My guess is it is a small (2 or 20 people tops) American group looking to take advantage of the situation.
I believe them to be middle aged White male possibly from the East coast.
More likely a hold over from the militia anti government types like McViegh. Or even White supremacist looking to heat up anti Muslim resentment.
Why do I think this?
This is not the style of Bin Laden or his gang. Every action they have taken in the last decade has dealt with showy explosions on identifiable targets (Embassies, Ships etc) Sending a few letters in the mail lacks the punch in the face style of blowing up a building.
The targets so far have been press and Government offices. What better way to undermine democracy at this time than to make them look frightened or disrupt them from doing their jobs.
Nothing has happened in the West (that I know of), Just the East coast. I think they are operating outside the immediate area and not “pissing on their own lawn”
I believe it was home-grown by the fact that these people did exactly what the Press was worrying about. Note that CNN and other news groups worked up a furore over the possibility of use of Anthrax. Suddenly Anthrax is used despite the fact it is not good for physically affecting large groups and is iffy on the means of spreading it (spraying large areas) To me it was as if these people were waiting for a good idea and picked it up from the press.
Of course with little to really go on I’m just profiling based on my own world view and could be completely wrong but hey I’m not paid to do this.
I lived in several Middle Eastern countries as a child, and dates were always written day-month-year. This is one of my reasons for thinking, like you, that even if the writer is Arab or Muslim, he may be a long-term resident of the United States.
Another point which I forgot to mention: one of the envelopes was addressed from a school in New Jersey. The practice of schoolchildren writing to senators and other government representatives, while not restricted to the U.S., is very uncommon outside of North America and Europe. Of course, any terrorist who has spent time in the U.S. or taken the trouble to educate himself about American society could be familiar with this practice, but it is a concept which is quite alien to many foreigners.
Well, by definition I know what a terrorist’s handwriting looks like. i.e. whoever sent the anthrax letters is a terrorist.
The point of this thread is to “profile” the author of the anthrax letters - to make guesses about his background and motivations.
I find it an interesting exercise, but if you feel there’s something wrong with it, I’m not gonna debate you.
I’m not sure what your point is about the handwriting, but to me, the handwriting looks like that of someone who did not grow up writing English. In spite of this, my guess is that the author is American-born and unaffiliated with extremist Muslim causes.
By the way, if you could (1) define “weapons grade” anthrax; and (2) identify your “source,” I’d appreciate it.
The handwriting is irrellevent. Whoever did this would certainly make some attempt to disguise their handwriting. My guess is that they copyed the letters upside down or some other technique to remove identifying characterists from the writing.
Certainly, it would be silly to try to determine the ethnicity or nationality of the offender by examining the printing, but there’s plenty of other info for forensics. There’s an article at USA Today that focuses on the handwriting, but it is typical USA Today quality stuff. ‘Handwriting experts’ have determined that all three letters were written by the same person. (That’s why they get the big bucks, I guess.) I can’t believe they cite a corporate graphologist (who uses a system about as scientific as astrology to advise companies on the best hire,) as an ‘expert.’
So, disguising your handwriting in the comission of a capital crime indicates a suicidal personality? And the sloping baselines in a document that is covered in deadly anthrax tell us the writer has a disregard for other people’s lives? This guy deserves a raise, he’s good. :rolleyes:
The letters seem to me more like someone trying to sound like an Islamic terrorist rather than someone who is an Islamic terrorist. The statements are too simplistic. “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” “Allah is Great.” It’s like the person read Islamic Extremism for Dummies.
If it were Al Qaeda, I’d expect the letters to be completely innocuous in content. They would write perfectly normal-sounding letters, then sit back and let people die.
the boston globe ran a story (can’t find the link) suggesting that it’s a homegrown right-wing group. mainly because they attack Democrats & the “liberal media”.
