I did not know that This is what happens when you go on night shift. You miss things.
The 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."
Most of the markers examined indicate that the anthrax came from a domestic supply, and we had the news flap a couple of weeks ago about an American scientist under suspicion. Now it looks like there may be an Al Qaida connection as well. This leads me to the disturbing possibility that we have a 5th column at work here in the US. Take this new information, and combine it with the recent revelations about Terry Nichols and his trips to the PI, potentially to meet up with Al Qaida sponsored terrorists, and the possibility grows a little more likely.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Washington on March 14, alleges that convicted Oklahoma City conspirator Nichols met repeatedly in the Philippines with World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Youssef, and that Youssef was an Iraqi intelligence agent. If these allegations are confirmed in court, they constitute a stunning indictment of Iraqi state complicity in murderous attacks on the United States well before Sept. 11.
Thanks to Rand Simberg for the above link.
If Al Qaeda terrorists are working through home grown terrorists, then we have a much bigger problem than we first suspected.
UPDATE Maybe it isn't just the night shift. I've just finished doing my daily rounds, and nobody seems to have picked this up.
Posted by Rich at March 26, 2002 5:29 AM