was absurd. A positive test one day was negative the next. A confusing series of on-and-off listings ensued. Washington DC mail should have been generally “hot” with spores, but none was reported. Exceptionally, again, were claims of contaminated mail overseas from Washington but not within it. A low-intensity kind of pandemonium settled over the District of Columbia as scattered “trace” amounts appeared here and there, disrupting the functions of government in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 and the Afghani invasion.

Track along with the reports: www.thirdring.wordpress.com/contamination-trail/ .

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WHY SHOULD WE CARE NOW?

Disruption in DC during the anthrax scare overlayed the critical days of passage for the Patriot Act which passed the House of Representatives on October 12, 2001 and was signed into law on October 26. Senators complained that they had no time to peruse the weighty legislation. Building closures and displacement only exacerbated the overly daunting task and we live with this “temporary” legislation now, as many knew we would.

   Perhaps more than any other potential threat, “health” emergencies can disposess the citizens of all their civil rights including the right to refuse bodily invasion in the form of medical treatment. The anthrax attack increased the likelihood of bio-attacks in the future, concentrating resources on the (said) countermeasures of necessarily created biowarfare agents. Truckloads of cash and incentives have since poured into bio-research to refurbish biomedical infrastructure and hire pharmaceutical contractors…and they’ve cleaned up, tightened security, improved data-processing, streamlined protocols and communication, they swear…and this is precisely why we should be paying attention.

   Among the many victories gained since 2001 by police powers, achieved through the ‘election’ process, was the right of agencies to take DNA samples upon arrest. There are no protections for the taking of DNA — there never were. The protection, it turns out, has always been for the “scientific utopia” that was boldly envisioned in the 1920s and ’30s. Restrictive laws against biological experimentation were seen as potentially hamstringing scientific “progress” and actually do not exist. When technology advanced to the point where “cells” were amply substituted for “humans” –sometime in the 1950s– new legal arguments for the definition of “human experimentation” were safely docketed for debate. It is a form of “false antithesis” that was deeply deceptive and misleading in its time. The field of medical ethics was promoted and expanded to sketch out the differences between “you” and the stuff from which you are made. In short, “you” are not your stuff. So when they take your stuff, and you fight back –will they let you fight them?– it wouldn’t surprise me if significant reversals to the present policing occurs. They will have already won. Look for the false antithesis.

UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE

 http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0805f.asp

Anthrax Addendum

—Facts, Enigmas, Holes and Questions—

        situation normal, all FEHQed up

Anthrax takes a while to propagate and set up an infection. In the 2001 attacks, it averaged out among the victims of either type, cutaneous or inhalation, to a close and repeated period of 4 to 6 days. Most of the cases fit neatly into this time window, although a few of the total 23 (plus or minus) took a few days longer. Only one case, the first one, violated this norm.  The woman was a New York Post editor who manifested a red ‘bump’ on her right-hand middle finger which she noticed on Friday, September 21. The bump was becoming a blister and the next day, while she attended a wedding, it burst. She recalled drying the sore on the fabric of her dress.

   Several days earlier, on Tuesday the 18th, someone dropped an anthrax-tainted letter into a mail slot somewhere in central New Jersey. It was addressed to the “Editor, New York Post”. A ‘twin’ letter to Tom Brokaw at NBC was mailed the same day from another N.J. mail slot, but they were both sent on to the Hamilton mail center outside Trenton where they passed through the sorting machines about three hours apart, sometime on the 18th. Later that evening, a Hamilton worker who repaired and maintained the postal machinery reached into a contaminated sorter and cut his arm. No one is really sure who got sick first, the mechanic or the editor. They both started out with unusual red bumps that they thought were spider bites and noticed about the same time, but clearly the mechanic had a head start. He recalled his symptoms began on September 22.

