State or Non-State Terrorism: What's Your Bet?

Sheffield, Alabama. Reynolds Metal Company. Workman in reduction plant. The white powder on his face is alumina. August 1942. (Photo: Jack Delano)

Envelopes containing “a suspicious white powder” were mailed to Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton and Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot at the WSJ’s New York headquarters.

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also received an envelope with a white powdery surprise inside.

The FBI has “declined to comment” on whether the mailings are related but Shira Ovide, writing for the WSJ on the subject, points to Mr. Dershowitz’s opinion piece published by the WSJ on January 2, 2009 which expressed support of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. The inference she clearly wants the reader to draw is that this rash of mailings is tied to events in Gaza, or some other “anti-Israel” source.

All of the envelopes had the same Knoxville, Tennessee postmark.

Given what we have learned about how “intelligence operations” function, it would not surprise me at all to learn that this postal exercise originated in a US or Israeli “intelligence” agency. They are just that desperate.

Initial tests of the envelopes received at the WSJ indicate that the powder “was probably flour or a food-based substance” and not hazardous.

The ninth and eleventh floors of the WSJ offices were evacuated, five people were quarantined and subsequently released, but the tenth and twelfth floors, where the paper is actually produced, were not evacuated and work continued uninterrupted. Very convenient!

My doubts about the source of these envelopes only increases when news stories contain extraneous facts like this from the Reuters article:

The building is on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan, close to the Ground Zero site where the World Trade Center stood before it was attacked and destroyed on September 11, 2001.

They tell you this just in case you didn’t understand, reading “New York,” that the WSJ building is really close to where a real terrorist attack occurred.

My money is on this being a game of international charades.