Yellow Journalism Takes a Holiday Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Yellow Journalism Takes a Holiday by Peter Bell peter_bell@email.com Workers at the "Sun" tabloid in Florida are taking Indigenous Peoples' Day off - at the request of what sounds like a multijurisdictional task force investigating the inhalational anthrax death of Bob Stevens, a photo editor at the "Sun." Apparently, the "Inquirer" comes out of the same building as the "Sun." A coworker of Stevens' is also ill with anthrax, the media are now admitting, and the building in which the "Sun" is housed apparently has traces of the infection. The form Stevens died of, inhalational anthrax, is extremely rare: Only 18 cases of it were reported in the US throughout the 20th century. I have yet to see anyone break that tally down into exposures in the wild versus exposures at Plum Island and USAMRIID, the US Army Infectious Diseases Research Center at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, an epicenter of biowarfare research throughout much of the latter 20th Century. A famous outbreak of anthrax in the FSSR city of Sverdlovsk is attributed by many to a breakdown in exhaust filtration at Biopreparat, a Soviet facility similar to USAMRIID. I have a prediction, admittedly highly speculative. A friend and I discussed the recent polling of African Americans indicating a new groundswell of support for racial profiling in the wake of the attacks on NYC and DC. Assuming the master narrative has some truth to it, and that bin Laden or other middle eastern elements had a role in the attacks of 911, they surely know that their closest allies are unlikely to get more easy freebies like the planes. The talent directly at their disposal tends to be best at small arms and explosives. If they want to really get our attention, they may well be looking to do something involving chemical, biological or radiological warfare (not necessarily a fission or fusion device per se - a big release of a uranium isotope from radwaste, or of plutonium, would bring a metro region to its knees.) Aum Shin Rikyo spent years trying to come up with a decent biological or chemical attack mode. In the end, the best they could do was to expose their own agents to very high level of risk by placing sarin in a subway system with very limited ultimate effectiveness. The hype over a CBW attack in the past weeks in our media has largely glossed over that point - delivery of those agents is damned hard, and requires very talented experts to build and deploy. The US is currently moving rapidly in the direction of far more aggressively going after people who look middle eastern - in the aerial campaign in Afghanistan, being conducted in spite of the lack of publically presentable data to implicate bin Laden, and in our streets (700 hate crimes against people who look "other," including Sikhs, as of a few days ago.) The much vaunted white paper from Justice proving bin Laden's authorship of 911 was never published. A source quoted by Seymor Hersh in the current New Yorker explains that white paper's failure to materialize as being not an attempt to protect intelligence sources and methods (the official story) but because "there was not enough to make a sale" in the way of facts linking bin Laden and Al Qaeda to the attacks. No matter - we'll drop the bombs, anyway, and we'll kill people whose looks we don't like here at home, anyway. However, the talent pool for chemical/nuclear/biological warfare that's available on the open market just now includes many from the former USSR; the most useful mercenaries would be those most likely to look like citizens. I think it's highly likely that the new fondness for racial profiling will blind offialdom to the next team: folks, trained in or even hailing from the FSSR who look a lot like US nationals who might do something that really, really gets our attention. And they won't have a lot of trouble doing it, if our attention remains as racially fixated as it is for now. But don't worry. I'm sure I'm just paranoid. I'm sure no one - not in our intel community, or in anyone else's, would even dream of doing a demonstration release of inhalational anthrax at a famous tabloid's headquarters. Smells too much like something Hearst would have thought of. * October 8, 2001 Officials: Anthrax Shown in Co-Worker By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 3:04 a.m. ET BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) -- Anthrax has been detected in a co-worker of a man who died after contracting a rare inhaled form of the disease and tests at the building where both worked have found evidence of the bacterium, authorities said. A nasal swab from the man, whose name was not immediately made public, tested positive for the anthrax bacterium, Tim O'Conner, regional spokesman for the Florida Department of Health, said Monday. It was not yet clear if anthrax had spread to his lungs or if he had a full-blown case of the disease. The man was in stable condition at an unidentified hospital, according to both the Florida and North Carolina health departments. His co-worker, Bob Stevens, had recently visited North Carolina. Stevens died Friday, the first person in 25 years in the United States to have died from an inhaled form of anthrax. News that Stevens had contracted the disease set off fears of bio-terrorism, especially when it was revealed that Middle Eastern men were believed to have recently visited an airfield about 40 miles from Stevens' home in Lantana and asked questions about crop-dusters. O'Conner said he couldn't say that the second case was related to terrorism. ``That would take a turn in the investigation,'' said O'Conner. ``It's a different aspect, we were thinking more of environmental'' sources.'' Stevens, 63, was a photo editor at the supermarket tabloid The Sun. Environmental tests performed at the Sun's offices in Boca Raton have detected the anthrax bacteria, said O'Conner. The Sun's offices have been closed off and law enforcement, local and state health and CDC officials were to take additional samples from the building on Monday, O'Conner said. About 300 people who work in the building are being contacted by the Sun and instructed not come to work Monday and undergo antibiotic treatment to prevent the disease. The FBI was helping in the search for the source of the bacterium, said Miami FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela. But ``the current risk of anthrax is extremely low,'' O'Conner said. It was unclear when the final tests would tell whether or not the second man has anthrax. The bacterium normally has an incubation period of up to seven days, but could take up to 60 days to develop, O'Conner said. ``We're waiting for additional testing to see if it will become a confirmed case of anthrax or not,'' said Barbara Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. ``I realize for the public this is going to be a very slight distinction.'' Michael Kahane, vice president and general counsel of American Media Inc., which publishes the Sun and two other tabloids, the Globe and the National Enquirer, confirmed the company closed its Boca Raton building at the request of state health officials. ``We are cooperating with the department of health and all other governmental agencies investigating this matter,'' he said Monday. ``Obviously are first concern is the health and well-being of our employees and their families.'' Only 18 inhalation cases in the United States were documented in the 20th century, the most recent in 1976 in California. State records show the last anthrax case in Florida was in 1974. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytenv-10.08.01-18:03:03-17218