Sorry. As I've told you MANY times, my web site is about the anthrax attacks of 2001. It's not about al Qaeda or their quest for weapons of mass destruction.
The latest information related to the anthrax attacks of 2001 is that two of the DOJ employees who were confidential informants for the media have come forward, getting Newsweek off the hook in the Hatfill v FBI et al lawsuit. CBS, USA TODAY and The Washington Post are trying to get confidentiality wavers from their sources. Plus, Brian Ross of ABC has apparently been ordered by a different judge in a different case to name his confidential sources.
Additional source identifications may also result from the September 7, 2007 Order of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Hellerstein, J.), which ordered Brian Ross of ABC News to disclose his sources, for substantially the same reasons as this Court ordered the other five reporters to do so.
Does anyone know what that is about? I don't see any news articles about it, and the only lawsuit I find involving Brian Ross and anyone named Hellerstein is Ross et al v. 1 World Trade Center, L.L.C. et al. which is being presided over by Judge Alvin Hellerstein. The docket says there has been no activity on that case since it was filed on October 20, 2006.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDQ/is_2001_Oct_22/ai_80338940
Did the Kabul military commander that the USG Gitmo prosecutors allege had anthrax have any connection to this lab?
Anthrax in Kabul Red Cross lab left by foreign staff
Asian Political News, Oct 22, 2001
PARIS, Oct. 14 Kyodo
Foreign staff have abandoned a laboratory of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization in Kabul where anthrax bacilli were cultivated, a French weekly paper reported Sunday.
The Journal du Dimanche said foreign staff withdrew from Afghanistan on Sept. 16 and that the French intelligence service is concerned that terrorists might try to convert the bacilli into a biological weapon.
The bacilli kept at the laboratory were intended for use in making anthrax vaccines for domestic animals, the paper said.
ICRC spokesman Kim Gordon-Bates said that the bacilli used by scientists at the lab are not infectious and it is difficult to produce a deadly virus from the bacilli.
Fears of bioterrorism by anthrax are widening in the United States, where nine people have tested positive for anthrax exposure and one of them has died.
Ed, can you post this article (which you’ve omitted) on the anthrax attacks?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,,591931,00.html
Bin Laden denies anthrax attacks
Rory McCarthy in Islamabad
Monday November 12, 2001
The Guardian
A Pakistani newspaper editor who met Osama bin Laden for a rare interview said yesterday that America’s most wanted man denied he was behind the anthrax letter attacks which have shaken the US.
Western intelligence officials will be poring over every word that Hamid Mir has written since his two-hour meeting with Bin Laden on Thursday at a secret location inside Afghanistan. It was the first interview the Saudi dissident has given since the World Trade Centre bombings and appears to hold precious clues about his current hideout.
Mr Mir said he asked Bin Laden if his al-Qaida network was involved in the letter attacks in America, which have claimed four lives. “He laughed and said: ‘We don’t know anything about it,’” Mr Mir wrote in his Daily Ausaf newspaper yesterday.
US investigators have been baffled by the anthrax attacks, which targeted media groups in New York and Florida and forced the closure of several government offices in Washington. Although it was at first suggested that Bin Laden or even Iraq might be responsible for the anthrax-laced letters, attention now appears to be turning to a US source.
Bin Laden was reported yesterday to have made a separate statement in which he gives the first open admission that his network carried out the September 11 attacks. A videotape said to have been circulating for two weeks among al-Qaida supporters shows him giving his account of the attacks in which he refers to the Twin Towers as “legitimate targets” and the suicide hijackers as “blessed by Allah to destroy America’s economic and military landmarks”.
The tape will form the focus of a batch of new evidence of Bin Laden’s guilt to be unveiled this week.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, Bin Laden is unashamed about killing civilians. “If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents.”
He also issued direct threats against President George Bush and Tony Blair. “Bush and Blair don’t understand anything but the power of force. Every time they kill us, we kill them, so the balance of terror can be achieved.”
Mr Mir’s encounter with the world’s most wanted man took place early last week when the Pakistani editor, who is known to have close links with Bin Laden and has interviewed him twice before, was invited to Kabul for a clandestine meeting. He was picked up in the city on Wednesday night by Arab fighters, blindfolded, wrapped in a blanket and driven in the back of a jeep along rough roads for five hours.
When his blindfold was removed early on Thursday morning Mr Mir found himself in a dark room. The temperature was low, suggesting he was high in the mountains. Minutes later Bin Laden arrived with his deputy, Ayman el-Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian jihad. Both carried Kalashnikov rifles. They stared blankly at the camera as they posed for photographs.
“The floor of the room showed that this was a mud house arranged temporarily for the interview,” Mr Mir wrote in his Urdu-language newspaper yesterday. “On regular intervals one could hear anti-aircraft guns, so it was not difficult to guess that it was close to the frontline. Osama bin Laden looked confident, healthy and fresh.”
Mr Mir said the Saudi appeared undaunted by the military campaign. “He told me five times that ‘maybe this place will be bombed now and both of us will be killed,’ and ‘I’m not scared of death,’” he said.
Bin Laden also promised to fight on even if major Afghan cities fell. “We will move to the mountains. We will continue our guerrilla warfare against the Americans,” he told Mr Mir.
In his first accounts of the meeting, the Pakistani editor described how Bin Laden had claimed he possessed nuclear and chemical weapons and might use them against the US. “We have the weapons as deterrent,” he quoted Bin Laden as saying.
