Cipro. doesnt prove anything, he works with anthrax, all those
scientists i assume would be taking it.
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
> The Wrong Man
> In the fall of 2001, a nation reeling from the horror of 9/11 was rocked by
> a series of deadly anthrax attacks. As the pressure to find a culprit
> mounted, the FBI, abetted by the media, found one. The wrong one. This is
> the story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror
> investigation of the past decade—and nearly destroyed an innocent man. Here,
> for the first time, the falsely accused, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, speaks out
> about his ordeal.
> By David Freed
>
> Image credit: Melissa Golden/Redux
> The first anthrax attacks came days after the jetliner assaults of September
> 11, 2001. Postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, and believed to have been sent
> from a mailbox near Princeton University, the initial mailings went to NBC
> News, the New York Post, and the Florida-based publisher of several
> supermarket tabloids, including The Sun and The National Enquirer. Three
> weeks later, two more envelopes containing anthrax arrived at the Senate
> offices of Democrats Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, each bearing the
> handwritten return address of a nonexistent "Greendale School" in Franklin
> Park, New Jersey. Government mail service quickly shut down.
> The letters accompanying the anthrax read like the work of a jihadist,
> suggesting that their author was an Arab extremist—or someone masquerading
> as one—yet also advised recipients to take antibiotics, implying that
> whoever had mailed them never really intended to harm anyone. But at least
> 17 people would fall ill and five would die—a photo editor at The Sun; two
> postal employees at a Washington, D.C., mail-processing center; a hospital
> stockroom clerk in Manhattan whose exposure to anthrax could never be fully
> explained; and a 94-year-old Connecticut widow whose mail apparently crossed
> paths with an anthrax letter somewhere in the labyrinth of the postal
> system. The attacks spawned a spate of hoax letters nationwide. Police were
> swamped with calls from citizens suddenly suspicious of their own mail.
> Americans had good reason to fear. Inhaled anthrax bacteria devour the body
> from within. Anthrax infections typically begin with flu-like symptoms.
> Massive lesions soon form in the lungs and brain, as a few thousand bacilli
> propagate within days into literally trillions of voracious parasitic
> microbes. The final stages before death are excruciatingly painful.As their
> minds disintegrate, victims literally drown in their own fluids. If you were
> to peer through a microscope at a cross-section of an anthrax victim's blood
> vessel at the moment of death, it would look, says Leonard A. Cole, an
> expert on bioterrorism at Rutgers University, "as though it were teeming
> with worms."
> The pressure on American law enforcement to find the perpetrator or
> perpetrators was enormous. Agents were compelled to consider any and all
> means of investigation. One such avenue involved Don Foster, a professor of
> English at Vassar College and a self-styled literary detective, who had
> achieved modest celebrity by examining punctuation and other linguistic
> fingerprints to identify Joe Klein, who was then a Newsweek columnist, as
> the author of the anonymously written 1996 political novel, Primary Colors.
> Foster had since consulted with the FBI on investigations of the Unabomber
> and Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park bombing, among other cases. Now he was
> asked to analyze the anthrax letters for insights as to who may have mailed
> them. Foster would detail his efforts two years later in a 9,500-word
> article for Vanity Fair.
> Surveying the publicly available evidence, as well as documents sent to him
> by the FBI, Foster surmised that the killer was an American posing as an
> Islamic jihadist. Only a limited number of American scientists would have
> had a working knowledge of anthrax. One of those scientists, Foster
> concluded, was a man named Steven Hatfill, a medical doctor who had once
> worked at the Army's elite Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
> (USAMRIID), which had stocks of anthrax.
> On the day al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with
> hijacked jetliners, Hatfill was recovering from nasal surgery in his
> apartment outside the gates of Fort Detrick, Maryland, where USAMRIID is
> housed. We're at war, he remembers thinking as he watched the news that
> day—but he had no idea that it was a war in which he himself would soon
> become collateral damage, as the FBI came to regard him as a homegrown
> bioterrorist, likely responsible for some of the most unsettling multiple
> murders in recent American history. His story provides a cautionary tale
> about how federal authorities, fueled by the general panic over terrorism,
> embraced conjecture and coincidence as evidence, and blindly pursued one
> suspect while the real anthrax killer roamed free for more than six years.
> Hatfill's experience is also the wrenching saga of how an American citizen
> who saw himself as a patriot came to be vilified and presumed guilty, as his
> country turned against him.
> "It's like death by a thousand cuts," Hatfill, who is now 56, says today.
