Posted on 08/15/2002 10:49:53 PM PDT by Mohammed El-Shahawi
People shown pictures of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill in Princeton, have positively ID'd the bioweapons scientist. The FBI has thoroughly canvassed the vicinity of a mail box on a street opposite Princeton University, that was found to be contaminated with anthrax spores. The Bureau does not believe that the mail box was cross-contaminated, say by a mail basket that had been contaminated elsewhere, but rather that at least one anthrax-contaminated letter had been dropped directly into the box.
As the person most frequently interviewed by print and TV reporters, Leticia Fraga, observed to NBC reporters, she told the FBI agents that "He looked familiar, but only because I'd seen his face on TV."
We're now way past the border of Police Investigative Procedure 101, and firmly in Keystone Kops Kountry. In a missing persons investigation, it would be perfectly acceptable, for canvassers to show a photograph of a single person in a neighborhood where the photographed subject was believed to have been, just before he disappeared. However, in a criminal investigation, where law enforcement officers seek to get a positive identification of a suspect, the photograph of the purported suspect must be mixed in a batch of photographs of other people (ideally, other possible suspects). To show people only one person's photograph is unprofessional, under normal circumstances. But these aren't normal circumstances. The canvassing is being done eleven months after the letters were mailed, and after a series of targeted FBI leaks and countless media reports so biased as to fail to rise to the level of "yellow journalism," ensured that everyone in the world with a TV set, can identify a picture of Steven Hatfill. Any identifications of his photograph should be inadmissible in court, on a par with showing a witness a lineup with only one man.
I say, "should be inadmissible," because while I believe it would be inadmissible, as a matter of law, judges often dismiss the law, and in the current atmosphere of FBI and media-generated hysteria, even normally rigorous jurists might be tempted to take legal shortcuts.
Meanwhile, the FBI has put a full court press on Hatfill. As Susan Schmidt — with Rob Thomason and Tom Jackman — wrote in the August 15 Washington Post, "More than a dozen FBI agents have been diverted from white-collar criminal cases in the past two weeks to work on the intensifying investigation of whether bioterror expert Steven Hatfill had any role in last fall's anthrax attacks, according to law enforcement sources. "The former government scientist is under frequent surveillance, according to his spokesman."
However, Schmidt reports on the contradiction between the FBI's denials that they have "zeroed in on Hatfill," and the Bureau's use of techniques solely in the case of Hatfill, such as the bloodhound or bloodhounds who allegedly barked at Hatfill and his girlfriend.
Appearing on Aaron Brown's CNN show on August 14, Hatfill's friend and spokesman, Pat Clawson, derided the FBI for its lack of professionalism, and denied that Hatfill had ever been in Princeton.
"I've got to tell you, Aaron, the showing of the Hatfill photograph in New Jersey is very troublesome. Because that's not the way that investigators normally do a photo canvas. Normally when they're doing such a canvas, they have several pictures with them so that they can weed out false positives, erroneous witnesses, that sort of thing. That's not happening here at all. This is actually setting him up for a fall. It's a very unfair investigative tactic. I'm a private investigator and a long-time private investigative reporter for news organizations, including CNN, and I've done these spreads myself, and this is simply not how you do it....
"Aaron, we have a very troublesome situation developing here. And it basically boils down to this: Steve Hatfill told me as recently as this afternoon that he has never been in Princeton, New Jersey, to the best of his knowledge. Never been there. But we have the United States government coming out now and saying basically, 'you know, fellow, you look a little funny. We don't have anything on you. We don't have any evidence that you committed a crime, but you look a little funny.' "
Troublesome, indeed. The Founding Fathers would have been deeply troubled by the mere existence of a national police organization, as opposed to police departments maintained by the individual states. Such a concentration of power invites arrogance, which is the father of abuse of power. In the pre-911 Leviathan, the FBI was already dangerously out of control, as a series of tragically botched cases — most notoriously, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the pre-911 investigation of the Moussaoui connection to the 911 terrorists — attest to. But with emboldening of the federal authorities as part of President Bush's "Homeland Security" strategy, the Bureau, under the misguided leadership of Director Robert Mueller, has utterly lost its bearings. It is persecuting a man who it is not clear had the motive, means, or opportunity to carry out the attacks, and on whom the Bureau — by FBI officials' own admission — has not a shred of incriminating evidence.
