At the moment there is a rash of "letter bombs" which bear a postmark "somewhere in Italy".
Someone who understands modern postal systems knows very well that it's pretty difficult for a fused charge of any kind to make it through the multiple stages of any facing/cancelling operation, or even through the various kinds of sortation equipment it will meet.
So, how do you get a letter bomb delivered if it's going to be triggered in transit?
First of all, you get it cancelled BEFORE you put the bomb into it. I can think of several ways to do that.
Then you load the envelope with the explosive device and hand carry it to the delivery location.
The FBI, among other police organizations, would go crazy investigating the post office of origin where the bomb was loaded into an already cancelled envelope.
It's really not all that difficult to find folks willing to cancel an envelope or two ~ in fact, the USPS will do it for you for a modest fee (as an ordinary feature in the philatelic servicing business). You can find out what post offices are busy with some sort of commemorative cancellation right in the Postal Bulletin (or it's foreign postal system equivalent.)
BTW, I've seen envelopes disintegrate in an 010 operation, stuff flying everywhere. Was it a bomb? Was it bad paper? Was it just that envelope's turn to self-destruct? Best advice when you see that happen is to reverse course, go somewhere else, and call the Inspectors because, after all, it could have been a bomb and where there's one there's two, or maybe three, or more!
My suspicion is there's someone inside AlQaeda who understands the equipment and workings of modern postal systems. They are not smarter than the USPS folks, or even the foreign postal administration people, but, since the advent of the student loan system, they have become much smarter than the FBI in this regard.
Both the present letter bomb problem and the Anthrax Attack of 2001 could be solved in a matter of days by putting postal system experts to work and pulling back the accountants and lawyers at the FBI.
"My suspicion is there's someone inside AlQaeda who understands the equipment and workings of modern postal systems."That's one way to view it, and of course, to get any measure of success, you would have to have someone with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the postal system, but another way to view this is that the al Qa'ida person that fleshed out the goal for the anthrax attack had a degree in communications theory. Communications theory would tell you what could be done as well as why, while knowledge of the inner workings of the postal system would tell you how to accomplish it. The former being strategy, the latter, tactics.
So we may be seeing two tiers of al Qa'ida ops planning at work behind the anthrax attack.
Interesting line of thought you offer. The key to understanding it being that the prominent targets of the anthrax attack, Daschle and Leahy, while making a wonderful distraction to confuse investigators, were not the primary targets. The primary target was the postal system, itself.
When viewed this way, the attack on Daschle and Leahy make perfect sense for al Qa'ida.
--Boot