So you rule out al Qaeda entirely?
Lately, the idea that the anthrax mailer was an opportunist acting in the wake of 9/11 seems exceptionally unlikely to me. The motives and the circumstances don't add up. What motives, after all, have been suggested? The main suggestions I've seen are: (i) it was a warning about the bioterror threat, by someone who had no foreknowledge of 9/11; (ii) it was an attempt to frame Iraq, by someone who knew 9/11 was coming. (Partisans of 'none of the above' are herewith invited to post their ideas about motive.)
For (i), we have to imagine someone sitting on a stash of weaponized anthrax, so worried about the bioterror threat that they're thinking of faking an incident. Then boom, out of the blue 9/11 happens; and a week later, they think, "Gee, I'd better mail out those letters, just in case we get complacent about terrorism!"
Suggestion (ii) - who would want to frame Iraq? People mention Iran, Israel, and the Bush administration. But if Iran was behind the anthrax, it makes much more sense to suppose that they were behind 9/11 as well, which would make this a position-3 theory. (I'll come back to this possibility...) As for the other two, well, I'll debate those possibilities if anyone cares to defend them, but in brief I think it would be a strategically illogical way to proceed, and also supposes powerful yet sociopathic cabals of a sort that I think simply doesn't exist in those societies.
I have more time for the idea that it was al Qaeda acting alone, or that someone other than Iraq was the state sponsor. The former option apparently requires that the potency of the anthrax has been overstated, a path I won't explore here. In the latter case, let's specifically consider Iran for a moment. You might suppose that Iran has been working through al Qaeda all these years, trying to make it look like Iraq by carrying out attacks on days of Iraqi significance. The aim might be to get the USA to support a Shiite uprising, which Iran could later control; but Bush outwitted Tehran by invading Iraq with a massive American force, rather than attempting regime change on the cheap, as was advocated by the Iraq hawks circa 1999.
Where this theory initially founders, in my opinion, is on the Kuwaiti connection. Abdul Basit Karim (aka Ramzi Yousef) grew up in Kuwait, was there when Iraq invaded, was described as a collaborator by the Kuwaiti interior minister, and his itinerary beyond Kuwait was added to his file by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation, suggesting a cooperative relationship. He does not seem a very likely candidate for a plot meant to injure Iraq.
There are some other "what ifs" that I haven't mentioned, e.g. what if al Qaeda got the anthrax from North Korea, what if they got it from freelance Biopreparat scientists, etc. I guess we'll get around to those in due course!
I presume that some people in the administration thought Iraq the likely culprit, some thought al-Qaeda, and some thought neither.
In Woodward's NSC scene, they consider Iraq and Russia. I've also been told that Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are the three candidates for state sponsor of al Qaeda which are seriously considered in Washington.
'What ifs'.......got........North Korea,China,Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pac brothers, India, Egypt, Cuba, Canada,.....more...
:-(
So you rule out al Qaeda entirely?
I wouldn't go that far. I was referring to the specific options you enumerated.
I think option 1 ("The anthrax letters were a collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda, but the USA still can't prove it") is unlikely because of the complete lack of supporting evidence from Iraq, whether from on-the-ground discoveries or from Iraqi scientists.
Option 3 ("The anthrax letters were the work of al Qaeda...") seems unlikely because it requires al-Qaeda to behave out of character. Why didn't al-Qaeda use the anthrax for a mass attack? One might hypothesize that they thought (incorrectly) that the letters would be an effective vehicle, but, if they really know the weaponization secret, why haven't they simply processed some more and staged a mass attack since? As time goes by, this argument becomes more and more persuasive.
Option 2 I discussed earlier. (I don't think it's reasonable to think that a secret held by disparate and opposing groups, among which is a country that the U.S. has successfully invaded, could really be kept a secret.)
In any case, I don't think al-Qaeda is ultimately responsible for the letters, in the sense that they don't have the expertise or hidden infrastructure to have developed the weaponization method, nor to use such a method without the acquiescence of a government. And, again, the lack of mass attacks and further attacks demonstrates that al-Qaeda does not have that capability. (I will leave open the possibility that somebody gave them a small amount of weaponized anthrax, which, luckily for us, they squandered. This still seems unlikely to me, unless somebody can come up with a reason that they chose to use such a relatively ineffective dispersal method. Needless to say, I do not minimize the deaths that occurred, nor the economic damage, but it could have been far, far worse.)
Pakistan (or Pakistanis, as in ISI) would be another natural candidate.
I've always been surprised that China is almost never speculated about as a possible source for the anthrax letters. Although I've never read about it and have no documented proof, common sense suggests that China almost certainly has an anthrax program. So they'd be in a position to take fast advantage of 9/11, and they'd have the motivation to do so. In fact, they'd have a number of motivations:
There's also the possibility of a domestic U.S. source, of course. This would most likely be some small internal group acting without official sanction or knowledge. (In fact, a similar sort of rogue group could have operated in any of the foreign countries mentioned above also, acting under the protective cover of a secret defense or intelligence establishment.)
This is not so strategically illogical if you think of a cabal of rogues in any of those states, rather than thinking in terms of official sponsorship.
As for the idea that the letters were sent to frame Iraq: How do the anthrax letters frame Iraq anyway? They don't mention Iraq, they don't allude to Iraq. In context, they would seem to frame al-Qaeda if anybody. The text:
"Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great."
makes me think of Iran, if anybody.
So how could the perpetrators have known that Iraq would be blamed? And, if they had wanted to get Iraq blamed, wouldn't they have pointed more directly to Iraq in some way?
Another point: It is said that Iraq used the Vollum strain in its anthrax production. If one wanted to frame Iraq, that strain would have been a better choice than Ames.
And how did any of these foreign candidates get virulent Ames anyway? Whether it was a domestic job or a foreign job, you can't get away from some U.S. connection.
What if they got it from US stockpilers? Something very like it was at Ft Detrick. It was mailed from NJ. The shortest distance between these two pts doesn't go through N Korea. Ohio is OK, but Occam's razor doesn't like Pyongyang for this.
Why would someone plan to smuggle it out of the US and then back into the US? Doesn't that sound like a risky plan, a plan to go awry?