-Jerzy Pollack
Letter 1
One page, hand-printed letter
Transmittal envelope, also similarly hand printed
Addressed to "NBC TV – Tom Brokaw" – No return address
Postmarked Trenton, NJ 09/18/2001 (Tues.)
Letter 2
One page, hand-printed letter
Transmittal envelope, also similarly hand printed
Addressed to "NY Post" – No return address
Postmarked Trenton, NJ 09/18/2001 (Tues.) Letter 3
One page, hand-printed letter
Transmittal envelope, also similarly hand printed
Addressed to "Senator Daschle – 509 Hart Senate Office Building"
Return address – "4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ"
Return address zip code – "08852"
Postmarked Trenton, NJ 10/09/2001 (Tues.)
______________________________________________________________________________________ Letters sent to senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy tested positive for Anthrax on October 9, 2001. They were postmarked in Trenton, NJ.
_______________________________________________________________________________________ How many letters containing anthrax were sent out in the 2001 attacks?
Anthrax letter to Senate Majority Leader
Tom Daschle, postmarked Oct. 9, 2001.
Anthrax letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, postmarked Oct. 9, 2001. (AP Photo/FBI, HO)
Four letters were found. Contaminated letters to the York Post NBC’s Tom Brokaw had a September 18, 2001, postmark. Letters to Senator Tom Daschle and Senator Patrick Leahy, postmarked October 9, carried a more potent form of anthrax. Confirmed anthrax cases at American Media, in Florida, and at the New York offices of CBS and ABC suggest that letters were also sent to these offices.
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Jewish new year begins on somber note
September 18, 2001
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Jewish new year, known as Rosh Hashana, opened on a somber note in New York synagogues as congregations mourned the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks while marking the holiday.
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Jewish Holiday: Shemini Atzeret
October 9, 2001
Year 5762 / 2001-2002
Yom Tov/Holiday Hebrew Date English Date
Rosh Hashana (2 days)
Melacha* is prohibited Tishrei 1-2, 5762 September 18-19, 2001
* The concept of "Melachah": activity which is prohibited to a Jew on the Day of Shabbat, Shemini Atzeres
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Stars of David
THE MYSTERY OF THE AMI J.LO. LETTERS
"Tracking Anthrax", Newsweek, Oct. 29, 2001
"...Investigators are not ruling out a connection with Al Qaeda, but the letters to Daschle and NBC appear homegrown. Daschle’s, which bore the return address of a fourth-grade class, said, “We have this anthrax. You die now ... Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” NBC’s read, “This is next. Take penicillin now,” plus the last three phrases of Daschle’s letter. A powder-containing letter sent to AMI (but not recovered) contained a little star of David, recall staffers. So, too, NEWSWEEK has learned, did the anthrax letter to Daschle.
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"...a cheap Star of David charm"
FBI Ignored Letter in Anthrax Probe
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Aug. 15, 2002
Editor's note: See part one in this series, FBI and Anthrax: Another TWA 800 in the Making?
By now, there should be no dispute as to where the anthrax that killed Bob Stevens and nearly killed Ernesto Blanco came from. If you follow the spores found by the EPA in the samplings it took at the AMI building, even the most obtuse investigator would have to conclude that they arrived by mail.
Begin at the Boca Raton, Fla., post office that serviced AMI. Anthrax spores matching those found at AMI were found there.
Once in the AMI building, the mail was sorted. Either because the letter was addressed to the Sun tabloid, or because Blanco determined that it should go to the Sun even if addressed to the National Enquirer, he put it on his cart and began his regular route.
That route is marked by a trail of anthrax spores. It begins at the mail room, wends its way up to the second floor and ends up at the Sun offices on the third floor, where it is given to a Sun employee. Anthrax spores found on Bob Stevens' computer keyboard show that he handled the letter.
This much is known and beyond dispute. The source of the anthrax that killed Stevens and infected Blanco was a piece of mail. What can’t be pinned down is where the letter came from.
