Remember last fall's anthrax attacks?

We sure do.

"They" - whoever "they" are - tried to kill us.

That's not easily forgotten - nor forgiven.

In the event, the anthrax spores delivered to The Post through the mail last September infected three staffers (cases 1, 19 and 21) - each of whom has recovered nicely.

Still, we've been following the investigation - to the extent that reliable information has been forthcoming.

There hasn't been a lot.

But now comes an exhaustive report on the anthrax attacks, courtesy of The Weekly Standard - substantially reproduced on these pages.

Yes, the piece is tough going in parts.

Stick with it, though - because the report makes it difficult to deny that the anthrax attacks were carried out in an organized manner by disciplined terrorists, with the assistance of a foreign state.

Now, it's just possible that the FBI is waiting to reveal the involvement in the attacks of, say, Saddam Hussein, until a time when the government needs to galvanize support for an attack on Iraq.

It's also possible that the FBI continues to fixate on the chimera of a domestic source, and to avoid the indications that the anthrax came from abroad, because the bureau is still shot through with incompetence.

(Certainly the fact that the agency has failed even to interview our anthrax victims, nearly six months after the fact, inspires little confidence.)

Perhaps, as columnist John Podhoretz suggests this morning, the FBI is hoping that the anthrax campaign can be pinned on a militia group or the equivalent of the Unabomber in order to justify retroactively the FBI's quick trigger-fingers at Waco and Ruby Ridge.

But, as the Standard reports, a great deal of evidence points the other way.

* It turns out that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Ahmed Ibrahim Al Haznawi, visited a Fort Lauderdale emergency room last June with what The New York Times reported was an apparent anthrax lesion on his left leg. (We speak from experience: The wound is distinctive!)

* It also seems that journalists from the National Enquirer, the first media organization to suffer a confirmed anthrax attack, frequented the same Florida bar as some of the 9/11 hijackers.

Coincidence? Pretty long odds against that.

Moreover, the handwriting and the language of the anthrax-tainted letters suggests that they were not written by a native English speaker.

And many of the arguments put forward to suggest a domestic source are simply foolish.

For instance, the FBI and other domestic-conspiracy theorists assert that the letters originated in America because they contained no saliva traces - as if anyone would lick an envelope containing anthrax spores!

Then there's the matter of the origin of the anthrax by determining its "strain" - or how it was "weaponized."

It was widely reported that the anthrax powder mailed in the fall was identical to that once made in U.S. military laboratories, and that it lacked an additive favored by Soviet and Iraqi labs. Neither turns out to be true.

Finally, there is the bizarre choice of targets: a politically conservative newspaper; liberal television personalities; a more liberal U.S. senator; a supermarket tabloid. How likely is it that the senders of anthrax knew much about American media or politics?

Let's face it: It is extremely unlikely that the anthrax attacks were - or could have been - mounted by a rogue government scientist, Idaho skinhead or Ted Kaczynski wannabe sitting in a basement.

In the matter of complicated questions, it usually makes sense to opt for the least complicated answers.

And both motive and means speak to the likelihood of a foreign source for last fall's anthrax attacks.

This substantially increases the degree of difficulty in mounting an appropriate response to the mailings - and it suggests that a repeat performance can be expected whenever it suits the aggressor's purposes.

A disquieting notion, to be sure - and, again, we speak from a particular experience.

Sadly, we have no answers this morning - just a growing conviction that Washington, and the FBI in particular, aren't even asking questions.