Maybe he did. Do you know exactly when he wrote it? I'm trying to find more info on that. If it was written before the anthrax attacks on Congress, and if Cooper's description of the scenario in his novel wasn't doctored up as you believe, would you consider him suspicious? Couldn't he have crossed paths with some swarthy characters when he was in Africa? I'm not saying he's guilty or innocent - I just wouldn't rule him out just yet based on what we know about him. And it wasn't just ABC news. There were reports out of the South African newspapers confirming that he did indeed fabricate his credentials. If he is working with the feds and this all is just a staged charade, why would the feds bring this negative publicity upon themselves now if they're planning to go public with hard evidence in the next few weeks? They've stalled the investigation this long.
No, I don't. Hatfill copyrighted an unpublished novel about four years ago, called "Emergence." From the sound of it, the current book must be a work-in-progress, since it was on his hard drive.
Ask yourself some common sense questions.
If Steve Hatfill murdered five people, at least one in a death penalty state, how likely is it he would really write a novel to explain how he did it?
If Steve Hatfill, single guy, soldier of fortune, murdered five people in perhaps the most forensically distinctive killings in history, and had been publicly identified as a key suspect last year, and had freely travelled abroad during that period on business, would he still be here?
If the FBI really believed Steve Hatfill was the anthrax killer and had a secret anthrax lab, why did they search his Ocala storage locker in t-shirts and shorts?
If they really believed that Steve Hatfill had a secret lab for making the most sophisticated weaponized anthrax ever seen and a possibly unknown number of accessories in the military biodefense program, would the FBI really have left him on the loose for almost a year, and would they have let him travel overseas, or, if they were hoping to lure him into giving himself and his lab and his collaborators away, would they do it by staging a photo op search of his house, complete with TV news helicopters?
If the government seriously thought Steve Hatfill had killed five people and caused several billion dollars of economic loss last year, would they really have hired him back from the private sector to a $150K/yr job as a biowarfare preparedness trainer last month?
Is it really likely that Steve Hatfill had the means and motivation to stage an anthrax attack on the offices of the 9-11 terrorists' landlord within at most a few days of the hijackers' Delray Beach location being disclosed by Attornee General John Ashcroft?
Is there any reason to discount the conclusion of the staff of AMI and Bob Steven's treating physician (as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine) that the source of the AMI anthrax was a suspicious package which was received, but not opened, about one week *before* 9/11?
Is there any substantive reason to discount the post facto diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax in one of the 9/11 hijackers made by a Florida emergency room physician, and confirmed by Johns Hopkins scientists?
Does it seem likely to you that if the government were facing a hugely embarassing bioterrorism scandal emanating from within the "military-industrial complex," that it would choose exactly the time when we are trying to build up support for an attack on Iraq to foreground that embarassment into public consciousness, as opposed to burying the scandal, or dispatching it last year so it would be "old news" by now? Or does it seem more likely to you that the coincidence of this crisis in the domestic suspect theory of the anthrax with the new focus on Iraq has been engineered for a reason which will shortly become apparent?
Did the man you saw on television yesterday calling for his accusers to put up or shut up look either homicidal, suicidal, or in any other way mentally abnormal?
It sounds like Hatfill exaggerated some credentials on his resume. He may well be a bit of a self-promoter. I've known many, many people like that, in academia, in business, in science and in government. Incidentally, many of them are very good at what they do, but it doesn't stop them guilding the lilly. It also doesn't justify spinning elaborate X-Files theories about them being serial-killers without even circumstantial evidence. After all, it's not as if his resume includes hijacking an airliner and flying into a skyscraper, like certain other "persons of interest" I could mention.
If he is working with the feds and this all is just a staged charade, why would the feds bring this negative publicity upon themselves now if they're planning to go public with hard evidence in the next few weeks?
That's a reasonable question and here's how I would analyze it. In the first place, the people who are actually carrying out the investigation probably don't understand the big picture, or are smart enough, career-wise and pension-wise, to understand that they are not supposed to think about the big picture. I assume that the people who are actually carrying out the investigation are not independent thinkers. Bob Roth isn't Frank Serpico. He's no Harry Callaghan. More than likely, he's a bureaucratic time-server who takes direction well.
Bush says to Mueller: stall. Mueller says to his Number 2: Find somebody we can put on this domestic angle thing, and make sure he's loyal and not too bright. Number 2 says to Bob Roth -- here, check out these scientists, and here's a book on microbiology -- have at it! Welcome to the real world of bureaucratic gamesmanship.
Maybe Roth got a little gung-ho. Maybe Hatfill's "anguish" is, shall we say, a little bit played up, because he's smart enough to understand what's likely going on. They're both cogs in a bureaucratic machine, but they are probably acting semi-autonomously. If things get out of whack, Bush will inject a little steering input from above, but he isn't going to micro-manage it.
This is really guesswork, BTW. I'm not privy to the inner goings on of the FBI. It could be that the FBI is simply completely incompetent and corrupt. There's plenty of evidence that that is true of at least parts of the FBI. My problem with the simplest version of that theory is that I cannot believe Bush would leave a matter of such grave importance in the hands of knaves & buffoons. He might leverage the knaves & buffoons for his larger ends... but that brings us back pretty close to the model I just outlined.
But there is a second issue here, which dovetails with this analysis quite well. The "rogue scientist" theory promulgated by leftwing activist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has been, IMO, exploited by the Bush administration for its own ends, to wit, buying time in a game of chicken with Saddam Hussein. The Hatfill theory has become gospel among segments of the Left, and many hold to a version of the theory where Hatfill is not just a loose cannon, but is actually in cahoots with the CIA and/or Bush for their own nefarious ends (think "oil bidness"). Not all of those true believers are on the far-out fringes. The notion that Hatfill was carrying out the bidding of his CIA handlers was actually floated by Nicholas Kristoff in the editorial pages of the New York Times. If you do a web search on Hatfill's name, you'll see that the Hatfilll conspiracy is already well-entrenched in the European media. Thus, there is now a premium on "roughing up" Hatfill publicly before exonerating him, otherwise it might all look a little too cozy. But the "roughing up" he has received is, in the big picture, nothing. He will come out of this very well, with book deals, TV gigs, the works, if he wants it. So I wouldn't take it too seriously.