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Let me deal with the Rutgers thing immediately. The FBI has never announced authoritatively where the letters were copied. The whole business at that school, or near that school, was just another in a series of false leads.

Here's how the letters were mailed at one time, but ended up appearing to be part of a series of different "attacks" undertaken on different days:

Depending on what time of day, and which day of the week, a half dozen otherwise identical letters mailed at the same time are going to end up with different kinds of service.

Working backwards from 9/11 we have 9/10, 9/9, 9/8 and 9/7. There are more days of course but let's stick to these particular days.

9/7 is Friday. As we meet up with our terrorist friends, they have the anthrax, but they have only one envelope. So, they fill that envelope with the requisite amount and resolve to stop by the post office and buy some more envelopes after last prayer of the day.

They then do so. While there, they drop the original, filled envelope, into a letter drop in the lobby. Tests for anthrax spores conducted in the Boca Raton, FL post office show positive results in that area, and in many others showing a trail of contamination from there to two other buildings. This is the envelope directed at AMI publications. (Note: there were no spores found at the letter drop because the tray that catches the mail customers drop had been taken away ~ something that happens many times a day).

The Washington Post actually ran a large diagram showing the anthrax test findings from all the facilities that ended up being contaminated.

The terrorists then fill the new envelopes they've just acquired, address them appropriately, and then tape them up with clear packaging tape. An FBI agent demonstrated that all of the tape found on all the envelopes came from the same roll!

Rather than run the envelopes back down to the post office to drop in the letter drop in the lobby, the terrorists simply drop them in collection boxes in the neighborhood. By spreading them around they improve the probability of delivery, and reduce the probability of discovery by the authorities.

So, there those envelopes are in the bottom of collection boxes on a Friday night.

What happens next?

Well, collection occurs. A postal truck and driver come around, open the boxes, pull out the large tray in the bottom (which is where your letters fall) and put a new tray in. The door is locked. The driver returns to his vehicle and places a virtually empty tray in the back of his truck ~ probably nesting it inside yet another virtually empty tray.

He does his whole route, collects all the boxes, and ends up with a stack of nearly empty trays, several of which contain an anthrax letter.

Upon return to the Boca Raton post office on this late night collection run, he pulls out the trays, sets them on the back dock, parks his truck for the evening, and goes home.

It's going to be Saturday morning before anybody does anything with those trays with those letters.

Remember again ~ it's very important ~ very little mailing is done late Friday evening, and no businesses do any mailings of consequence on Saturday morning. For mail collection operations this is a very dead time, nearly as dead as Saturday evening and Sunday morning!

The stack of nearly empty trays is mistaken for a stack of "empty trays", or empty MTE (Mail Transport Equipment).

Down in South Florida equipment piles up since they don't send as much mail out as they receive in from the rest of the country. There, a stack of empty trays will ordinarily be wrapped in plastic, placed on a pallet with other stacks of empty trays, and as soon as possible, placed on a truck for a trip North to someplace with a lot of major mailers.

MTE from this area (West Palm Beach) is taken to Philadelphia, PA to the BMC (Bulk Mail Center). From there MTE is distributed to, among other places, Franklin Twp. New Jersey!

So, our stack of supposedly empty trays with a handful of anthrax filled envelopes gets sent to a mailer in Central New Jersey.

The mailer's people receive the trays, set them aside, and then, as time and circumstances, and mail volumes dictate, begin pulling trays off the top to be filled with mail.

As the trays are pulled, the letters will be found, one at a time, and then be dispatched to the local post office along with the company's own business related mail. This mail will enter the post office over the back dock. It will not go through a collection box. It will not be subject to culling and facing. Instead, it will be placed directly on the canceling machine.

That's how the anthrax letters got their postmarks.

Since different letters were in different trays in that single stack of trays, they were pulled on different days and ended up with cancelations that are different.

So, a single mailing, half a dozen letters, and ordinary handling of single-piece rate First-Class Mail under normal conditions pertaining to mail service on Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday ends up giving you something that looks like two different attacks ~ one in Florida and one in New Jersey, undertaken at different times.

I rather think everything happened normally for all of this mail, and there were no strange events. None of this is strange.

The FBI pursued the idea that someone dropped the mail in their very own curbside letter box (usually called by everyone a "mail box").

They were unable to find such a box although they dug up thousands of them for testing elsewhere.

They never bothered to check the records regarding empty MTE shipments originating in Florida and ending in New Jersey, although the USPS maintains an elaborate data base that should have been able to pinpoint the exact pallet-load of trays, and where they went.

For all anyone knows, there's still a couple of these letters sitting there in the remainder of a stack of MTE in some NJ mailer's shop.

This sort of negligence on the part of the FBI kills innocent people every single time. Unfortunately it's what we have all come to expect.