What's that you, say? "Of course, Hatfill had motive, means, and opportunity." Once upon a time, I believed that too, but as the saying goes, you have to consider the source. The claims that Hatfill was a "disgruntled" scientist, who had constant access to USAMRIID's bacteriological section, and who had received an up-to-date anthrax vaccine, all came from Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's rumor mill, Defamation, Inc. None of those "facts" have withstood scrutiny. And so, I am led to conclude, that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is a person deserving of heightened scrutiny.
Rosenberg knows her way around Princeton, she's a member of a circle of scientists who seek to dismantle America's biowarfare defenses, and she has admitted that the group has wished aloud for a biowarfare attack on the U.S. On January 6, the Baltimore Sun's Scott Shane quoted her as saying,
"There have been a number of occasions when we've said in frustration, 'What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.'"
I'm not suggesting that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg did in fact, carry out the anthrax attacks, if for no other reason, than that she is not scientifically competent to do such advanced work. But through her media manipulations and defamatory campaign against Steven Hatfill, she has certainly proved herself if not a terrorist, then a dangerous person.
Some observers have suggested that the FBI's campaign terrorizing Steven Hatfill might be a tactic to "divert" attention from its real interest. If that is the case, the Bureau has fooled not only the public, but its own personnel. And it's looking more than a little "funny."
Stix has an unusual writing style. Who is he?
"There have been a number of occasions when we've said in frustration, 'What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.'"
That's interesting; here's another article from the author Stix:
Calling Agent Frank Black! Leftwing Dr. Strangelove Stole Anthrax theory from TV's Millennium
CLINTON TO SEEK $340 MLN FOR ANIMAL DISEASE STUDY
January 19, 2000
Reuters
Barbara Hagenbaugh
WASHINGTON -- Administration officials were cited as saying on Tuesday that President Clinton will seek $340 million to boost research on the diseases. This story explained that some $40 million of the White House's planned request for fiscal 2001 would pay for building a more sophisticated research facility on Plum Island, New York, to study diseases in large animals that can easily infect humans and for which there are no vaccines. The rest would, this story says, be spent to upgrade the U.S. Agriculture Department's 30-year-old research facility in Ames, Iowa. Officials were cited as saying that currently, some research in Ames, including studies of anthrax and madcow disease, is done in rented space in strip malls. The proposal will appear in Clinton's budget request for fiscal 2001 that begins on Oct. 1. Officials was further cited as saying that the extra funds for animal disease research would be spent over a seven-year period. Clinton is expected to unveil the 2001 budget formally on Feb. 7.
* Strip malls?
With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story...
Thursday Oct. 25, 2001; 5:07 p.m. EDT
Clinton Salmonella Scare a Hoax?
Was the salmonella scare reported at the Harlem offices of ex-President Bill Clinton early Thursday the result of an insider hoax?
At least one prominent media personality thinks so, based on Clinton's long record of dissembling and all too apparent hunger for the spotlight.
"You're going to have to pardon me if I'm suspicious of this," talk radio mega-star Rush Limbaugh told his audience at the opening of his Thursday show.
"I don't doubt that a vial of salmonella was sent. I just question who did it."
"You don't send vials of salmonella. If you really want to hurt somebody with it, it's in chicken or it's in food. It's somewhere where you don't know that it lurks," the nationally syndicated radio talker said.
The Clinton salmonella story appeared just two days after President Bush revealed that the White House had been the target of mail contaminated with anthrax. The confluence with the Clinton scare seemed more than a little coincidental for some.
"Bill Clinton's one of these poor guys who feels left out of all the action," Limbaugh noted. "And I wouldn't be surprised if he sent (the salmonella) to himself.
"I know a lot of you are upset with me (and are saying), 'Do you really think he would send it to himself?'"
Limbaugh answered his own question unequivocally, "Yes, especially a vial -- just to get in on the action."
In early 1998, Hatfill staged this photo to help Insight illustrate an article about the specter of biological warfare. Today, some of his accusers are trying to use the picture as "proof" that he sent letters containing anthrax.
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.
Amen to that.
I've suspected for several month now that Rosenberg was somehow involved with the mailings. She is so far out on the left, Daschle et al must look like conservatives to her. One thing we must never forget about the left, is that they abandoned principle 40 years ago. To them the end justifies the means. The only active domestic terrorists today are leftists and she fit the profile perfectly. What is so disgusting is how the media has simply parroted her propaganda.
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