[muawiyah]

No, I'm not saying embossed envelopes are handled differently (in theory). Rather, it has to do with the O and D, origin/destination charactristic of the mail ~ in this case we are talking about individual to individual letters. They are in a distinct minority of mail types.

Plus, major mail generation (and mail collection) operations occur BEFORE 7 PM Friday evening. USPS doesn't even process mail on Sunday although it does fly it around the country, or dispatch it on trucks.

People do not mail much stuff on the weekends. It's easy for the handful of pieces entered late on a Friday evening (after last prayers at the mosque) to get lost for a few days ~ in fact, the system is virtually designed to ensure that this happens!

My thesis is that everything happened normally, and that the terrorists could not possibly have anticipated things going down this way.

[Battle Axe]

And then there is the question....why just those two senators?

Same deal as AMI and the NYT. The perps are foreign born Arabs. They do not understand our culture at all. Atta didn't either. One of the most telling insights is the account of the USDA woman who interviewed Atta on the spray plane deal. Atta thought she could open the safe behind her and dish out the money.

I had a Danish roomie in college who also thought the tabloids were an important, respected part of our culture. She said...they were up there by the cash register, so they must be important.
If those two senators were in the news a great deal, then they also must be important. If the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was intended for the White House, then there was no need to send a letter there. Otherwise, why wouldn't they have sent one there.