Me, I’m struck with a philosophical similarity between the 9/11 attack & the anthrax attacks. Both use the openness of american society & turn its infrastructure against itself.
wtc terrorist: gosh, those americans can lob missiles at us at will. I wish we could do that… Wait a minute - there are 4,000 missiles flying over USA at any given time. we just need to commandeer some. we can even get the americans to train us how to guide them!
anthrax terrorist: if I only had a courier to distribute this poison, who could sneak into the seat of american power, not even knowing what he’s carrying, without ever meeting me. And also it’d be nice if he’d do it for just 34 cents…
I’m going to admit straight up that I’ve have not been paying attention to the Anthrax attacks. I’ve been purposely trying to ignore them for a while. With that said, I haven’t read more than a few posts in this thread (though from a quick scan I see that the consensus is developing that this may be a homegrown incident). Here is some fuel for the fire, so to speak.
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Josh Marshall brings up an very interesting point about how this all started. Some guy at an National Enquirer office in some podunk town in Florida dies. That gets mentioned after the entertainment minute of the local news. Then we find Tom Brokaw recieving a letter. It gains a little bit of media attention but nobody seems to link them up together or even seem to acknowledge the events.
Tom Daschle doesn’t recieve a letter for several weeks – as the story seems to be dying down. I quote from Marshall…
This could mean that the original plan of attack–scare the reporters-- wasn’t working, (note: Why the National Enquirer?) so they started going after whom else would make news–the politicians, and to make sure to link it to previous letters to fan the flames. For that bit of evidence, I’ll quote from the Wash Post article…
And to note the last line, I’m not completely sure that Daschle’s politics is the issue – especially if the White House anthrax story is true. But it is interesting to note because it shows an awareness of the American political climate. Daschle didn’t become terribly important until Jim Jeffords made it known that he was leaving the Republican Party. Events like that in the Senate wouldn’t seem to be important to foreign terrorists like that.
Anyway, this looks doesn’t look like the MO of Osama or the Al Qaeda network. They seem to work on the idea of killing as many people as possible in big showy ways. This anthrax thing is too shrouded in mystery and such as to the perps. It looks more like a con than anything else. Like spoonbender said, it looks kinda like a caricature or burlesque of a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist. Remember that the suicide hijackers were pretty educated and living in America for some time. I’d expect the letters to be less kindergardenized than “You die now”. Anyway,I’m not sure Israel plays as big a role in Al Qaeda’s rage against us than is generally believed.
There also recent reports that this anthrax was treated with something that is only available in the US, Russia, and Iraq. Iraq could be very well behind this, but they’ve been trying their damnedest to get the UN to lift the sanctions, and they’re too close now to gamble that on some pennyante stunt like this. And that other signatures on the microbes seem to point away from the Iraqis.
But this is all speculative and I’m really bad at this detective stuff (especially under an all night crash course in the anthrax story), so I don’t know. And I should be going to bed.
vB is doing wierd things to that url - adding spaces where there aren’t any, rendering it bogus. here’s the raw address. paste it into your browser, but delete the space in “shtml”
My guess is that this person is both a homegrown American and nominally Muslim – a follower of Louis Farrakhan or someone similar. This individual is probably not directly connected with the WTC and Pentagon attacks, but does view them as a good thing.
First of all, I agree with pennylane’s analysis of the way the date is written; I’d add that the 1’s are written without strong upstrokes, and that handwriting analysts seem to have concluded that the writer is accustomed to writing left to write. All of this suggests that the writer is certainly not Middle Eastern, was probably educated in North America, and therefore has nothing to do with the earlier terrorist attacks.
However, I don’t think that the references to Allah and 9/11 are entirely a blind. It seems to me that there are two reasons to commit a terrorist act of this sort – to kill people, and to make a statement. If the writer simply wanted certain individuals dead, he (or she) would have chosen a more efficient way of spreading anthrax, one that doesn’t involve warnings or statements of any sort. Therefore, this person probably wants to call attention to a particular cause, and you can’t do that by pretending to represent a different cause. On the other hand, the messages make perfect sense if this person really DOES hate America and Israel, and DOES perceive the WTC attack as the will of Allah (and it seems likely that an American Black Muslim would make a distinction between “Allah” and “God” in English, while somebody from a predominantly Muslim culture would not).
It’s also a bit suggestive that the writer can’t spell “penicillin” but can spell “Israel” – most people who are poor spellers and accustomed to the standard American pronunciation would write “Isreal.” It looks like this person may actually be interested in Israel, at least enough to make sure he’s spelled it correctly.
