Despite the NYT‘s headline, the information in the article means that this independent commission lied when it reported of a “biological weapons program that ‘was extensive, well organized and operated two years before the Sept. 11.'”
Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans
The letters appear to be the same documents referred to in the report of a special presidential commission on intelligence failures and unconventional weapons led by former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the federal appeals court.
The report, released in March, describes a biological weapons program that “was extensive, well organized and operated two years before the Sept. 11.”
Two biological weapons experts who have read the letters said in interviews Friday that the letters suggested that the laboratory construction was at an early stage and that it would have most likely been at least two to three years, if not more, before the Qaeda team would have been able to produce enough anthrax to use as a weapon.
“They were moving to try to get the right stuff,” said D. A. Henderson, an expert on biological weapons who is a former top scientific adviser to the Health and Human Services Department. “But not in a very sophisticated way.”
The second of the two experts, Dr. Milton Leitenberg, a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said many of people who were involved in the effort had been arrested or, in one case, killed.
“It is not likely that anything is going on right now,” said Dr. Leitenberg, author of “The Problem of Biological Weapons” (2004). “And in the three years they were working on this, as best as is known, they did not succeed in obtaining a pathogen or reach the stage of growing the pathogen in the laboratory.”
The writer of the two letters is widely believed to be Abdur Rauf, a Pakistani microbiologist who is known to have attended a conference before 2001 sponsored by the Society for Applied Microbiology, said a biological weapons researcher who insisted on anonymity because of his work investigating Al Qaeda.