Posted on 08/25/2002 11:33:25 AM PDT by at bay
Just watched the Hatfill press conference. FBI continuing on its theory that this was something that originated from the US and that Atta must have had athlete's foot or something. Hatfill, if innocent, is rightly indignant at his treatment.
I am quite amazed but shouldn't be
to see that the majority of those posting know nothing about this case
despite the fact that there have been about 50 threads about it
in the past two months.
One would like to think that conservatives are better informed than leftists
but unfortunately that seems not to be true.
However it is good to know that complete ignorance does not prevent most people
from expressing their fatuous opinions.
I agree with you on this point. But who'd doing it and why?
BTW, there is a man in the Princeton area--he either works for the Borough or Township--that looks like Hatfill, or at least looks like the picture of Hatfill that was being shown in & around Princeton (Nassau Street & Palmer Square). There was an article about him right after the story broke about anthrax being found in the mailbox on Nassau street. I believe it was in the Trenton Times.
Criminals don't do press confernces... unless their first names are Bill and Hillary.
This is like American Idol in reverse. They have twenty persons of interest and if they are whittling that list down, the person of interest who is left, might be "it" but without a record contract.
Why did the FBI start investigating these labs in the first place? Did somebody call a hotline or something and give them a lead? This story has not been highlighted around here.
I still don't trust him, even though he's probably innocent. He's milkin' it a little bit IMO. If he hates publicity, why is he holding press conferences? It is curious that he is blaming Ashcroft when it would be easier to just file a complaint against the justice department without naming Ashcroft specifically. That's why I believe the dems are egging him on. FV
Starting last December, while at an international conference in Switzerland, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg launched the theory that the anthrax perp was a member of the "American biowarfare community". She went on to assert that she, and most of her colleagues, probably knew who the "rogue scientist" was.
Her story first appeared in the house organ of Germany's Green Party.
The media found her "revelations" absolutely fascinating and got on the story like a chicken on a june bug. Since then, she's been playing media darling, asked to comment on each and every "break" in the case. Which, whenever the trail turns cold, she furnishes a brand new "suspect".
Thanks to her "expertise", which has more to do with media management than bacteriology, she even got a confidential meeting with Senators Daschle and Leahy and their staffs.
Shortly thereafter, the FBI made a surprise raid on Hatfill's apartment...accompanied by a fleet of media helicopters and a convoy of remote vans.
If I was Hatfill, I'd be pissed off, too. At John Ashcroft, or anybody in a position of authority who was allowing this charade to continue.
Of course, there is some thought that Hatfill is in on the act and knows the script. He may be a CIA asset himself...and is to play out the role as a media diversion until such time as the administration is ready to announce where the anthrax really came from.
It was just so bizarre and who the heck told him the ninth commandment was about bearing false witness? I don't think the press conference was completely in his own words. Why would he embarass himself if he wasn't familiar with the commandments? Someone else told him to say that which exposes that he did not write his speech in its entirety. It seemed so scripted, and when he left the podium and embraced some guy to his right, it looked like he was acting. That's my opinion and that's not about Ashcroft or the Constitution or dems.
I think you may be right. If this is some weird diversion for the American people and for the world's consumption - they're good because I'm totally bewildered.
This story has been highlighted around here on 100+ threads.
Why don't you go back and read them
instead of continuing to make a fool of yourself
by displaying your total lack of knowledge about this story?
The other thing concerns the leaks. If there have been leaks to the papers about him from the FBI then yes he is being treated unfairly and should sue. The other possibility is that he and his own legal team are leaking some of this also knowing full well that Richard Jewell is still fresh in the minds of many. None of us have any idea what is going on and all we are doing are making subjective value judgments based on individual perceptions of the FBI and government in general.
It has not gotten big play in Tampa Bay so why would I go looking for it? Today, Hatfill was unavoidable. It was a bit much considering that yesterday locally, I endured a televised press conference by Al Arian from Lebanon on the local Time Warner channel.
I guess to get credibility and attention, we have to have press conferences and hire attorneys and parade our family and friends in front of the cameras too. We have become so melodramatic. Maybe that's what bugs me.