'Weird Love Letter to Jennifer Lopez'
On its Web site, Newsweek magazine reported that on Sept. 4 AMI received a "weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez" containing a "soapy" powder and a star of David, addressed to the singer-actress c/o The Sun tabloids.
That report is the only source of information concerning the date of receipt of the letter, or that it was addressed to Lopez specifically in care of the Sun.
Inside the Lopez letter was a "soapy, powdery substance" and a cheap Star of David charm, Sun employees confirmed. Knowledgeable sources told NewsMax.com that the letter, which Blanco had taken to the Sun, was opened by one of the editors in the absence of an editorial assistant who would have ordinarily opened it.
The editor looked at it and then tossed it into a wastepaper basket. Another Sun staffer, who NewsMax.com was told had a daughter who is a Lopez fan, retrieved it, found the contents amusing but of no interest to his daughter, and passed it around to other staff members, according to our sources.
The last person to touch the letter, they told NewsMax.com, was probably Bob Stevens.
At the time the AMI editorial director, Steve Coz told reporters that because his eyesight was faulty, Stevens held the envelope close to his face and probably inhaled the deadly spores. Stevens, or somebody else, threw the letter away. It was never recovered, leaving forever open the question of its being the source.
Coz’s account of Stevens' bad eyesight and his tendency to hold written material close to his face was confirmed by one of his best friends, who told NewsMax.com that Stevens read material that way.
Evidence Lost
Because the letter that may well have been the source of the anthrax at AMI no longer existed, a vital piece of evidence was lost. That a letter was the source is indicated by the fact that the trail of anthrax spores in the AMI building matches the exact route it took from the mailroom to the Sun tabloid office, but it cannot be proven that the anthrax carrier was the JLo letter.
The incident made little or no impression on the Sun staff at the time. Wacko mail frequently comes to the tabloid and is sometimes passed around. Few paid any attention to the letter, and only a couple of Sun employees even recalled that specific piece of mail.
FBI's Strange Reaction
Moreover, the FBI, which dismissed the letter out of hand and denied it had any significance, for reasons not disclosed asked AMI not to go into detail about it with the media or anyone else. The whole thing just vanished from the investigative radar screen.
The Newsweek report that the Lopez letter arrived Sept. 4th, seven days before the events of the terrorist hijacking attacks, would have assumed enormous significance had the letter been kept. It would seem to point the finger of guilt directly at the 9-11 hijackers, most of whom lurked nearby until leaving for their deadly rendezvous with the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
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Anthrax hoaxes: Hot new hobby?
By Leonard A. Cole
July/August 1999 pp. 7-9 (vol. 55, no. 04) © 1999 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
In April 24, 1997, a petri dish labeled "anthrachs" arrived in a package mailed to the offices of B'nai B'rith in Washington, D.C. The dish contained a red, gelatinous material which, nine hours later, was determined to be harmless. Meanwhile, police cordoned off the area around the building, rerouted traffic, and quarantined more than a hundred B'nai B'rith employees and residents of a nearby hotel......"
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"The incident occurred during Passover - a Jewish holiday, which is associated with the blood libel myth, the ancient anti-Semitic allegation that Jews murder non-Jews, especially Christians, to obtain blood for holiday rituals."
Friday May 2, 1997
Questions lingering after bizarre mailing to B'nai B'rith
MATTHEW DORF Jewish Telegraphic Agency
The episode was over, but questions were just beginning as Jewish organizational officials were left to assess the motive behind the threat and the handling of the emergency situation.
The announcement by Clearfield, B'nai B'rith's executive vice president, at about 8:30 p.m. on April 24 ended an ordeal that began when a B'nai B'rith mail clerk discovered an envelope leaking a red gelatinous substance from a petri dish that the sender claimed was an agent of "chemical warfare."
The dish was labeled with a misspelling of anthrax, a highly toxic biological agent.
"Antrax" (sp) Missing From Army Lab
(NOTE: "Antrax" & "Antraz" are European spellings of "Anthrax")
Hazardous material experts arrived at the downtown office building to remove the envelope, which also contained a suspicious and threatening anti-Semitic note, according to B'nai B'rith officials.
