Interesting, if true.
Photos of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in captivity were first released on March 1, 2003. The 48-hour deadline for war was announced on March 17, 2003. On March 23, 2003, a few days after the war had begun, we got Barton Gellman's story about KSM being "involved in anthrax production". What does it all mean?
Well, let's first take a detour. July 17 was Revolution Day in Baathist Iraq. Saddam made long, long speeches on that day and sometimes launched new initiatives. Here is Saddam speaking on July 17, 2002: "Temmuz (July Revolution) returns to say to all evil tyrants and oppressors of the world: You will never defeat me this time. Never! Even if you come together from all over the world, and invite all the devils as well, to stand by you."
July 17, 2003, brought us the death of David Kelly, biowarfare expert and former weapons inspector in Iraq, who seems to have known that he would be in danger if the war went ahead. We are coming up on July 17, 2004, the first July 17 on which Saddam has been in captivity. And what do we suddenly hear from Tom Ridge? Al Qaeda planning large-scale attack in the United States.
I would submit that the danger has been Iraq all along, everyone at the highest levels knew this all along, but that they had and have no intention of ever admitting this - it is as simple and as sordid as that. Even now, they are setting up a cover story just in case the remnants of the old Baathist regime manage to engineer something next week. If it happens, it will be Osama bin Laden, disrupting the democratic process.
Here is another example. The African embassy bombings took place on August 7, 1998. What was the next day? It was "Victory Day" in Iraq, the tenth anniversary of the 1988 "victory" over Iran, and an occasion on which it was good to demonstrate that Iraq was also prevailing in the on-going "Mother of All Battles".
How did Clinton respond? He bombed Al Qaeda sites in Sudan and Afghanistan. He let a few months lapse. Then he had an Iraqi Liberation Act passed, talked up the WMD issue, and finally launched a bombing campaign which apparently concealed yet another attempt to overthrow Saddam. Does that course of events remind anyone of what happened after September 11?
So I don't know the basis of this "failed anthrax attack" story. Maybe they secretly had KSM in captivity since the original Karachi raid on September 11, 2002, and brought him out only after Iraq gave the signal for an anthrax attack. (If so, it would be the reverse of how Iraq bested the CIA in 1996, when they captured some communication gear supplied to Allawi's organization, the INA, but didn't reveal this for several months.) Or maybe this is just another cover story. Certainly Gellman's article could function as a failsafe: if there had been an anthrax attack in the West during the war in Iraq, they could point to it and say, see, we told you Al Qaeda had an anthrax program.
I wonder how many unreported anthrax letters there were.
It seems there was an anthrax letter in 2001 or 2002 that went unreported. The only reference that I'm aware of is an oblique one in a scientific article. (Based on the dates, this does not appear to be the same as the ostensible Feb., 2003, attack that you've referred to.)
Look at the following statement from the paper "Molecular Subtyping of Bacillus anthracis and the 2001 Bioterrorism-Associated Anthrax Outbreak, United States," by Alex R. Hoffmaster, et al., of the CDC, at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no10/02-0394.htm :
"State A reported isolating B. anthracis (2002017388) from an envelope. This state was not in the vicinity of the 2001 outbreak. By MLVA, the isolate was shown to have been cured of pXO1 and had the same genotype as the Pasteur strain, used in laboratories as a control strain for various tests (Table 2)."
Has anybody seen anything else about this letter?
Being of the Pasteur strain instead of Ames, and with at least one plasmid cured, it would seem likely that it is unrelated to the major incidents. But, until I read of this letter, I had thought that, although there are many hoax anthrax letters every year, none had contained actual anthrax with the exception of the FL/NY/DC attacks.
Given that this one seems to have snuck under the radar, and given the unreported-at-the-time B. cereus fatalities, and possibly given the claimed Feb., 2003, attack, one has to ask how many other anthrax letters there have been?