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I was musing on Steven Hatfill's famous forged PhD certificate today and it struck that it would actually be easier to gin up the fake-of-a-fake than the supposed "straight" fake served up to us by the Baltomore Sun's Scott Shane.

If you look at the copy released to Scott Shane and Alan J. Weberman (interesting juxtaposition of players), you'll recognize just how little work it would take to put together, provided you had access to other certified documents from which to copy the notaries' stamp and signature. All you have to do is scan those documents, cut-and-paste them into Photoshop, and composite them with a Rhodes coat of arms lifted off the web, the phony signatures and the lettering. Print it out, run it through a copier a few times to obscure any imperfections, and -- voila! -- instant forged PhD certificate à la Weberman, conveniently pre-dated to 1995. I wouldn't be at all surprised if those notarized documents were from Hatfill's time in Oxford. I wonder if the solicitors keep copies of the documents they notarize?

Mind you, if Hatfill really forged and notarized those documents back in 1995, all by his lonesome, then it wasn't no Photoshop job. You can't walk into a Oxford solicitors' office and ask them to notarize some crappy-looking black-and-white copy of a diploma. That thing would have to look real, with fancy parchment, embossed lettering, coat of arms, etc. Certainly not impossible to do, but, even with the color lasers and the like available today, not a piece of cake. I could do the Shane-Weberman-Photoshop version myself in a couple of hours max, but a real-looking original would be another story. This whole Hatfill scam is looking easier every day. Like 9/11, it uses the minimum number of people and resources to create the maximum psychological effect. Neat, huh?

LOL! You're a real sap, aren't you?

But now they could just let the whole thing remain an unsolved case, rather than keep beating on Hatfill.

So why don't they? Come to think of it, what was the deal with that phony decapitation strike on Saddam Hussein, with the forty cruise missiles and Saddam being med-evaced on a gurney with an oxygen mask over his face? What is all this BS? Is there something that unites all this BS theatrics? Some underlying connection? I think we should be told.

 

 
"Be seeing you."

As window-dressing PR stunts go, it's a whole lot cheaper than firing forty cruise missiles at an empty buiding.

 

 
"Be seeing you."

As you no doubt know, Laurie Mylroie's book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War on America, was praised to the skies by experts on terrorism, international relations and the Middle East right after it came out in 2000. The book's predictions of near-term mega-scale terrorism and biological WMD blackmail also look amazingly prescient. So, just for a lark, why don't we try postulating that the central argument of the book is correct, and see where that leads us?

The central argument of her book is that Ramzi Yousef, author of the 1993 WTC attack, is an Iraqi agent.

What would follow if that were true, either directly or by the most elementary logical deduction from the facts avaliable to us? The dominoes would fall pretty quickly, I would suggest:

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an Iraqi agent.

• 9/11 was an Iraqi hit.

• The Bush administration knows 9/11 was an Iraqi hit.

• The administration isn't being frank with us about that fact.

• The anthrax letters were Saddam's attempt to blackmail the US, to deter Bush from pointing the finger and bringing him to justice.

• The blackmail worked.

• Powell's dog-and-pony show at the UN was really about the anthrax.

• Amerithrax is a cover up.

• Steven Jay Hatfill is not only not the anthrax killer, but he is also a willing front-man for one of the greatest strategic deceptions ever perpetrated.

See how easy it is to figure everything out, provided you start from the right place?

What is going to happen when they come up empty handed from draining the pond? What does that set up?

I had some interaction with her on the anthrax_fans list, where she made a few brief appearances. She seemed interested in certain points I made concerning the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Slightly curiously, she e-mailed me privately, saying she had accidentally deleted one of my postings on the subject, and would I mail it to her directly -- which I did, but still using my anonymous anthrax_fans account. And, yes, I get your drift about her dropping out of sight. Much the same could be said of her supporter, former CIA director James Woolsey. However, I believe they both testified during the recent civil case in which the plaintiffs claimed that Saddam was responsible in the 9/11 attacks. The case was decided for the plaintiffs.

Any guess what they will find and how they will try to tie it to Hatfill?