   New York City-bound mail was sent from Hamilton to the Morgan mail center in Manhattan where it was sorted, stamped again, separated and bundled for local delivery. No one at the Morgan center was ever reported with anthrax. After processing at Morgan, the Post’s letter arrived at the company headquarters, waiting there for the company mailroom clerks to sort it again. Could all this have happened in less than a day? It makes the editor’s anthrax onset more believable were it so. But the actual timing of this letter through the postal equipment appears unannounced by any public media. Maybe it’s classified, or maybe just a well-kept secret. Maybe, like the Leahy letter, knowledge of the real route and time stamps would cancel out what modicum of ‘credence’ remained with the telling. Without proof of the ‘Editor’ letter’s traveling time, the case is still implausibly fast and oddly isolated. An account by the editor herself, published five years later, contains a remembrance of this letter and how she transferred it from her desktop to a shelf where it got stuffed in a bin of anonymous-looking crank mail. Funny– because after she got sick and sought treatment she couldn’t remember anything about any unusual mail and had no idea about how or where she might have picked up anthrax!

   Four weeks after she first noticed her blister, on October 19, investigators said they finally found the letter, unopened in the company trash. Two of the Post’s employees, a mail clerk and another editor, had helped them look for it. Four days after that, those two workers developed unusual red bumps…

The deadliest of the “in evidence” letters, comprising four of a suspected seven, was the Leahy letter. It was found on November 16, 2001, shortly before the last recorded fatality in Connecticut, in a quarantined batch of undelivered mail. It was thought to have been delayed behind the Daschle letter which was opened Oct.15, because of mistaken routing to the State Department’s mail facility,  but it was missing a special stamp from the State Dept. machinery. CDC investigator Jim Hayslett tracked down the Leahy Letter’s Washington journey and learned from the senator’s aide that, in fact, the Leahy letter was delivered and returned unopened when the gravity of the Daschle letter contamination was known. Senator Leahy’s office tested negative for anthrax. Over a month later, when the letter turned up in undelivered mail, the envelope bore a mysterious pinhole.

   The official story asks us to believe that a 94-year-old woman in Connecticut died from cross-contaminated mail. As proof of a theory, on November 30, officials found a neighbor one mile away with a saved letter bearing “an anthrax spore, a tiny amount” that had followed the Leahy letter through the New Jersey sorting machine by 15 seconds. And that’s it — proof of a theory. The neighbor’s house and family turned up zero contamination. The local post office and the victim’s home and belongings turned up zero contamination. But the lingering question is whether or not Mrs. Lundgren’s neighbor, artist and “estate liquidator” John Smith Farkas, may have been involved in some deeper way with or without his knowledge. Among the ‘interesting persons’ of September 11th is New york/Miami lawyer who was well-connected to the CIA and Israeli Mossad, named Michael D. Farkas. As yet, the research neither proves nor disproves a connection between these men, however in the world of high-finance and fine-art, they are drawing closer and closer…

Earlier, in the Florida contamination at the National Enquirer where no letters had been saved, the remembrance of a woman employee who worked in the mailroom office, was that “on or about” September 25 she opened a powdery letter at her desk. She continued to use her office for two more weeks before the American Media Inc.’s building was closed down two days after the death of the SUN tabloid photo editor on Oct.5. She remained healthy and well, even through the diagnosis of having anthrax spores on her nasal swab. Her mailroom office later tested ‘hot’ for anthrax and the building had air-borne microscopic contamination throughtout its three-stories, but there were no spores found in the air ducts near her workstation….an enigma indeed.

   Photo editor, Bob Stevens, was said to have visited Duke University on or before the day his infection became acute, a recollection of his wife Maureen and known to be true by North Carolina health officials. No reports of Mr. Stevens’ activity or purpose at Duke has been offered in the mainstream press, but according to the “Special Libraries” of news archivists used by the tabloids, only two places in the country house the information and personnel Experts on the terror events of September 11- Harvard and Duke Universities. Was Bob visiting for professional reasons regarding 9-11? Did he have a personal interest in 9-11 or was there another reason? The ongoing ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit of Mrs. Stevens and her family, hinging on the ‘lone perpetrator’ theory, have fundamentally ‘gagged’ any case information until well into 2011, when the case may finally be allowed to proceed.

