The American Spectator

Special Report

Nicholas Kristof vs. Steven Hatfill

8.16.02 @ 12:02AM

Last weekend saw the first public appearance of Steven Hatfill, a former viral researcher at the Army's biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill has been the subject of much media speculation over the last several months as a possible perpetrator of the deadly anthrax mailings last fall that claimed five lives. In the face of some highly dubious circumstantial evidence and undoubted leaks to the news media from the FBI concerning his role as a "person of interest," Hatfill and his attorneys came out swinging last Sunday. Perhaps a look at the paper trail and possible motivations of those insinuating Hatfill's guilt is in order.

The first story regarding the "lone American" theory of the anthrax mailer appeared in February 2002 on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. It came from Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a professor at SUNY-Purchase and the chair of FAS's Working Group on Biological Weapons. In this piece, entitled "Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks," Rosenberg didn't couch her charges in the form of an allegation, but came right out and said:

"For more than three months now the FBI has known that the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is American. This conclusion must have been based on the perpetrator's evident connection to the U.S. biodefense program. "

Since its inception many years ago FAS has been a predominantly left-wing critic of nearly every U.S. defense-related initiative. Its efforts included active support for the "nuclear freeze" programs of the 1980s. Since the February FAS posting other left-wing critics of the FBI and U.S. national security policies have joined in the search for an American perpetrator.

In May, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote a bashing President Bush in connection with pre-9//11 warnings. It included this about the anthrax mailings and the persona of "one middle-aged American":

"One of the first steps we can take to reduce our vulnerability is to light a fire under the F.B.I. in its investigation of the anthrax case. Experts in the bioterror field are already buzzing about a handful of individuals who had the ability, access and motive to send the anthrax.

"These experts point, for example, to one middle-aged American who has worked for the United States military bio-defense program and had access to the labs at Fort Detrick, Md. His anthrax vaccinations are up to date, he unquestionably had the ability to make first-rate anthrax, and he was upset at the United States government in the period preceding the anthrax attack.

"I say all this to prod the authorities, for although the F.B.I. has known about this handful of people since October, it has been painstakingly slow in its investigation. Let's hope it will pick up the pace, for solving the case would reduce our vulnerability to another attack."

Apparently, Kristof was unaware of an important piece -- "Remember Anthrax?" by David Tell -- that ran in the Weekly Standard of April 20. Tell pointed to a compelling evidence of a non-domestic source for the anthrax -- precisely the sort of news those convinced of a homegrown American source would not welcome :

"The U.N.'s former top bioweapons inspector in Iraq, Richard O. Spertzel, has told Congress about reports of a 'cryptic September article in a newspaper run by Saddam's son, Uday' which promised that a 'virus' would soon attack 'the raven,' apparently a Baath party curseword for America.

"Spertzel has also told Congress that Iraq has conducted military exercises simulating the dispersal of anthrax spores from crop-dusting aircraft -- a subject in which both Mohamed Atta and Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 'twentieth hijacker,' are known to have expressed intense interest. Last June, one of Atta's September 11 confederates, Ahmed Ibrahim Al Haznawi, walked into a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, emergency room with a painless butin flamed one-inch black lesion on his lower left leg. In retrospect, Al Haznawi's attending physician, Dr. Christos Tsonas, is convinced that the wound was cutaneous anthrax. The Department of Health and Human Services' top bioterrorism expert agrees, as do two leading researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies."

On June 27, the left-leaning American Prospect entered the game, with an online piece by Laura Rozen entitled "Who is Steven Hatfill?" Rozen made much the same
case, except explicitly, and picked up on an angle Kristof would subsequently pursue:

"There is something curious about Hatfill's claim, on his resume, to have worked concurrently with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance in Fort Bragg and with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron. Indeed, several of his associates have told the Prospect that Hatfill bragged of having been a double agent in South Africa -- which raises some intriguing questions. Was the U.S. military biowarfare program willing to hire and give sensitive security clearances to someone who had served in the apartheid-era South African military medical corps, and with white-led Rhodesian paramilitary units in Zimbabwe's civil war two decades earlier? Or did Hatfill serve in the Rhodesian SAS, and later in the South African military medical corps, at the behest of the U.S. government?"

Kristof revisited the anthrax issue in a July 2 column, but seemed unaware of the Rozen piece as he continued to refer to Hatfill not by his real name:

"Almost everyone who has encountered the F.B.I. anthrax investigation is aghast at the bureau's lethargy. Some in the biodefense community think they know a likely culprit, whom I'll call Mr. Z. Although the bureau has polygraphed Mr. Z, searched his home twice and interviewed him four times, it has not placed him under surveillance or asked its outside handwriting expert to compare his writing to that on the anthrax letters...

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Law, Military, Iraq, Africa