Additionally, the fact that it's taking a government agency years to conclude that a terrorist was behind an act that, by its very nature, constituted "terrorism", is no great source of confidence in the future.
Well, then you have to ask yourself a question, a couple of them. First, do you believe they ever thought otherwise? And secondly, if you answer no to question number one waht would be the motivation for coming out now with this information/leak? What could be the motivation.
Only two that I can think of. One they are concerned that another attack may take place in the not too distant future. Or maybe two, they are fixing to "find" some WMD in Iraq and finger Saddam as the source of the first anthrax attacks.
On the phone that day, S.S.A. Fitzgerald told me that Erin O'Connor (case 2), an NBC aide, had been diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax 17 days after opening a powder-filled letter addressed to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The letter, postmarked on September 20 in St. Petersburg, Florida, began:
"THE UNTHINKABEL" (the Ns are reversed as Cyrillic characters in the published Vanity Fair article)
SAMPLE OF HOW IT WILL LOOK
Brief but ominous, the handwritten note threatened bioterror attacks on New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
I found the text curious for a number of reasons. First, the quotation marks were done Russian-style, with the opening quotes below the line, and the document's backward N's resembled the letter I in Russia's Cyrillic alphabet. But a bilingual Russian would be unlikely to confuse English and Cyrillic characters. This appeared to be someone's attempt to make his writing look Russian, or at least foreign. The same went for the block letters, which Russian adults don't use.
The Brokaw letter matched two other biothreat letters, also from St. Petersburg, mailed 15 days later -- same writing, same backward N's and Russian quotes, same threats of imminent bioterror. One was sent to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a co-author of Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the other to Howard Troxler, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times. Troxler opened his powder-packed letter on Tuesday, October 9. Miller opened hers at her office on Friday the 12th"the same day the NBC infection was diagnosed.
"THE UNTHINKABEL" looked like a deliberate misspelling, but why had it been placed in quotation marks" Turning to the Internet, I found announcements for a disaster-management conference to be held in Orlando called "It Could Happen to You -- Preparing for the Unthinkable" and featuring talks on bioterror readiness. The St. Petersburg letters, with their arrows and lists and dashes, vaguely resembled a slide from a Power-Point presentation, a common feature at scientific conferences. Then, too, Howard Troxler's surname -- in the letter proper, though not on the envelope -- was spelled "TOXLER." Could the error have been in-advertent, I wondered, a reflexive misspelling by someone used to writing such words as "toxic," "toxicity," "toxins," "toxicology," "toxoid?"