One more point on

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One more point on the issue of the MO and motivations behind the Anthrax letter attacks. This article in the Washington Post quotes counter-terrorism expert Gerald “Gary” Brown saying that he thought the “Daschle letter was crafted to attract attention after the anthrax letters sent previously to news organizations garnered too tepid a response.”

This got me thinking. What was the timeline exactly? What was the state of play, publicly, when the perpetrator sent the Daschle letter?

The letters to the New York Post and NBC News were sent on September 18th from Trenton, New Jersey. To the best of my knowledge, the letters responsible for the CBS, ABC and AMI contaminations have yet to be found. But it seems reasonable to assume, from all we know now, that those letters were also sent out of Trenton on the same day.

Two weeks later almost nothing had happened. Bob Stevens had been hospitalized on the 2nd of October, had his diagnosis confirmed on the 4th, and died on the 5th. But at that time federal authorities were still sticking with some improbable natural explanation for Stevens sickness.

So after two weeks the terrorist’s work had gone entirely ignored and after two and a half weeks authorities were not even conceding that there had been a terrorist attack. None of the letters to the legit media had even been publicly discovered or acknowledged. This isn’t meant to sound flippant but you get the sense there was a bit of frustration.

It was in this climate that the terrorist or terrorists sent the letter to Tom Daschle on October 9th, this time leaving no doubt what the letter contained: “We have this Anthrax. You die now.”

(Again from the Post: “Unlike the earlier letters to Brokaw and the New York Post, which had no return addresses, the letter to Daschle carried a fictitious one. “Now they’re saying, ‘How can we get this through the system? Well, a letter to a senator from grade school kids might get it through. And if we mention that this is anthrax, this might get their attention,’ ” said Brown.”)

Soon after the Daschle letter was sent, of course, news started to break about letters to various media outfits. (The skin Anthrax infection at NBC was reported on October 12th.) But on the 9th it must have seemed to the terrorist that this first volley might go permanently unnoticed.

This is all tea leaf reading of course. But I think there’s something there, and I suspect Brown is on to it. The motivation for the second letter seems not only to have been to kill people but even more to make sure people realized that a terror campaign was underway.

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