Al Qaeda's Bio-weapon Plans

Picture credit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why there hasn't been more mainstream media coverage of Al Qaeda's recently FOIA-outed anthrax plot. Here's a bioterrorism effort that threatened the U.S. civilian population. And, by and large, the mainstream media hasn't found the time to cover it in any depth.

Yes, Eric Lipton had a brief Times article entitled, "Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans".

But a Google News search reveals an amazing paucity of coverage. How vulnerable is the U.S. to bioterror? How close did AQ come to weaponizing anthrax? Are other terrorist outfits the beneficiaries of their research, or did the war in Afghanistan terminate the plot (with extreme prejudice)?

These and other questions are the sort of thing the clods at Newsweek should be covering... but aren't. Of course, that would require them to actually do the research required of a real story, not a "fake but accurate" one.

And such a story might also involve casting the U.S. military in a positive light, which doesn't appear to be any part of their everyday agenda.

Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan began to assemble the equipment necessary to build a rudimentary biological weapons laboratory before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, letters released by the Defense Department show... The letters, recently made public as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request, detail a visit by an unnamed Qaeda scientist to a laboratory at an unspecified location where he was shown "a special confidential room" with thousands of samples of biological substances. The scientist tried to buy anthrax vaccines, which would be necessary to protect any Qaeda members working with the material. He also bought a sterilizer, a respirator and an air-contamination detector, one letter said. "The conference was found to be highly beneficial for our future work," the letter said. "I finalized all the accessories required for the smooth running of our bioreactor."

Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans

Update: speaking of newsweek (little "n"), Charles at LGF points us to this nearly unbelievable story on Newsweek's international edition. You won't believe the anti-U.S. tripe they're spewing abroad, all the while covering hard news like "Oscar Confidential" here at home. It's hard to imagine a more two-faced, anti-American stance.