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Could it have come from Russia's ongoing and never-shut-down aggressive bio and chem weapons infrastructure?

"You Americans have 5 experts on Anthrax...we have 5,000," a Russian scientist bragged.

They made--and have not destroyed nor accounted for--thousands of gallons of militarized agents such as anthrax, Smallpox, Dengue Fever, and numerous others...

--Boris

Wouldn't suprise me if it came from Russia. Also wouldn't surprise if it came from Saddam Hussein's labs, aided and trained by Russians. What stuns me is the way the article itself and seemingly the FBI are absolutely fixated on the idea that the anthrax was Made in USA. They turn handsprings to avoid going anywhere near the most obvious explanation, which is that Mohammed Atta mailed the anthrax just before September 11, 2001.

Timing and motive are interesting questions about the anthrax attacks. The first fatality in Florida occured less than one month following 9/11.

From the information in this article, it seems unlikely that an individual could have assembled apparatus, supplies, and then created the agent in the time between 9/11 and the first mailing. Therefore, it was either someone with the apparatus and supplies in place, or it was someone with access to a preexisting stock of weaponized anthrax.

As to motive, one could imagine that persons in the US would want to amplify the impact of 9/11, so that the populace could be stampeded into accepting a greater erosion of liberties as a legitimate tradeoff for more effectively combating terrorism. However, that could have been accomplished with a less sophisticated agent, so it is fairly unlikely.

The most likely possibility is that there is deep suspicion that it came from Iraq. That would at least partially account for the Bush administration's fixation on invading Iraq under whatever pretenses were necessary to coerce public opinion. It is unlikely that it came from Al Qaida, although it is not impossible that they got hold of Iraqi material somehow and used it to implicate Iraq.