Finally, I seem to remember from Farrakhan’s speech at the Million Man March that he sees some sort of cosmic significance in the numbers 9 and 1 – the sort of thing that may cause one of his followers to take an interest in the date 09-11-01, and perhaps to see the attacks as the first step in some grand divine plan.
Good point, Fretful. American Muslims often do distinguish between “God” and “Allah” when speaking English. There are two other possibilities - that the person responsible is attacking specific people or organisations (this being his cause) or that he is simply a madman or prankster (and has no cause). In either of these cases, he could attempt to blame the attack on Muslims/Arabs without obscuring or hampering his intent.
I was really inclined towards the “home-grown white supremacist loony trying to start a race war by mentioning ‘Allah’ and casting blame on the A-Rabs” theory myself. Now, I’m not so sure. An article in the Washington Post seems to be talking much more convincingly about the “weaponization” of this stuff than some off-the-cuff remark by a politician as reported by the TV news. Reportedly, this stuff has weaponized–aerosolized–in a way that only the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and Iraq are known to have developed techniques for. This isn’t just Earl and Bubba going out and taking some scrapings from a dead cow. Would domestic terrorists have that kind of capability? But then, the article quotes a “government official with direct knowledge of the investigation” as saying that “the totality of the evidence in hand suggests that it is unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq.” Does that mean they were weaponized by the United States?
Did we destroy all our stocks of weaponized anthrax?
Could some of our domestic loonies have gotten ahold of actual U.S. military bioweapons?
Or are these unnamed government sources just blowing smoke?
That’s a very interesting article, MEBuckner, but I think that in some ways it is a bit misleading.
Sounds definitive, but later, they elaborate:
That sounds more like an inference than a confirmation to me. The hypothetical coating in question is intended to obviate clumping due to static charge.
Package-handling facilities that I have worked at all have conductive “streamers” hanging over the conveyer-belt, the intention of which is to ground out everything that moves across the belt. Could this have any effect on individual particles, and, for that matter, do the conveyers in question have these? Also, it seems to me that the particles that would escape the envelope would be necessarily fine, and likely were blown into the air with the compressed air used to clean the machines.
As for how sophisticated a Militia mentality perp is likely to be, this page has a fairly objective analysis of Larry Harris’s credentials, from the dawn of proto-history, when he was still writing books about how to prepare for a biological attack by Muslim terrorists. I don’t know how typical the guy is.
I’ll still lay 100 to 1 odds that this is NOT a domestic terrorist.
The type of anthrax we’re talking about is just not easy to get. It was probably either stolen from the Soviet Union’s stocks, or manufactured in Iraq. My money is on Iraq, and has been since I first heard of the Anthrax in Florida.
That doesn’t mean that Iraq attacked us. They could have given it to Bin Laden years ago to attack Russians with. Or they could have given it to him before the WTC attack just as some quid-pro-quo for something, and not even know what he was going to use it for.
But certainly Iraq has to be considered the top contender right now.
Oh, and I don’t buy the ‘right-wing nut’ theory. They want attention. If they sent the stuff, it would have been with notes saying, “First Bin Laden, and now us.”
The same type of person (or the same person?!) as the Tylenol killer. This is the only other ‘anonymous, widespread poisoning’ case I can think of, although the killer used retail medicine rather than the mails as a delivery system.
Check out the profile at the bottom of the above link; very interesting.
Sam Stone, I have heard claims from several “experts” on both BBC and CNN that the anthrax was not manufactured in Iraq, but was the kind made in the United States or Russia. (These were unofficial experts - university professors and the like.) I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this statement, but after hearing it from many unrelated sources I can’t help but wonder if it might be true.
i’d bet one thing about the anthrax terrorist(s) -
that they didn’t expect this to affect postal workers to the extent it has. Anthrax has never been distributed thru mail before (I don’t know that it’s been intentionally distributed in any fashion before). I can’t imagine the culprits figured it would spill out into mailrooms on its way to its target. That just seems inadvertant. The bummer here is that the postal workers seem to be bearing the brunt of the anthrax attack.
whether that fact delights or dissappoints the terrorist(s) I couldn’t guess.