   The first two inhalation-anthrax cases which happened in Florida, to Mr. Stevens and co-worker Ernie Blanco, were both administered in ‘medical centers’ belonging to HCA, the Hospital Corporation of America, a large-scale hospital manager belonging to Senator Bill Frist, MD, and his family (founded by Frist’s father). Frist became the Congressional ‘anthrax’ spokesman and also took a chair at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which participated in bioterror drills that included various anthrax attack scenarios. Mr. Blanco survived, thanks in great part to a ‘miraculous’ coincidence concerning a minor car accident on a Miami street involving the mother of a DoD anthrax expert. Blanco’s son-in-law was nearby, working at his car dealership job when the lady came in to negotiate for a car. This fateful connection led to Ernie Blanco’s case being advised from afar by top docs in the US military.

In Washington D.C. at the Brentwood Road mail center, four cases of inhalation anthrax resulted in two fatalities. One of the two survivors remains today ‘unidentified’. He does not appear in the subsequent lawsuits. Brentwood employed approximately 2,000 workers, and this man was said to be among them. Curiously, the other survivor, Mr. Richmond, was best friends with the two who died and he worked part of his time at an express package facility by the Washington-Baltimore Int’l Airport, some long distance outside D.C. Off work, the three met regularly to play cards and pray together, Mr. Richmond himself being the common point of contact. (Anthrax is not contagious – only spores can initiate infection). Richmond was the first to sicken enough to seek treatment. During his hospitalization which began Oct.19, he was enabled by his Brentwood plant manager to remember the details of how he became infected. It was agreed and reported in the news at the time, that an unusal request by his manager for Mr. Richmond to clean a Brentwood letter-sorting machine on the morning of October 11 was the infectious cause. At least one of the deadly “weaponized” letters, the Daschle letter, did not pass through the equipment until 7:10 am the next day, on the 12th. Either the contamination was already present, or the timing is wrong. Should we believe the Leahy letter caused this contamination when it did not leave a spore behind at the senator’s office? So far, details of the Leahy letter’s timing through Brentwood cannot be found.

   In a class-action suit brought against the Postal Service by Brentwood workers, it was revealed that mid-managers were instructed by their superiors to LIE to the floor supervisors about possible contamination and keep the workers on the job. In a surreal twist of visualization, regularly uniformed postal employees carried on their normal duites while health officials in hazmat space-suits walked around them taking samples. The lawsuit only mentions the Daschle letter, stamped on the morning of October 12. After the Daschle letter was opened on the 15th, hours later the FBI carefully ferried it over to Fort Detrick for analysis by Dr. John Ezzell –Dr. Ezzell was said to have called the anthrax powder inside “the Face of Satan”. He said in all his years as a bioweapons expert, he had never seen anything as concentrated or imagined an aerosol as finely produced.

   Despite his careful technique and state-of-the-art protective barriers, Dr. Ezzell took the “very painful” step of inhaling bleach solution for fear of anthrax. He went home and baked all his mail in the family kitchen and then prepared a public statement for the internet, encouraging everyone to use their ovens to ‘autoclave’ their own mail.

Fortunately, John Ezzell’s fears aside, the Face of Satan didn’t leave anthrax spores in anyone’s airways on Capitol Hill. Staffers and Capitol Police who might have breathed in spores turned out to test positive for bacterial antibodies only. Washington D.C. did not report any known contamination to any other letter or package mail. Just the Daschle and Leahy letters. Spores, however, seemed to be all over D.C. mailrooms in miniscule amounts, causing closures and general havoc.  Up to that point in time, the medical significance of tiny amounts was not a matter of concern. It was the later Connecticut case that began changing doctors’ minds. They really were very impressed, the news told us,  that Ottilie Lundgren could have been infected by near-undetectable amounts of anthrax. Another neighbor of Mrs. Lundgren was impressed enough to cover his entire house with heavy-gauge plastic and duct tape.

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There’s more ‘Addendum’ to come…

American Anthrax

For years, the 2001 Anthrax Attack has begged another explanation of how it was connected to 9-11. That it is connected, designed to widen and personalize the terror of September 11th, is little doubted among researchers, however, as an ‘unwitnessed’ crime with a confusing backlog of scientific opinions to sort through, a reasonable scenario has remained elusive.

