CIA Seeks Terrorist Angle on Anthrax

Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough report in their Washington Times column that the CIA “has been quietly building a case that the anthrax attacks of 2001 were in fact the result of an international terrorist plot.” This is in contrast with the FBI’s hypothesis, which Gertz and Scarborough call the “mad scientist” theory. They note that the FBI’s approach has gone nowhere, but do not disclose any of the intelligence that the CIA relies on for its terrorist alternative. (Other than the fact that all of the messages that contained anthrax concluded with the words “death to America, death to Israel, Allah is great.”) They also report that according to the Iraq Survey Group, the strain of anthrax used in the 2001 attacks has not been found in Iraq.
POSTSCRIPT by BIG TRUNK: This is a subject that has interested me for a while. Take a look back at it with the links contained in my brief post this past February 11: “The Iraq/Al Qaeda connection, take 2.” In April 2002, the Weekly Standard ran an excellent cover story (David Tell’s “The hunting of Steven Hatfill”) on the FBI’s botched investigation of the anthrax cases. Unfortunately, the Standard archives are unavailable at the moment, but Mona Charen based a good column on the Standard article: “Something fishy in Hatfill case.”