Someone had questioned on another thread whether Atta would be involved in both the hijackings and the anthrax. If al-Haznawi and someone else doing the mailings after 9/11 were both involved, then Atta could be the link.
I.e., if Enron didn't stick to the Bush administration, maybe anthrax will.
I can conceive of no other motivation for Al Hunt, the most political of journalistic animals, to interest himself in the provenance of anthrax.
The following paragraph strikes me as particularly illuminating:
But the Iraq theory has its own problems. Bush administration hawks who want to topple Saddam know it's much more palatable if they can link the Iraqis to Sept. 11 or the anthrax attacks. They have been willing to peddle stories that now appear false, such as an alleged meeting between hijacker Muhammad Atta and a top Iraqi intelligence official in Prague last year; recently Newsweek magazine reported convincingly that story almost surely was a hoax. If there's anything damning here on Iraq's involvement with the anthrax threat, it would have been leaked.
Thus is the Bush administration set up as a.) not only incompetent, but a liar and b.) cynically attempting to employ a hoax as a pretext for an Iraq attack, now incisively discredited by the mainstream media.
This column is a trial balloon. It sets the stage for a partisan attack on the Bush administration's competency and credibility. Anthrax is about to "go political".
The Democrats also intend to fight any notion of an attack on Iraq, making it a political issue. If they can...