Bio-Terrorism

Debra Bottcher (worked “down the corridor” from Mr Stevens): Oct 11, 2001:  "It's just starting to hit me. At first I thought it was a fluke but now I find myself wondering about all these crazy things going on.  Bob Stevens lived in Lantana.  Atta, that terrorist, was in Lantana.  All these amazing coincidences are just too amazing for me. I'm very worried.

NEWSWEEK has learned that the FBI is aggressively trying to locate a summer intern from nearby Florida Atlantic University in connection with the investigation. The intern, who sources said came from a Middle Eastern country, had sent an e-mail to all employees that … thanked company employees for the help he gave them, but then contained language suggesting that he wasn’t saying “goodbye.” 

AMI official: (The email had) a sense of foreboding -  it referred to a “surprise” - something that he left behind - it was weird.

Al Qaeda

The Atlantic::, June 1, 2002:  If anything, hints that anthrax and Al Qaeda may be linked have grown harder to dismiss.

Dot one: Several of the hijackers, including their suspected ringleader, Mohamed Atta, are reported to have looked at crop dusters in Belle Glade, Fla.

Dot two: Among five targeted media organizations, only one was not nationally prominent—American Media, of Boca Raton, Fla., which happens to be a few miles from where Atta and other terrorists lived and attended flight school. (Atta rented an apartment from a real estate agent whose husband worked for American Media.)

Dot three: In March a doctor in Fort Lauderdale announced that he had treated one of the terrorists for what, in retrospect, he believes was cutaneous anthrax. Doctors at Johns Hopkins University examined the case and concurred that anthrax was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available."

Deseret, Apr2002:  Assessing a medical case in Florida, in which one of the Sept. 11 hijackers sought treatment for a leg wound in June, O'Toole and Inglesby concluded that the skin lesion might have been caused by anthrax. That was the conclusion too of the attending physician, Dr. Christos Tsonas of the Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., but it was reached only after reviewing his notes taken while treating Ahmed Ibrahim Al Hanzawi for what appeared to be a simple, if unusual, leg injury.

Bryen, on mailing anthrax:  It's not how regimes think about dispersing a biological or chemical weapon, which should say that the guy distributing it was a total amateur.  (That leads me to) "sample" theory" - the sample theory being that somebody gave these guys a small amount. It has all the characteristics that it was given to people who didn't have any idea how to use it.

The Atlantic::  Other recent reports cite captured documents and an unfinished lab in Afghanistan that suggest Al Qaeda was interested—as presumably it would be—in producing biological weapons, including anthrax. In 1999, an Arabic-language newspaper in London reported that: "elements loyal to [Osama] bin Laden" had, for a few thousand dollars, "managed to obtain an offer for the supply of samples of anthrax and other poisons" from a former Soviet bloc country.