   To the citizen journalists who have tasked the evidence of September 11th, adhering to the knowable facts and pioneering avenues of communication to present those facts, I am in debt. Thankyou.

   I created an online notebook to help sort and arrange anthrax-related information: www.thirdring.wordpress.com –a work-in-progress to seek as full an understanding of what really happened as possible. But, indeed, the core story of the ridiculously named ‘Amerithrax’ investigation has emerged. Webster Tarpley suggested that the anthrax attack could turn out to be “the Achilles Heel of 9-11”. Perhaps he’s right. One can hope.

   Many illusions about the biological nature of anthrax were made to stick in the public mind. New York Times medical correspondent, Lawrence Altman, MD, played up a “new normal” learned from the attack by the science community where a previously held notion about thousands of spores needed to initiate an infection no longer applied. Independent Ed Lake gave a lot of attention to a notion that the anthrax victims were ‘older’ and therefore had impaired immune function making them susceptible. The scientists argued about whether or not the powdery poison had been ‘weaponized’ –a term of use ill-defined and liberally salted over official statements until it remained the psyche’s last taste.  And mostly, the media coverage focused on a strawman debate seeking the perpetrators as either Al Qaeda/Iraqi operatives or a lone ‘nut case’ American scientist. The ploy of delays and division was quickly papered over as the US rushed to war in Afghanistan, passed the Patriot Act, and plunged the public into a dire circus of continuing Acts of Terror. Over the years, even the remembrance of the Anthrax Attack slipped into obscurity. Another key down the Memory Hole.

   The death of Bruce E. Ivins, a suicide by Tylenol while under FBI surveillance in July 2008, refreshed the interest of 9-11 researchers who had made much progress identifying the real perpetrators of September 11th. It is only one more step to uncover the connection to the Anthrax Attack. All the necessary information is logged in the mainstream news archives, ready to be ‘fitted’ into the puzzle of how ISRAEL DID 9/11.

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A dramatist would find a treasure trove of character-rich elements in the story of post-9/11 anthrax — but where are the books, the documentaries, the multi-page glossies? How is it that no polished alternative media journalist has taken up this quintessentially American tale so rife with the tensions of life in the United States? It is not an uninteresting story, in fact, it speaks loudly about what is best and what is worst in us; from the ‘highest’ to the ‘lowest’, dilemnas both old and new, the narrative unfolds like pure Americana. “Amerithrax”. I felt a surge of shame for my country on hearing this name. It sounds like one more stupid, unwanted commodity invented by cheap salesmen with counterfeit baggage. And maybe that’s the point. If somebody knocked on your door, selling some storyline about “Amerithrax”, would you want it?

 

 But like an unanswered invitation bidding to “drop by anytime”, the real anthrax story hangs suspended –waiting for what? An official inquest? Another independent investigation by Congress? Should we take it as an ominous sign that once the Feds get back into the act, some new trauma to obliterate the truth might occur? Most of us, it seems, have forgotten about anthrax, at least to the point of no longer caring. Who now thinks about caution when handling their mail? Maybe it’s better to let the story simmer up from the bottom.  Unlike other arrangements that led to the spectacular crashes of September 11th, the anthrax incidents lacked the courage of folklore. An overstimulated-to-exhaustion public was only too content to swallow the pap being dished. A ‘crazy’ did it –sure– some guy with a privately mental axe to grind saw a chance and took it. We were lucky. Only five people died. The anthrax deaths just stopped, and the Pile at Ground Zero was still smoldering…

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Before the 1950s, anthrax was a sporadic problem on the open range and in the confined spaces of woolen mill workrooms. World War II-era penicillin was effectively applied for the few cutaneous cases that cropped up from time to time but interest in the disease remained largely limited to veterinarians and ranchers. So it seemed. The secrets of covert germ warfare were still safe among Cold War denizens who operated under the veil of patriotic duty and stewardship. Whatever it was they were hatching in their labs, well, it had to be good, right? We were the Good Guys!