The incident, which is being investigated as domestic terrorism, spread beyond the headquarters of the international service organization. Chaos descended as reporters rushed to the scene and police cordoned off a five-block radius around the building, snarling evening rush-hour traffic and trapping people in adjacent office buildings, a restaurant and at least one hotel.
When tests at the Naval Medical Research Institute determined that the substance was not harmful, Clearfield announced that the quarantine was over.
But the questions continued.
Citing conversations with law enforcement personnel who had tended to the emergency and had expressed their own concerns about lack of training to deal with such a situation, B'nai B'rith officials complained that the nation's capital was not equipped to deal with such an incident.
"It is inexcusable for police and fire personnel in a city which is so vulnerable to terrorist incidents to not have the highest level of training and appropriate resources for dealing with situations as potentially deadly as this," Clearfield said.
He specifically cited the lack of proper suits and decontamination equipment needed to hose down some of the employees who were exposed to the potentially hazardous material.
He also expressed anger that the decontamination took place in the open, leaving two of his employees shown on national television being hosed down in their underwear.
B'nai B'rith has called for a federal investigation to determine if the police are prepared for such incidents.
Ironically, B'nai B'rith, which has been involved in anti-terrorism efforts abroad, also unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to include in last year's anti-terrorism bill a provision allowing military personnel to assist local law enforcement and FBI agents in the event of a chemical or biological incident.
"This incident needs to be a wake-up call for our government," Clearfield said.
Last week's threat to B'nai B'rith came to an institution with unusually tight security.
After the 1977 siege, when 12 Black Muslim extremists seized the B'nai B'rith building and two other buildings not affiliated with Jewish organizations, B'nai B'rith implemented strict security measures.
Of the 134 hostages held in the 1977 attack, 107 were held in the B'nai B'rith building. That siege ended peacefully after 39 hours.
Although the site of last week's incident was the same, the situations were very different.
"In 1977, we were in an immediate life-threatening situation, with people holding guns to our heads and hitting people with rifle butts and their fists," Clearfield said.
"This time we were at our desks, waiting and worrying."
Although Jewish hostages were not singled out during the 1977 raid, anti-Semitic epithets were hurled frequently at the group.
This time, police believe that the Jewish group was targeted.
The substance came in an envelope with a two-page typed letter that identified the sender as the "Counter Holocaust Lobbyists of Hillel," according to the FBI.
The letter was anti-Jewish and included non-specific threats, according to Clearfield, who saw the letter at a private FBI briefing.
Clearfield confirmed that the letter included a reference saying that the only "good Jew is an Orthodox Jew," but cautioned that this was "a single phrase among many."
The letter also included references to Nazis, the Holocaust and Hillel, the Jewish college organization, but did not mention B'nai B'rith specifically.
"It's a crazy letter," Clearfield said. "It didn't make any sense."
As the situation began to return to normal at the building that also houses the Washington offices of the Council of Jewish Federations, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, law enforcement officials began trying to identify the sender of the package.
At the same time, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said it would pre-screen all mail addressed to Jewish community organizations in New York, according to the FBI.
Meanwhile, speculation about the source of the threat continued.
Initially, Clearfield said he would have "bet money" that the package was related to Passover.
The incident occurred during Passover, which is associated with the blood libel myth, the ancient anti-Semitic allegation that Jews murder non-Jews, especially Christians, to obtain blood for holiday rituals.
"When I first heard that there was red liquid dripping from the package, I thought it was related to the blood libel," Clearfield said.
But with no reference in the letter to Passover, Clearfield dismissed his earlier conjecture.
Many in the building were thinking of Passover during the ordeal.
With the employees having gone without food since noon, police allowed B'nai B'rith volunteers to drop off gefilte fish, matzah, cream cheese and cookies for dinner.
After they left the building, many staffers said they were concerned during the episode, but did not believe they were in danger.