Yesterday he said Bin Laden refused to say where he obtained the weapons but said he suspected US forces were using chemical weapons. “Bodies of mojahedin found from a site in Kabul had all turned black,” he told Mr Mir.
The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, said he doubted that Bin Laden had the ability to produce nuclear bombs, though he conceded that al-Qaida was probably in possession of nuclear materials.
US officials believe Bin Laden may have had more success in developing chemical weapons. One site at Derunta, near the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, is thought to have been a chemical weapons research laboratory. Yesterday the New York Times said that al-Qaida may have produced cyanide gas at Derunta in small quantities.
US intelligence officials are also concerned about a fertilizer plant in Mazar-i-Sharif, which had been run by al-Qaida and the Taliban until the Northern Alliance captured the area on Friday.
Equipment at the site could be used to make biological or chemical weapons, the paper said. Another site in Kabul which made anthrax vaccine and was used by the Taliban was also a worry for intelligence analysts because of the equipment it contained. None of the sites has been bombed.
Ed, here is an article by the Economist, Bill Gates’ favorite magazine, on the subject of the anthrax attacks and findings upon the fall of Kabul. As you’ll recall, when the Washington Post last summarized the status of Amerithrax, the WP reported that the FBI posited that when this guy from Gitmo, the Kabul military commander, pointed to a storage facility in Kabul where there was anthrax, the FBI posited that the anthrax had been weaponized in the US and brought there. Clearly, this military commander captured upon the Fall of Kabul, who agreed to turn over the weapons etc. and who stood accused of having possessed anthrax, was in the thick of things. And, according to the WP’s description of the Amerithrax investigation, you are clueless to omit all these articles while including dozens of articles about anthrax from African drums, shield laws, biological weapons convention etc. You even failed to link Mueller’s video when he said to think 9/11, think Oklahoma City.
In The House of Anthrax: Chilling evidence in the ruins of Kabul
http://www.aijac.org.au/updates/Nov-01/291101.html
Economist, Nov. 22, 2001
AMERICAN officials increasingly believe the anthrax attacks since September 11th were not carried out by people connected to al-Qaeda, but may have been the work of a lone American madman. To avert future attacks, though, perhaps they should look harder.
They might start, for example, in a nondescript house in the wealthiest district of Kabul, where a Pakistani NGO called Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) once had its offices. UTN’s president is Bashiruddin Mahmood, one of Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientists and a specialist in plutonium technology. Last month Mr Mahmood was arrested by the Pakistani authorities and interrogated on his links to the Taliban, with whom he has had frequent contact for, he insists, humanitarian reasons. Mr Mahmood was released again soon afterwards. The Taliban has denied any “abnormal” links between Mr Mahmood and Mr bin Laden, and he himself says he has never met the man.
In public, UTN helped Afghans with flourmills, school textbooks and road-upgrading schemes. But its offices suggest that this may have been a cover for something far more sinister. According to their neighbours, the Pakistanis who lived and worked there fled Kabul along with the Taliban, but the evidence they left behind suggests that they were working on a plan to build an anthrax bomb.
An upstairs room of the house had been used as a workshop. What appeared to be a Russian rocket had been disassembled, and a canister labelled “helium” had been left on the worktop. On the floor were multiple copies of documents about anthrax downloaded from the Internet, and details about the American army’s vaccination plans for its troops. The number of copies suggests that seminars were also taking place there.
One of the downloaded documents featured a small picture of the former American defence secretary, William Cohen, holding a five-pound bag of sugar. It noted that he was doing this “to show the amount of the biological weapon anthrax that could destroy half the population of Washington, DC.”
On the floor was a small bag of white powder, which this correspondent decided not to inspect. It may have contained nothing more deadly than icing sugar, but that could be useful for experiments in how to scatter powder containing anthrax spores from a great height over a city, or to show students how to do this. The living room contained two boxes of gas masks and filters.
On a desk was a cassette box labelled “Jihad”, with the name of Osama bin Laden hand-written along the spine. Most chilling of all, however, were the mass of calculations and drawings in felt pen that filled up a white board of the sort used in classrooms. There were several designs for a long thin balloon, something like a weather balloon, with lines and arrows indicating a suggested height of 10km (33,000 feet). There was also a sketch of a jet fighter flying towards the balloon alongside the words: “Your days are limited! Bang.” This, like the documents, was written in English.
Since UTN was run by one of Pakistan’s top scientists, a man with close links to the Taliban and, it is said, close ideological affinities with Mr bin Laden, the circumstantial evidence points to only one conclusion. Whoever fled this house when the Taliban fell was working on a plan to build a helium-powered balloon bomb carrying anthrax. Whether it was detonated with a timer or shot down by a fighter, the result would have been the same: the showering of deadly airborne anthrax spores over an area as wide as half of New York city or Washington, DC.
After the September 11th attacks, it was generally agreed that western intelligence agencies had failed through lack of “human intelligence”—men on the ground, as opposed to spy satellites and computers monitoring phone calls and e-mails. This failure was to be rectified. Yet since the fall of Kabul on November 13th, journalists have been fanning out across the city. They have stripped houses such as this one, and others directly connected to the al-Qaeda network, of all sorts of documents and other valuable evidence. These have included the names and addresses of al-Qaeda contacts in the West. For the West’s intelligence agencies, September 11th was Black Tuesday. There may be no words with which to describe their failure in the week since the fall of Kabul.