The enemies of Goodness were shattered, and though a terrible war had ended with the most brutal technology ever witnessed, a nervous world seeking to right itself in the aftermath was eager to support ‘Atoms for Peace’ and medicine for the masses. When the polio vaccine finally triumphed as the victory it was erected to be, no microbe would long outlast the genius of science. It was around then that anthrax became a military problem.

   Inhalation of infectious anthrax was extremely rare. It’s not clear if or how many cases were recorded before the war, but as of 1948, the official casebook begain to document one after another, and then another. In 1957, in the midst of an Army vaccine experiment, an ‘unexpected’ outbreak erupted among textile workers in Manchester, New Hampshire. It has completely slipped the written account that the U.S. was experiencing peak atmospheric fallout from the Nevada Test Site precisely when this outbreak occurred. Radioactive clouds from Operation Plumbob streamed relentlessly over central New England in that late summer, for what turned out to be the dirtiest and most controversial series of Atom-bomb tests ever carried out. (By now, I’m used to the thought that these things are never simple). If the Army released anthrax at the mill to test its vaccine, as some investigators have accused, they did so knowingly under conditions of nuclear war– a prime military obsession to discover the combined effects of radiological and biological weapons. We can only guess. On the record, the Arms Textile Mill outbreak remained America’s only anthrax epidemic…among humans, blamed on a contaminated lot of Iraqi goat hair.

After the deaths of four workers, the mill was shuttered and off-limits for any purpose until a failed decontamination in 1971 led to the building being razed, buried, and paved over into a parking lot. The following year, an international biological and chemical weapons treaty engaged 144 national signatories. Israel did not sign on.

 

Anthrax ‘bombs’ were live-tested by the British in 1945 as Gruinard Island was made uninhabitable to 1990, but the onus of testing an anthrax bioweapon fell to the Soviets in 1979 in a release described years later as ‘accidental’. Early in April of 1979, a cloud of manufactured spores oozed from a smokestack for hours, falling over the region’s farms where locals were known to engage in a lively blackmarket of mutton. Strangely enough, five days before in the United States, Three Mile Island endured a partial meltdown, similarly accidental, releasing an untold quatitiy of radiation.  Thirteen years passed. Chernobyl exploded. Glasnost erupted and the Soviet system disintegrated.

    A team of American scientists, headed by Salk Institute Fellows, visited the Sverdlovsk surrounds in 1992 to collect saved autopsy samples, medical records, and whatever eyewitness accounts were available. One of their members, Alexis Shelokov, spoke perfect Russian.  Sverdlovsk had once been called Yekaterinburg and was the Soviets mighty industrial center situated in the Ural mountains. When the Bolsheviks took over near the end of WWI, the ill-fated Czar Nicholas Romanov and his family were taken to a hideaway there and executed. As if to erase this blot on Russia’s history, Yekaterinburg was also paved over; renamed Sverdlovsk and constructed into an economic powerhouse, Boris Yeltsin designated it as the “emergency capital” where functions of government were implemented prior to the dissolution of the USSR.

Knowledge gained from the Yekaterinburg anthrax was the principal source of information about the inhaled human disease, and the scientists who examined the event became the world experts and chief spokespersons when the crazed Anthrax Mailer launched his venomous attack in 2001. 

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The Army’s anthrax problem centered around a vaccine that few outside the military would learn about for several years after the first Iraqi invasion and the mysterious appearance of Gulf War Syndrome. Sometime during the mid-90s the maker of the vaccine, Michigan Biological Products Institute that held the only license to provide it to the DoD, came under the scrutiny of FDA enforcers who were compelled to issue a notice to MBPI to clean up its production facility or face a mandatory closure. Unable to solve its problems, renovations and closure finally happened in 1997 and it was then that a brand new company formed by foreign nationals stepped in to buy out MBPI and transfer the defense contracts to itself. Borrowing heavily from the state of Michigan, with unheard of leniency regarding its contracts, the official deal went down in the fall of 1998, but curiously it appears that BioPort was created three years earlier, according to independent journalist Alex Constantine. A German-born Lebanese businessman who worked for Citigroup in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and two former Israel Defense Forces officers claim to the founding of BioPort in June of 1995.