They will find nothing and this publicity stunt is precisely designed to discredit Operation Hatfill and place the blame for it on the conveniently just-retiring head of the WFO, Van Harp. That would be my guess.

Hatfill's military past is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. About the only thing we know for certain is that he did a three year stint at the US Army Institute for Military Assistance at Fort Bragg -- formerly known as the US Army Psychological Warfare School.

Interesting, since it goes to the timeline. This is one day after Bob Woodward's WP article, 11 days after the NSC meeting where Cheney decided to keep state sponsorship of the anthrax threats from the American people.

Wow, a double-dose of snow today?

But several Ukranian-American groups, as part of their commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Ukranian Famine, are asking the Pulitzer board to revoke Duranty's award, arguing that the correspondent's sympathy for Stalin caused Duranty to ignore millions of deaths.

Just a slight oversight -- mild by New York Times standards.

Index Case of Fatal Inhalational Anthrax Due to Bioterrorism in the United States

BTW, that link is on my profile page, along with a lot of other good stuff. Highly recommended!

The timing of the Project Hatfill fits the Daschle meeting scenario, and, IMO, fits an explanation that is plausible within established scenarios of bureaucratic politics.

As best can be determined from public domain sources, the genesis of Project Hatfill was the National Security Council meeting of October 17, 2001 -- the meeting described on p. 248 of Bob Woodward's authorized history of the Afghanistan campaign, Bush at War. It was at that meeting that, in response to an intelligence assessment that the anthrax threats emanated from a state sponsor of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney made a decision that the truth be kept from the American people. Ten days after that meeting took place, the "domestic terrorism" story was pump-primed by none other than our old friend, Bob Woodward, writing in the Washington Post: FBI and CIA Suspect Domestic Extremists - Officials Doubt Any Links to Bin Laden.

The rest is history -- 1984-style history, anyway.

Rosenberg was merely a disposable useful idiot exploited by the Bush administration in the early phases of the campaign. In phase one, the administration focused on developing left-wing useful idiots to sell the Amerithrax story. By making the Hatfill story a left-wing cause celebre, the administration ensured that their biggest potential problem -- well-funded and antagonistic liberal news outlets and watchdog groups -- would actually end up being suckered into promoting their own cover story. Once that was accomplished, they pulled the rug out from under the folks they had coaxed into priming the pump. Rosenberg and, more importantly, Kristof, dropped the story like a hot potato. It is in the nature of the operation that the coals are continually being raked over to keep the fires burning, but the primary focus since last August has been to develop right-wing useful idiots to rant and rave about how Hatfill has been railroaded, he's the victim of political correctness, the FBI is a hopelessly corrupt bastion of Clintonian malfeasance, yada, yada, yada. The carnival barker-like figure of Pat Clawson, Hatfill's friend and Oliver North's flunkie, has been the head shill for that side of the con. Both sides have been manipulated effortlessly, because most people believe that ideology, like religion, is a substitute for critical thought. The people who are running this show know their audience well. They're real pros, and they're almost ready to bring this thing home now. Watch.

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." — Winston Churchill

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." — P. T. Barnum

In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full-spectrum domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil.

Sounds good to me.

Interesting. I'd seen the header for that mail when Googling for Michie, but was never able to call up the whole thing. The "Scorpions" he refers to are an elite detective squad inaugurated by the South African goverment a few years ago: Scorpions target South African crime.

It certainly looks like Dr. John Michie of the University of Stellenbosch Radiobiology Lab is indeed "Scorpion," the individual who spread many of the rumors about Hatfill on South African bulletin boards, including supporting disinfo for the famous "Greendale School" talking point. Based on information I have obtained privately, it appears also that Michie provided Stephen Dresch with the e-mail concerning Hatfill allegedly sent by Prof. Bohm to Prof. Kirby, implicating all three men in gross scientific misconduct. On top of that, Michie seems to be the source for much of the material on Alan J. Weberman's "STEVE HATFILL NAZI SWINE" hate page at the JDO web site, material supposedly implicating Hatfill in white supremacist activity. If Michie supplied the e-mail to Dresch, then I would guess that he also supplied the page from Hatfill's Stellenbosch lab notebook that is reproduced on Weberman's site.