Oh, yeah, there can be real leaks and fake leaks. You are right about that.
He lost me when he accused Ashcroft of breaking the ninth commandment. He should have at least checked the commandments before he accused Ashcroft of the wrong one.
I am saying it was a weird press conference and now we have to listen to this through the primaries and the November elections. Then it will be a dead issue after the elections are over. Everything is about politics, even this. I believe I blamed the dems.
Now if they smacked people around, that's more serious stuff but nobody's made allegations that they were physically harmed or threatened. Janet Reno did much worse to people in any event. I'm outta here. There aren't going to be any quick answers. Hatfill is one of twenty. The other nineteen are not on the radar screen. Have a nice week.
We don't know the whole story and I'm going to sit this one out for now. I thought conservatives hated whiners. What is happening?
It was made clear at Hatfill's first conference that he had hired a criminal defense attorney by that point. He did so immediately after a criminal subpoena was served on him by the FBI at the time of the search of his apartment that was done with all those media guys present.
Media Manufacture Cloud of Suspicion Over Hatfill
By Nicholas Stix
Insight first published this article about the effort to blame Steven Hatfill for the anthrax attacks in the Fair Comment section of the Aug. 12 issue.
Just point and click. Those two steps, and a long e-mail "cc" list, apparently are all that it takes to spread a hoax around the world today. It works like a computer virus, and with consequences no less dangerous.
Just ask Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
Readers of Insight and her sister daily, the Washington Times, know Hatfill through his attempts over the years to warn the public of America's lack of readiness against biowarfare attacks. However, the mainstream liberal press ignored Hatfill — until late June, that is.
Since then Hatfill has gained international notoriety with a slew of stories in Time magazine, the American Prospect, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the Washington Post, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel and on Websites as far away as Zambia. The stories played up FBI searches of Hatfill's home and a refrigerated storage locker he rents — implying that he is the anthrax terrorist who killed five people last fall with contaminated mail. On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist.
"If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. … It's time for the FBI 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."
Why would the FBI need to "exculpate" someone on whom it has nothing? The only cloud of "suspicion" hanging over Hatfill's head is the one manufactured by the media, who have let Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg lead them around by the nose.
Rosenberg blames the U.S. government for last fall's anthrax attacks. She long has called on the United States to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would permit international inspectors to visit our biodefense installations.
In a sympathetic portrait in the March 18 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that "Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the [1972 Biological Weapons] convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored."
Rosenberg has provided no evidence to support her charges. Meanwhile, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton has argued, her prescription would allow rogue nations such as Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to learn through protocol inspections about U.S. defensive programs and develop their own offensive programs.
Journalists usually refer to Rosenberg as a "microbiologist" and "State University of New York professor." Officially, she is a professor of environmental science at a performing-arts college, but she neither has conducted scientific research nor taught in years. And she has little biowarfare expertise. Working with the far-left Federation of American Scientists, Rosenberg is a taxpayer-supported, full-time activist.
Immediately after last fall's anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began claiming that the terrorist was an American scientist from within the biodefense establishment. However, her stories diverged wildly depending on her audience. In the European version, the terrorist was a CIA agent/contract scientist who acted on agency orders as part of a deadly germ-warfare experiment. Unbeknownst to European reporters, they were getting a plotline from the brilliant but little-watched TV show Millennium (1996-99).
In the American version, the terrorist was a "bioevangelist" (The Sun's Scott Shane) who sought not to harm anyone, but to warn the public of the dangers of biowarfare.
In setting up an American scientist to take the fall for the killings, Rosenberg may have seen an opportunity to discredit the U.S. biowarfare-defense program, get the Bush administration to sign on to international biowarfare protocols that would give our enemies access to our biodefense secrets and exact political revenge on Hatfill.
In seeking to convince readers of Hatfill's guilt in last fall's attacks, Kristof and the other journalists claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these "attacks."