"Once I heard that the petri dish had been labeled, I thought that a terrorist would not be so silly to label the contents of his petri dish," said Leila Barcony, a project assistant at B'nai B'rith's Center for Jewish Identity".
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FBI stymied in efforts to solve anthrax case
"A former law enforcement official who keeps up with several investigators said,"From the people I've talked to, it's going nowhere."
The official, who asked to remain unidentified because of sensitivity over leaks in the case, said some agents still formally assigned to Amerithrax are now mostly working on other cases, because "there's nothing for them to do.
WASHINGTON - Richard Lambert, the FBI inspector in charge of
the investigation of the deadly anthrax letters of 2001, testified under oath
for five hours last month about the case.
Four years after an unknown bioterrorist dropped letters
containing a couple of teaspoons of powder into a mailbox in Princeton, New
Jersey, what began as the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history
appears to be stalled, according to scientists and former law enforcement
officials who have spoken with investigators.
The failure to solve the case the authorities call
Amerithrax is a grave disappointment for the FBI and the Postal Inspection
Service, the investigative arm of the U.S. Postal Service.
The letters, the first major bioterrorist attack in the
United States, killed five people, sickened 17 others, temporarily crippled
mail service and forced the temporary evacuation of U.S. federal buildings
including Senate offices and the Supreme Court.
"They've done everything they can possibly think of
doing, and they're just not there yet," said Randall Murch, a former FBI
scientist who pioneered the use of testing to trace the origin of microbes used
in crimes. "You have to understand that the pressure is enormous."
A former law enforcement official who keeps up with several
investigators said, "From the people I've talked to, it's going
nowhere."
The official, who asked to remain unidentified because of sensitivity
over leaks in the case, said some agents still formally assigned to Amerithrax
are now mostly working on other cases, because "there's nothing for them
to do."
For Robert Mueller 3rd, director of the FBI, who started
work in September 2001 just before the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax letters,
the case is a priority. He gets a briefing on the investigation every Friday
that he is in Washington, said Debra Weierman, an FBI spokeswoman.
In the past year, the number of FBI agents on the case has dropped from 31 to 21, authorities said. During the same time, the number of postal inspectors has fallen from 13 to nine. The reward remains the same: $2.5 million for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
The culprit is a U.S. scientist who had access to the high-grade anthrax and the knowledge of how to physically manipulate it and use it as a weapon. That theory emerged early in the investigation and remains viable today, authorities said.
The report will include the names of various people deemed to be "persons of interest" over the years, as well as updates on the scientific tests....."
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The Times September 24, 2005
Anthrax terrorists outfox the FBI
Failure of inquiry has astonished Americans and angered widow
FOUR years after the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, which brought fresh terror to the US days after the September 11 hijackings, the biggest criminal investigation in American history has gone cold.
The failure to solve one of the most baffling and sinister terrorist cases of modern times has not only led to intense frustration for the FBI, but has also prompted the British widow of one of the victims to sue the US Government.
Robert Stevens, 63, photo editor, the Sun, American Media Inc, Boca Raton, Florida. Contracted inhaled anthrax...[found on his keyboard] Died October 5. - Guardian (11/23/01) The first anthrax victim was a photo editor at American Media, Inc. who owns the National Enquire and a number of other supermarket tabloids.
Bob Stevens, a British picture editor from Berkshire who worked in Boca Raton, Florida, was one of five people who died in and seventeen who became ill in September and October 2001, after coming into contact with a weapons-grade strain of anthrax posted to media organisations and the offices of two Democratic senators in Washington.
His widow, Maureen, who believes that the anthrax came from a government biodefence laboratory in Maryland, spoke yesterday of her anger and frustration at the failure of the FBI to make an arrest in the case. She is suing the Government for $30 million (nearly £17 million), alleging that security lapses at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick led to her husband’s death. Much of her case is aimed at getting leading bioterrorism experts to testify in court.