All of which raises a host of questions. If Michie is a really an enemy of Hatfill and a genuine whistle-blower, then Hatfill, Kirby, Bohm are all charlatans. Michie himself is likely, on that scenario, also a somewhat disturbed individual, inasmuch as he has been a colleague of Hatfill's thesis advisor, Bohm, since at least 1989, and authored a paper with him as recently as 2000. Odd that he would choose to collaborate scientifically with a man he knew to be a scoundrel and a charlatan. Odd that he would expose a friend like that, anonymously. Odd that he would choose to make his case through the medium of Andrew J. Weberman, the eccentric Bob Dylan "garbologist" whose Lower Manhattan apartment was used as a sniper nest by Mordechai Levy. Odd that not a wit of supporting evidence for the melodramatic tale of Hatfill's wholesale scientific deception is to be found in the public domain, and odd that his papers, including the supposedly fraudulent MSc work, are still being referenced in prestigious scientific journals to this very day.

There is another explanation for all this bizarreness, and it is the one I favor. The e-mail supplied by Michie is, IMHO, a sophisticated fraud. I say sophisticated, because the author clearly has a good understanding of molecular biology, and the "inside baseball" talk in the e-mail is quite impressive, and suggests at the very minimum considerable insight into Hatfill's MSc thesis work. This stuff is right up my alley, professionally, but I had to dig around a bit to understand what the "DIAGEN" reference and the "GC clamp" talk were about -- these details refer to the very specialized Thermal Gradient Gel Electrophoresis technique Hatfill used for the Lancet paper and are not, incidentally, discussed in that publication. Aside from noting the sophistication, one would have to assume that, if the e-mail is a fraud, the perp is either very confident that he will not be sued by the three men implicated in gross scientific conduct, and quite happy to completely trash their reputations -- or, the perp knows perfectly well that none of those individuals will raise a ruckus about the e-mail, and, even in the unlikely event someone other than the smeared parties tried to make an issue of it, the whole matter would soon be exposed as a Internet hoax and melt away in the light of day -- perhaps because the e-mail address in the To: line of the header puts Ralph Kirby in Taiwan in 1993, when he didn't move to Yang Ming university until ten years later.

On that second scenario, the author of the e-mail is likely Steven Jay Hatfill himself. Michie, who is probably a friend and confidante rather than an arch-foe of Hatfill, is acting as Hatfill's "cut-out" to feed superficially incriminating but ultimately toothless "evidence" into the Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce. Hatfill's Msc thesis advisor, Bohm, and his PhD thesis advisor, Kirby, are also old friends -- they've authored many papers together and Kirby was introduced to his wife by Hatfill -- and they are in the know, or at least have been given a heads up by Hatfill. They know "everything is under control" and "it's a national security issue" and Hatfill isn't a a cold-blooded murderer, nor is he in any danger of being railroaded and sent to the Florida death house, and everything's gonna be alright, and in the mean time, they should just keep their mouths shut.

And that is what my best guess as to what's really going on here. Care to hazard your own theories?

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." — Winston Churchill

Speaking of S.H., was there ever actually anything stated or claimed which specifically linked him to this pond? (not a rhetorical question)

Back when they first searched the pond, the story fed by to the press by the FBI was that the search was inspired by a scene in Hatfill's unpublished novel, Emergence. When they revived the pond story after the invasion of Iraq, the story changed: now the search was motivated by a friend of Hatfill who told the FBI he'd heard Hatfill opining that the anthrax killer could have filled the envelopes under water. And then, in the last day or two, the FBI has fed the media the story that they were led to the pond by the bloodhound Tinkerbell. So, I guess you gots yer choice. Which story gets you all tingly and excited? Which would you like to be true?

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." -- Winston Churchill

"Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been."

Hatfill must be held to a higher standard. He used to invite fellow grad students to "poke and puke" parties. Al-Haznawi only flew a jumbo jet into a skyscraper. Let's be logical about this.

Here's Maier's article, which talks about the visit:

FBI rush to judgmment on anthrax

Here's his original 1998 article with the quote from Hatfill:

First Response to Terror

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." -- Winston Churchill