By ROGER FRANKLIN
NEW YORK - The most hawkish body of opinion within the Bush Administration, the one that wants to wrap up the war in Afghanistan and make Iraq the next target, believes Saddam Hussein's fingerprints are all over the anthrax letters.
Their case, while not yet uttered on the record,
follows the same template biochemist Dr Barbara Rosenberg finds so appealing: begin with what little can be assumed of the mailer's background and work backwards into the realm of confident - perhaps overconfident - conjecture.
The first argument revolves around timing. As mouthpieces for Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz have noted, Mohamed Atta, the apparent team leader of the September 11 hijackers, twice met a senior Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in the months before the United States massacres.
Saddam is known to have assembled a bio-weapons arsenal, therefore Atta might have been given a small quantity of refined anthrax, which Atta's supporters mailed out on September 19 after their comrade's death.
And what "evidence" supports this assertion? Like the lone nut theory in the anthrax mystery, it is entirely circumstantial.
Begin with the fact that the four surviving letters - the first, mailed to the Florida headquarters of American Media and its stable of supermarket tabloids, was thrown away before its significance was realised - were all sent from Trenton, New Jersey, just a short drive from the city of Newark and the largest concentration of Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants in the US.
Rosenberg, a lone nut theorist, dismisses this as a deliberate deception on the mailer's part. If her disaffected scientist is to blame, she says, "he is smart enough to handle anthrax, he is smart enough not to mail it from his home town".
If her man lives in the Washington, DC, area, as she suspects, he might have bought a train ticket to New York and alighted at Newark, the last stop before the Big Apple.
Fair enough, except that there are any number of intriguing strands to the Newark thread. The first is that the bogus return addresses on several of the letters listed the postal area code for a particular section of Newark - a section that is home to an Islamic studies institute and a storefront mosque formerly supervised by Sheik Abdul Rachman, the blind Egyptian cleric now serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up two New York tunnels under the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge and the United Nations headquarters.
Could it be, as opponents of the Rosenberg scenario maintain, that the writer made a telling slip and simply nominated a zip code with which he was familiar?
Similarly, one of the letters to the Capitol Building in Washington listed the return address as a "Greendale school" in "Abingdon, Virginia". There is no school with that name in the town - though there is a Greenbrook primary school in Newark. Might the perpetrator have drawn one telling detail of the fictional address from his local knowledge, subtly changing a single syllable to throw investigators off the track?
Next, there is the peculiar size of the notepaper in which the anthrax was folded, the same paper on which those laboriously rendered notes were written in that curiously awkward hand.
It is of a size all but unobtainable in the United State but common in Europe.
If, as Rosenberg suggests, the letters did originate within the US, is it reasonable to assume that the mailer had such a command of telling details that he was not only aware of the slight variance in stationery sizes on different sides of the Atlantic, but also brought back a sheaf from Europe, ready to use when the opportunity arose.
Here, the profile differs from that which the FBI's abnormal psychology experts have embraced. Such a man, they say, would be so pleased with himself he would be fairly bursting with enthusiasm to put his plot into effect. Is it likely he could have had the restraint to wait until the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked.
If so, it lends credence to the view that the anthrax letters are the work of a foreign power, since none but those privy to the planning involved in the assaults would have known they were coming.
Finally, there is a direct conflict between the "facts" as presented by Rosenberg and those embraced by her detractors. Begin with the size of the particles, which Rosenberg insists are so small that only an American lab could have made them.
Not so, responds David Franz, a biochemist who was part of the UN-sanctioned teams that went looking for evidence of biological warfare facilities in Iraq. At one site, he said, investigators found stockpiles of bacillus thuringiensis.
Harmless to humans, it had been prepared as a powder as fine as the anthrax in the US letters.
Franz says the explanation is simple: having succeeded in replicating a bio-agent that is in every way comparable to weapons-grade anthrax made in the US, Iraq's chemists needed an inert substitute to practise with, perhaps using bacillus thuringiensis to perfect aerosol nozzles that could be used as a means of dispersal.
As for the 20 US laboratories which Rosenberg maintains are the only possible sources of the anthrax, other scientists also differ.
An unnamed consultant quoted by the Wall Street Journal says US labs have been notoriously lax about restricting access to anthrax supplies, frequently sending them to known fellow researchers by parcel post.
Last month in Vermont, for example, a graduate student was found with several vials of liquid anthrax nestling beside the butter and jam in his refrigerator. His explanation: as a bio-chemist, he thought anthrax was "neat" and just wanted to have some around for future study.
Finally, there is a curious visit that Atta and a fellow hijacker paid to a Florida chemist shortly before September 11. According to the pharmacist, Atta demanded a salve to soothe hands that looked "as if they had been dipped in bleach", while his companion wanted a remedy for a heavy cough - one of the flu-like symptoms of anthrax exposure.
Sadly, there may never be a resolution to this mystery, especially in the light of the US Government's embarrassment.
Only last week, the Pentagon admitted it was in the habit of sending "sludge" samples of anthrax from a Utah testing facility to Fort Detrich in Maryland, where they would be rendered harmless with gamma radiation and then sent back for further testing. How was it mailed? By less-than-secure overnight mail.
Lastly, there is Rosenberg's extremely sensitive allegation that the US has been violating its treaty promises by continuing to produce anthrax. Not so, replied a Justice Department lawyer, who said that the pact allowed America to produce small quantities of powdered anthrax for use in developing antidotes.
And that is where, with those unanswered letters to Santa piling up, the mystery stands. It's a pity because Old Saint Nick might have a few more clues.
After all, it is his specialty to know who has been naughty and who has been nice - maybe even with anthrax.
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The case for Saddam's fingerprints
By ROGER FRANKLIN
NEW YORK - The most hawkish body of opinion within the Bush Administration, the one that wants to wrap up the war in Afghanistan and make Iraq the next target, believes Saddam Hussein's fingerprints are all over the anthrax letters.
Their case, while not yet uttered on the record,
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