“There’s nothing coming out — it’s just amazing,” Mrs Stevens said. “I’ve had one meeting with the FBI. I have had little communication with them. I would have thought they wanted to talk more.”
She said that she found the case difficult to talk about, because of anger and other emotions, and that she and her lawyer were “just meeting a stone wall”.
The failure to make one arrest in the case has astounded and dismayed many Americans. FBI agents and officials from the Postal Inspection Service have conducted more than 8,000 interviews on four continents and served more than 5,000 subpoenas. They have travelled to Afghanistan twice.
Maureen Stevens and her family filed a $50 million claim against the U.S. government. (Photo: CBS/The Early Show)
In the past year, the FBI says, the number of agents on the case has dropped from 31 to 21, a far cry from the hundreds assigned to the investigation in its early weeks. Despite a $2.5 million reward for information leading to a conviction, the case “is going nowhere”, a former investigator said. The favoured theory has remained consistent: that the culprit is an American scientist who had access to the anthrax.
Spore-laden letters were posted on September 18 and October 9, 2001, to media organisations in New York and Florida, and to the offices of Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic leader, and a colleague, Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont. Five people were killed — Mr Stevens and two postal workers, and also a New York hospital worker and an elderly Connecticut woman, whose deaths were not a direct result of the mail attacks.
Panic gripped Washington, with the Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court building and numerous postal facilities being shut down. The letters included photocopied notes referring to the September 11 attacks and Islamic rhetoric.
Investigators soon determined that the anthrax used was the Ames strain, most commonly used in American biodefence research. Attention focused on Fort Detrick, and in particular on Steven Hatfill, an American biodefence expert who worked at the facility between 1997 and 1999. Dr Hatfill, who has not been charged and fiercely denies any involvement, was named as a “person of interest” by John Ashcroft, then the Attorney-General.
Numerous tips have proved fruitless. Two years ago the FBI spent three weeks draining a pond near Fort Detrick, believing that the culprit may have discarded materials there. The pond yielded nothing.
2005
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Confirms Positive Anthrax Tests
Two labs confirmed Pentagon anthrax
Two labs confirmed Pentagon anthrax
WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) -- Anthrax has been confirmed in samples collected from the two Pentagon mail facilities that were at first closed last week and then declared free of the pathogen, United Press International has learned.
The head of the company that was accused of contaminating the samples sent from those facilities -- a detached building on the Pentagon grounds in Arlington, Va., and the other in Falls Church, Va. -- said the presence of anthrax was detected independently by two government laboratories.
The Washington Post ^ | July 12, 2005 | Washington Post ...
***
"It is a fact that we had a presumptive positive test come up," he said. "That presumptive positive test was confirmed by us and by at least two other labs as being a true positive."
Carlee Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md., which tested the samples after CBI, confirmed that the follow-up tests on the first sample were positive and that two labs had done such tests."
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BIOCHEMICAL ATTACKS
Northeat Intelligence Network
The Anthrax Attacks of 2005
"The Elephant in the Room"
by Sean Osborne, Military Affairs Expert, Senior Analyst
23 March 2005: Youve probably heard a casual mention on one of the evening news programs recently of an incident involving a report of anthrax being found at the Pentagon and two other facilities in Washington, DC last week. This report was quickly followed by reports that the alarm was really the cause of false positive test results and the incident was actually a non-event. Lacking true investigative journalists for the most part, the press rarely follows through on getting answers to the more difficult questions and accepts the official denials, moving on to cover more sensational stories such as the Michael Jackson trial and the sad case of Terry Schiavo as the talk of terrorism is beginning to get tiresome anyway. More importantly, though, this most recent anthrax case brings to mind the old phrase about the presence of there being an elephant in the room," which is used to describe a situation where there is a very large problem or situation, but everyone pretends that it really isn't there, and no one really wants to talk about it. Such describes the anthrax incident that began in Washington, DC on Thursday, March 10, 2005......"
The Overlooked Attack
"Amerithrax are now mostly working on other cases, because "there's nothing for them to do."
CONTINUED.....
