With no success. It must not be a recent event.
<< One proponent of the "liberal targets" theory said to me that Daschle and Leahy were being attacked by Rush Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts throughout 2001 >>
I'll pass on this would-be theory.
<< On the other side, you've probably seen Ross Getman's arguments about the "Leahy Law" and its role in counterterrorism assistance to states like Egypt, and that law dates from 1997. >>
Havnt seen it. Do you have a link?
With no success. It must not be a recent event.
I don't agree with this reasoning of yours. I have not seen any very analytical discussion of the "liberal targets" theory, for example. If you search backwards through Google's newsgroup archives, from September 10, 2001, for joint occurrences of "Daschle" and "Leahy", the first (i.e. most recent) occasion on which they are mentioned together is in a statement by a group called Traditional Values Coalition, complaining that the senators are removing the phrase "so help me God" from oaths made before Senate committees. So like it or not, the political targets of the anthrax letters may have been drawn from the enemies list of someone on the right.
What bugs me is the idea that this is the only reasonable interpretation. The proponents of this idea never seem to ask whether there might have been other political letters that were never recovered, whether Daschle and Leahy were targeted just because they were in charge of a whole branch of the US government (one which had just voted for war with Afghanistan), etc. The idea is either embraced or rejected, on the basis of political affiliation, but never discussed at length - that's my impression.
<< On the other side, you've probably seen Ross Getman's arguments about the "Leahy Law" and its role in counterterrorism assistance to states like Egypt, and that law dates from 1997. >>
Havnt seen it. Do you have a link?
He goes into some detail here, in the section on motive. Getman posts his theories in a wide variety of forums, but his latest essays don't go into as much detail about the law as he does in that article from 2002.
I thought, by the way, that Allan's "LL" must stand for "Leahy Law".