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Three months earlier, in March of ’95, an extremist cult in Japan, grabbed world headlines by setting off a SARIN gas chemical attack in the Tokyo subway. A dozen people died and thousands, it is said, suffered harm, with hundreds enduring permanent injury. Only later, because of the ‘low-grade’ sarin release, was it learned that AUM SHINRIKYO ‘yoga club’ had attempted an anthrax attack back in 1993. This bizarre event failed to infect anyone according to the CDC, who negotiated with the Japanese authorities to obtain a sample in November of 1999 –a sample that sat on a shelf unanalyzed for almost two years. Interest in the type of anthrax cultured by AUM SHINRIKYO looked to be nil until October of 2001. The CDC enlisted the help of Dr. Paul Keim who had also been rushed a spinal fluid sample from the first inhalation victim in Florida two days before he died. As it turned out, the cult’s anthrax was a different strain; a widely available veterinary vaccine culture, called the ‘Stern’ strain, made by the Colorado Serum Company. In a very peculiar twist of Aum Shinrikyo’s story, this ‘anti-Semitic doomsday cult’  that preached a coming global takeover by an elite cabal of Jewish internatonal bankers, Freemasons, and British royals, changed its name to the Hebrew “Aleph”, announced in February of 2000.

AUM SHINRIKYO’s leader, who called himself ‘Asahara’, had been a talkative defendent after his arrest in May of 1996, but over the next two years, his condition and behavior degraded to the point of speechlessness. Witnesses claimed that his courtroom presence alternated between ‘dozing’ and ‘incoherent babbling’, disruptive to the point of needing removal from the court. The same month that the CDC secured its bioterror-anthrax sample, November 1999, Japanese journalists and trial observers said that Asahara quit speaking and would not even verbalize to his lawyers in private. The cult’s second-in-command who had been cleared of all charges, described as an idealogical charismatic, was let go;  free to leave the country where he soon migrated to the cult’s most active chapter in Russia to lead a transformed ‘Aleph’ in a spiritual revival.

Perhaps it is significant that Aum Shinrikyo was created  as a yoga meditation group in 1984, the same year another “yoga club” of sorts under the leadership of Bagwan Shree Rajneesh incited followers to perpetrate an act of bioterror by contaminating Oregon salad bars with salmonella…

In the United States, the Rajneeshies stand guilty of famously pulling off the only successful act of bioterror…that is, at least, until 2001. No one can say it was for lack of trying.

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Anthrax hoaxes through the mail generated the majority of terror threats from the moment the Washington D.C. headquarters of B’nai B’rith advertised the receipt of a bogus package containing a broken lab dish labeled “bacillus anthracis”, not quite properly spelled. Every major news outlet carried the April 1997 story. A reported ‘surge’ of anthrax threat mail escalated in October of 1998 and peaked the next year when the Monterrey terrorism database logged 82 of a total 104 ‘events’ as anthrax. One of them was “an attempted acquisition”. Over the course of those two years, ‘dozens’ of anthrax-related evacuations and prophylactic decontaminations, which included the dispensing of antibiotics, plagued the Los Angeles area alone. Surely, the true count is unknown, as evil “anthrax” stole its way into the collective consciousness.

Meanwhile, official proponents of preparedness were concocting scenarios and bioterrorism drills to test the readiness of government agencies for anthrax, even smallpox, which no one had yet advertized as a physical threat outside of government speculators. One of the programs of long duration, called Project Bachus, was especially designed to imitate the actions of ‘low-tech’ terrorists determiined to cultivate anthrax in secret homemade labs. “What could they actually make? How would they get their supplies? Could they avoid detection?” These were some of the questions that management hoped to have answered.

   Months before 9-11, as the retrospectives detail, high-profile celebrity newscasters began receiving hoax letters at their offices –so many, in fact, that no one bothered to keep reporting them. Sean Hannity told the press after infectious cases emerged and several victims were dead, that his particular threat letters were identical to the powder-bearing missives that scored on their intended targets.

