But if the goal was to get people to blame the far right, why would they go to such trouble to pin the blame on Islamic extremists?
And if the goal was to stop research into biological warfare, this would have had the opposite effect.
There is no need for a lab.All that is needed is a proper glove box-which can be bought or built.
It is not as simple as that.
Either your hypothetical hippie perps obtained already-weaponized anthrax from their US government source, or else they obtained stock spores - virulent Ames but not yet weaponized.
A left-winger without deep military or CIA connections would not have been able to obtain already-weaponized material, whose existence to this day has not even been acknowledged. I'm not sure a simple glovebox would have sufficed for placing the material in the envelopes, but I suppose they could have obtained brief access to a containment facility. It's obtaining the material in the first place that's the sticking point in this case.
If they instead obtained unweaponized spores, which is a more reasonable possibility, then they would have been faced with the formidable task of developing a weaponization protocol and then weaponizing the purloined spores. This requires a series of experiments over a period of time in an advanced lab facility. It is not credible that this could have been done secretly in the U.S. by some group of far-left-wing rebels.
THAT I can agree to !
Worth noting: There has been some suggestion the material used to "float" the spores was a substance called "nanoglass",and that the anthrax was prepared in a spray dryer.
I've also read(somewhere or other)a PROPERLY made w/g anthrax would be almost impossible to package,because it would float right out of anything it was placed in (except a covered vial).
Descriptions of what was mailed suggest a combination of w/g anthrax and almost-dry anthrax slurry may have been used.
One of our posters,who used to use the name "Van der Waals" here knew something about nanoglass,but got himself barred because of a dispute with some of the other posters.