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.
Okay, I've added that one, too. There's nothing new in the story that they found evidence that al Qaeda was "working on a plan to build an anthrax bomb," but it's worthwhile to show that another Right Wing media outlet like the Economist felt that investigators should look harder at al Qaeda.
Right and Left Wingers both seem to believe that if you do not find what they believe to be true, then you just aren't looking hard enough. However, it takes a total idiot to believe that American authorities weren't looking as hard as possible at every aspect of what al Qaeda was doing or planning to do.