Hi IQBAL LATIF; Re domestic anthrax...
While they're not officially discounting anything, there are a bunch of reasons why domestic terrorists are suspected:
(1) Not very many letters were mailed. Osama bin Laden is an engineer, and he would know that hitting the enemy lightly with such a weapon simply prepares him better.
(2) The handwriting and wording on the letters seemed very little like what I would expect from Islamic terrorists. First, the other attacks had no attribution or messages, why include messages in the letters?
(3) The messages include only English, why didn't they write the message in Arabic? If the objective was to convince us to attribute it to Moslems they did a rather bad job of it.
(4) The messages seem more like a native English speaker trying to imitate English spoken by a foreigner rather than English as spoken by foreigners. You'll just have to trust me on this one, probably, but do recognize that native English speakers can easily recognize foreign nationals even by the order in which they put nouns and verbs. If more than a few sentences are included you can even distinguish between English written by native Russian speakers from English written by native German, for instance.
(5) US nut cases have had their hands on anthrax before. They love to talk about it. All it would take is for one of them to have stolen an anthrax filled artillery shell, for instance.
(6) Anthrax seems a bit subtle for Osama bin Laden.
The FBI likely is way ahead of us on this one, and note that they're not accusing Osama bin Laden of any involvement.
Do keep us updated on the anthrax discoveries in Pakistan. If these do not turn out to be false positives, then I'll retract my guess that the anthrax is domestic US. Is anyone actually sick with anthrax over there?
-- Carl |
