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…
“People in the biodefense field first gave Mr. Z’s name to the
bureau as a suspect in October, and I wrote about him elliptically
in a column on May 24.
“He denies any wrongdoing, and his friends are heartsick at
suspicions directed against a man they regard as a patriot. Some of
his polygraphs show evasion, I hear, although that may be because
of his temperament.
“If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned
long ago. But he is a true-blue American with close ties to the
U.S. Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the American biodefense
program. On the other hand, he was once caught with a girlfriend in
a biohazard ‘hot suite’ at Fort Detrick, surrounded only by
blushing germs.
“With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it’s
time for the F.B.I. to make a move: either it should go after him
more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking
up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove
this cloud of suspicion.”
Now in fairness to Kristof he does not come right out and say
that the man in question is Steven Hatfill, but by this time anyone
who’d followed the case with any degree of detail — as evidenced
by Laura Rozen’s online piece — would know exactly to whom he’s
referring. In addition, might it be asked just what the FBI was
doing leaking details on an ongoing investigation to a columnist
for the New York Times? And can someone explain what
inspired Kristof to attempt a cheap imitation of David Brock by
reporting on “Mr. Z” allegedly being caught with a girlfriend in a
“biohazard ‘hot suite’ at Fort Detrick” — and how such an
interlude would have made “Mr. Z” or anyone else any more or any
less likely to have committed the anthrax mailings.
In his news conference and with testimony provided by his friend
and former CNN reporter Pat Clawson, Steven Hatfill emphasized his
research was in the area of such viral agents as Ebola and not
anthrax. Nonetheless, all the media speculation regarding his
alleged guilt has seen him suspended from his job as an associate
director at Louisiana State University’s National Center for
Biomedical Research and Training. His attorneys have filed an
official complaint with the Justice Department regarding the FBI’s
defamatory leaks to the media concerning Mr. Hatfill. Which brings
us to Mr. Kristof’s column
of August 13th, written after Hatfill’s public appearance.
In it Kristof does a good deal of hasty backpedaling and, to put
it politely, derriere-covering, claiming “it’s time for me to come
clean on Mr. ‘Z’” — as if anyone who’d followed the story would
not have known by then exactly to whom he was referring. But as in
the Rozen story one paragraph probably explains Kristof’s obsession
with Hatfill, particularly since it also connects to something
mentioned prominently in Kristof’s July 2nd column. Here are the
two relevant sections:
July 2nd:
“Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest
anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened
more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is
evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army
fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he
participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts. Could
rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian
Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks?”
August 13th:
“Moreover, what was a man like Dr. Hatfill who had served in the
armed forces of two white racist governments (Rhodesia and South
Africa) doing in a U.S. Army lab working with Ebola?”
So Steven Hatfill deigned study (it’s not
clear that he served in either country’s armed forces) in
countries that were not on the New York Times
politically-correct listing at the time, which is enough to make
him a prime suspect in the Kristof’s eyes. If innuendo is all
Kristof can use against Hatfill, the least he is owed is an apology
and I suspect much more.