No one ever has provided any evidence showing that the Rhodesian army carried out anthrax attacks, much less that Hatfill participated in them. Kristof and company merely are regurgitating a tainted 1992 article by longtime Rosenberg associate Meryl Nass. The Nass report purported to explain the 1978-80 anthrax outbreak that affected 10,000 black farmers, predominantly with cutaneous anthrax, killing 182. In her "explanation," Nass leaped from one politically loaded speculation to another without any evidence.
The flamboyant, brilliant Hatfill earned his medical degree in Rhodesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s while serving in U.S. and Rhodesian special forces. In Rhodesia, he fought against communist guerrillas. One must recall that in Rhodesia — now named Zimbabwe, and ruled since 1980 by genocidal communist Robert Mugabe — the choice was never between apartheid and freedom, but rather between white or black apartheid.
Hatfill's attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me, "My client doesn't want to do anything, right now. … He's really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he's decided that the best approach is to ignore everything and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something but, right now, he doesn't."
If Hatfill doesn't engage the campaign against him in a hurry, he soon may find himself sharing a cell with the likes of José Padilla.
Nicholas Stix is a free-lance writer based in New York who contributes to the New York Post and Middle American News.
This statement simply is not true.
Those on this forum who have been following the activities of Barbara Hatch Rosenberg
for the past six months
have a perfectly clear idea of 'what is going on'.
At the time of Hatfill's first press conference
almost all the ignoramuses who posted on this Forum
had not idea who this women was.
Probably they still don't.
Yes, I heard him say that he had a criminal defense attorney at the first press conference. I wonder if the criminal defense attorney, presuming he is still in Hatfill's employ, approved of his client giving the press conferences, or if the criminal defense attorney has given that authority to Hatfill's civil attorney?
If you believe that, you really need to go back and read more about the case. Compared to the evidence that the anthrax came from an Islamic source, the so-called "evidence" that it came from a domestic right-winger is of zero value.
To get a start, I suggest you read the series of newsmax articles to which I have been providing links on another thread. Here's a link to one of them (which will allow you to navigate to the others): FBI Overlooks Iraq's Connection to Anthrax Attacks .
Yesterday he stated he had never met her, so your information is incorrect.
I watched the news conference, and Hatfill is either the best liar I've ever seen in my life (BeezleBubba included), or is innocent. I think he's innocent.
Hatfill is seriously pissed at Ashcroft and the FBI. I believed him when he said he was originally glad when Ashcroft was appointed AG...he sounds like a good conservative just like most of us...might even be a FReeper. He expressed serious concerns about the Patriot Act that many of us have voiced, and caused me to change my mind from thinking the Patriot Act was a necessary evil to thinking it is a serious threat.
Well, I hate lying, now he has to prove that John Ashcroft lied - that's not gonna be easy.
Yeah, well.. as I said, I might have gotten the thing garbled :). I'm pretty sure he's innocent, though. Too many things that don't add up.
And were probably the same people excoriating the democrat sheeple for following Klintoon like lemmings. Ironic, isn't it? And before I get flamed, no, I am not equating the Bush and Klintoon administrations -- Klintoon and Co. set the standard for government slime. I'm just saying that if our government representatives are wrong, we need to sock it to 'em, regardless of the letter after their name.
Exactly... I am conservative first, for the country first, for the constitution first, all else is secondary.
I don't think that's right.
My understanding is that he only has to prove in civil court that his rights were violated by the government.
That is a very different thing from having to prove that Ashcroft lied.
/sarcasm
If Mr. Hatfill is mad at Ashcroft and the FBI, et al, wait until he gets to know the court system and is deposed, has to fill out interrogatories, produce records, get ready for trial. Have a trial and so on. Further, someone can follow him around too. He has no idea. If he hates publicity and wants his privacy why is he inviting Court TV into his life? It could happen and it makes no sense to me.
No matter how good a case you have, it's a long tedious process and you still may not win in court.
If he hates publicity and wants his privacy why is inviting court TV into his life?
My understanding is that the NY Times published information leaked from the government and placed Dr. Hatfill into the limelight.
What is your understanding of who first put this into the public spotlight?
Good questions.
I'm not as up to speed on this story as others here, but I don't remember anyone else's name being made public.
To all: Have any of the other 19 names been released?
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