[genefromjersey]

Your hypothesis is interesting, butM/b> (There's always a but,isn't there ?)but it fails to address why the Bush administration would not trumpet such a connection to the ends of the earth.

Like you, I have doubts the anthrax attacks were carried out by the fanatically religious al-Qaeda (though I suppose one could not rule out a secular "surrogate".)

My opinion is based,in part, on the notes enclosed in the letters.Putting "Allah is great" at the bottom of the note would be unthinkable to one who was devout.

A note written by a devout terrorist would start out with something like: "In the name of Allah the merciful and compassionate..."

[apokatastasis]

Well, our old pal "The Great Satan" says it's because the anthrax threat is still in play, rendering Saddam untouchable even in captivity. I have a dreadful suspicion that Ames-strain anthrax was covertly supplied to Iraq in 1988 by David Kelly at Porton Down, in order to stop Iran. Definitively linking Iraq to the 2001 anthrax must also risk exposing the "egregious deceptions" to which I referred (e.g. TWA800). I see a variety of reasons not to talk about it, but unfortunately they are highly scenario-dependent and information is scarce.

I do actually think that "Islamists" at least determined the timing of 9/11 and the initial anthrax mailing. The conventional story is that Atta chose the date and then phoned Hamburg to keep them in the loop, and I've noted before that 9/11 is the Egyptian Christian new year, while 9/18 (when the first anthrax letter was mailed) was the Jewish new year in 2001. It seems like a variation on the abortive "millennium plot" of January 2000.