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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.