The argument is set forth in much greater detail at the website
http://www.anthraxandalqaeda.com
at which I upload the documents produced under FOIA by the DIA.
It was declassified prior to being released with the most important stuff redacted — such as the identity of the second lab Rauf Ahmad visited and the identity of the scientist he consulted with.
I could email you the resume of the Pakistani scientist Rauf Ahmad’s and you can call him. He’s a very nice chap and his English is perfectly passable. The approach is best made by someone willing to listen to and report his side of the story. He lost touch with me when he realized I had his correspondence with Ayman. But he likely would welcome a call by any journalist who is going to give him a chance to explain side of things. For example, I believe inquiry would establish he’s an ecotoxicologist and not a microbiologist.
It was Dr. Ken Alibek who told me what the FBI suspected about Ali when I asked him if he knew Ali (having noticed that both Ken and Ali were at GMU and in microbiology). If you ask nice and respectfully, people more often than you might expect will tell you what you want to know.
Here is background from an A1 story in the Washington Post that explains the DIA’s production and declassification of the documents.
Suspect and A Setback In Al-Qaeda Anthrax Case
The scientist, identified by U.S. and Pakistani officials as Abdur Rauf, traveled
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2006/10/30/AR2006103001250.html
The April 1999 email from Ayman to Atef was from his computer which WSJ journalist Alan Cullison bought from a looter in late 2001 after his own computer got damaged and he went to a local computer dealer looking for a replacement. Atef’s laptop likely would have been even more interesting but it had been wiped clean by the time a guy named “Bob” handed it back to the WSJ journalist on a street corner. (He didn’t have time to copy it then and thought he was doing the patriotic thing by getting it to the CIA pronto.