Susan;

About two years ago, I was responsible for arranging a series of speakers on various aspects of security at the University of Calgary. The first speaker for the series was scheduled to be a former Israeli special ops type (now living in Toronto), giving a talk on suicide bombers and the Israeli response.

EXACTLY 30 minutes before the talk was scheduled to start, the fire alarm went off. At the time, I didn't consider this "terrorism" so much as I figured it was a nuisance prank by some lone individual who didn't like Israelis. I grabbed my laptop and the USB drive containing the powerpoint presentation and we exited the building along with everyone else.

Long story short: the building was shut down by the police HAZMAT team for over 7 hours. Several employees had to go through the emergency decontamination showers. The alarm was caused by the discovery of several envelopes containing an unidentified white powder.

A few hours later, Campus Security issued a university-wide advisory warning people to be on the lookout for any envelopes that either did not have a return address, or that had a return address from North York, Ontario. When I mentioned North York to my Israeli guest, he simply nodded and said "I know who sent it" or something like that.

A few months later, our guest speaker, as it happened, was a civilian scientist from the Defense Research Establishment at Suffield, where they specialize in Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Warfare defense. By coincidence, it turned out that the "white powder" had been sent to him for analysis. He wouldn't tell me what it was, of course, except to say that (a) it was not anthrax or any other life-threatening agent, and (b) it was not powdered sugar.

I have no proof of this, but there is now no doubt in my mind that this was a real terrorist attack; that it was organized and ordered by someone in another part of the country (Toronto and Calgary are two hours apart; think New York and Montana); and that it was carried out in person by someone on campus, probably a student.

I do believe that some terrorist organizations, at least, are quite capable of using poisoned envelopes instead of car bombs and IEDs to achieve their aims.

Interestingly, in an episode of American Justice (I think) one detective who was interviewed pointed out that poison and bombs tend to go hand in hand. Often, someone who has tried and failed to commit a murder by poison will resort to using a bomb. His theory was that, in both cases, it's a "coward's weapon"; you don't have to be there when the victim dies, and so you don't have to witness the suffering; whereas with a knife or a gun, you actually have to have the stomach to do it in person.