Did you ever have one of those horribly irrational moments that led you to a very rational question? Just before I left work today, I read about more anthrax being found in 3 House offices. And then I got home and got my mail, not thinking even twice about it.
And one of the things I got was from the DC area. Not a handwritten message or anything of the sort; just from DC.
And I got a bit ... twitchy. Just for a second.
And then I realized that I was being silly. Took a minute though. (And I still wanted to wash my hands after I touched it.)
And then I wondered: why was it silly? What I mean by that isn't so much that my reaction was irrational, but that it shouldn't have been, given what's been happening in DC and New York and Florida and New Jersey.
Look, the working hypothesis at the moment is that either Daschle's letter leaked all over the post office, all over mail, all over postal workers ... or that there's more than one letter, which also leaked. (I'd tend to the second option, myself; nothing else makes sense.)
But the Brentwood post office in DC, or any of the other post offices, also handle outgoing mail. Mail headed to Virginia, to Maryland, to other parts of the country. If the issue is that the letters leaked all over, why aren't people in other parts of the country coming down with cutaneous anthrax? You probably couldn't get enough of a concentration to get inhalation anthrax, but it doesn't seem to take nearly as much to get a cutaneous infection. It should be happening elsewhere, and it's not. Maybe there's some nicety of mail sorting that I'm completely missing, but somehow, it sounds almost as if something else has to be going on. I'm not sure what, precisely -- any means of infecting a post office directly should produce the same sort of result, right? infected mail both inbound and outbound -- but something odd. Something seems to have been very precisely ... targeted.
Whatever is going on, it's been a very sophisticated campaign, regardless of the look of those letters. First, get the attention of the media by infecting the media itself, and then, when they're completely hyper about it all, and then go for the government -- and it seems almost certain, given how things have unfolded, that this particular attack was indeed sequenced.
I expect that within the next two months or so, all mail coming into major facilities in major cities will be irradiated ... although that won't help find the perpetrators. (And I don't even want to think about what they're going to do with the high mail volume holiday season looming.) And I would imagine that, with some justification, post office workers will demand anthrax vaccines, as well as improved gloves and filters.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!