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FBI investigators surmised that seven letters had been sent; five originals mailed on Sept. 18, destined for the news media, and two more marked for Washington on October 9. All of them were purportedly mailed from a street box in Princeton, across the busy thoroughfare in the center of town facing Rockefeller College. In a presumed route of travel in the postal system, these letters whisked through a series of automated sorting machines where they were separated for dispatch at the Hamilton New Jersey distribution center. Two of the recovered letters headed for New York. The later two were bound for Washington. (Sounds like the 9-11 planes, doesn’t it?).

   However, the Postal Service forensics lab stood at variance with this theory. On October 24, the day after two postal workers at the Brentwood Rd (Wash, D.C.) were dead of inhalation anthrax, the USPS lab expert announced that the best information revealed that only three possible letters could have been sent through the mail.

   Holes appeared in the main theme: where were the postal worker infection cases in the “middle”? None were acknowledged in New York City or Florida, despite the “late recognition” that contaminated mail was spreading a lethal disease, loosed by processing machines that hurled airborne spores onto the nearest surfaces. Beyond the morbid trail of contamination, anomalous “traces” were found in the wastebaskets of Kansas City stamp center employees. Ever since the news of the dangerous ‘Daschle’ letter that was opened in the Senator’s office, routed through the Brentwood USPS, the Kansas City supervisor had ordered that ‘Brentwood’ mail be isolated and shrink-wrapped. Not a single piece of the isolated Brentwood mail produced a spore.

 

The Palm Beach Florida health department assured the postal workers there that they were at no risk and only “medically insignificant” amounts of anthrax had been found at six post offices. Antibiotics were offered as voluntary, and many people chose not to take them. No subsequent infections developed. In all, there were only three “positives” in Florida and they were restricted to the three colleagues who worked at the National Enquirer’s headquarters in Boca Raton: Bob Stevens, who died on October 5; Ernie Blanco, who was hospitalized with pneumonia on the same day that Bob was too ill to continue his vacation trip in North Carolina (Oct.1); and Stephanie Dailey, who kept her office in the company mailroom, the defintive “Ground Zero” of the anthrax attacks, and never felt sick for one day throughout the whole ordeal in spite of using her hotly-contaminated office for two weeks before the building was shut down. 

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Are you with me? –dear reader– by now you’ve noticed that we took the fork in the road! A shortcut is straight ahead though a map and compass are at your disposal, but I can say from here we’re settng our feet on the central Murder Mystery of American Anthrax. I want to tell you what I think and how the evidence adds up so far:

   No anthrax-laden letters need to have passed through the postal system. Dozens, perhaps, and dozens more envelopes at each tainted locale with very small amounts of ‘medically insignificant’ anthrax could have been batched by antibiotic-taking conspirators; mailed and addressed locally, even routed back among the conspirators themselves, leaving spores behind to collect over several days and establish a ‘positive’ route of contamination. Before there was an outbreak, no one would ever suspect. When the time came for the ‘hit’, planted threat letters bearing fake postmarks were carefully delivered to their intended recipients.

   Most of the victims, tragically, would not have been random and haphazardly ‘in the way’; rather they were selected for the convenience of their roles in fabricating the larger plot which was based on the illusion that “Somebody is trying to kill the American people” as Ari Fleischer announced in a press conference. Each one of the inhalation victims had something unique about them that gave value to the illusion; in exploitable ways for propaganda and in subtle ways that erases the doubt of ‘chance’ exposure. The perpetrators didn’t merely move among us. They knew us.

   A commentator stated that the anthrax attacks were the work of “a very intelligent mind” –with so much intelligence, one must assume, from the workings of the postal system, to microbiology, to the jurisdictional disputes and limitations of investigating agencies, and on down to the habits of institutions and individuals, that this ‘mind’ was adroitly able to mobilize itself with politically astute precision and maximize the results of September 11th. What will you believe?

   

Map, compass, details, and conclusions to this essay are at www.thirdring.wordpress.com/  

Dr. Alan Sabrosky says it is “100% certain that 9-11 was a Mossad operation” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZci_o8nzQs