> "There's a sheer feeling of hopelessness. You can't fight back. You have to
> just sit there and take it, day after day, the constant drip-drip-drip of
> innuendo, a punching bag for the government and the press. And the thing
> was, I couldn't understand why it was happening to me. I mean, I was one of
> the good guys."
> Don Foster, the Vassar professor, was among those who set the wheels of
> injustice in motion. Scouring the Internet, Foster found an interview that
> Hatfill had given while working at the National Institutes of Health, in
> which he described how bubonic plague could be made with simple equipment
> and used in a bioterror attack. Foster later tracked down an unpublished
> novel Hatfill had written, depicting a fictional bioterror attack on
> Washington. He discovered that Hatfill had been in Rhodesia (present-day
> Zimbabwe) during an anthrax outbreak there in the late 1970s, and that he'd
> attended medical school near a Rhodesian suburb called Greendale—the name of
> the invented school in the return address of the anthrax letters mailed to
> the Senate. The deeper Foster dug, the more Hatfill looked to him like a
> viable suspect.
> "When I lined up Hatfill's known movements with the postmark locations of
> reported biothreats," Foster later wrote, "those hoax anthrax attacks
> appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud."
> In February 2002, Foster tried to interest the FBI in Hatfill, but says he
> was told that Hatfill had a good alibi. "A month later, when I pressed the
> issue," Foster wrote, "I was told, 'Look, Don, maybe you're spending too
> much time on this.'"
> Meanwhile, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a passionate crusader against the use of
> bioweapons, was also convinced that an American scientist was to blame for
> the anthrax attacks. In an interview with the BBC in early 2002, she
> theorized that the murders were the result of a top-secret CIA project gone
> awry, and that the FBI was hesitant to arrest the killer because it would
> embarrass Washington. A molecular biologist and professor of environmental
> science who had once served as a low-level bioweapons adviser to President
> Clinton, Rosenberg had taken it upon herself to look into the anthrax
> murders, and her investigations had independently led her to Hatfill.
> (Hatfill says he believes Rosenberg was made aware of him by a former
> acquaintance, a defense contractor with whom Hatfill had clashed over a
> proposed counter-anthrax training program intended for the U.S. Marshals
> Service.) Rosenberg wrote a paper she called "Possible Portrait of the
> Anthrax Perpetrator," which was disseminated on the Internet. Although
> Rosenberg would later deny ever having identified him publicly or privately,
> the specific details of her "Portrait" made it clear she had a particular
> suspect in mind: Steven Hatfill.
> Foster says he met Rosenberg over lunch in April 2002, "compared notes," and
> "found that our evidence had led us in the same direction." Weeks dragged on
> while he and Rosenberg tried to interest the FBI in their theories, but the
> bureau remained "stubbornly unwilling to listen." Two months later, her
> "patience exhausted," Rosenberg, according to Foster, met on Capitol Hill
> with Senate staff members "and laid out the evidence, such as it was, hers
> and mine." Special Agent Van Harp, the senior FBI agent on what by then had
> been dubbed the "Amerithrax" investigation, was summoned to the meeting,
> along with other FBI officials.
> Rosenberg criticized the FBI for not being aggressive enough. "She thought
> we were wasting efforts and resources in a particular—or in several areas,
> and should focus more on who she concluded was responsible for it," Harp
> would later testify.
> "Did she mention Dr. Hatfill's name in her presentation?" Hatfill's
> attorney, former federal prosecutor Thomas G. Connolly, asked Harp during a
> sworn deposition.
> "That's who she was talking about," Harp testified.
> Exactly a week after the Rosenberg meeting, the FBI carried out its first
> search of Hatfill's apartment, with television news cameras broadcasting it
> live.
> In his deposition, Harp would dismiss the timing of the search as
> coincidental.
> Beryl Howell, who at the time of the investigation was serving as Senator
> Patrick Leahy's point person on all matters anthrax, recently told me that
> asking Harp and other lead agents to sit down with the "quite persistent"
> Rosenberg was never meant to pressure the FBI to go after Hatfill. The
> meeting, Howell says, was intended simply to ensure that investigators
> cooperated with other experts outside the bureau and objectively considered
> all theories in the case in order to solve it more quickly.
> "Whether or not Rosenberg's suspicions about Hatfill were correct was really
> not my business," Howell says. "It was really law enforcement's prerogative
> to figure that one out."
> There was enough circumstantial evidence surrounding Hatfill that zealous
> investigators could easily elaborate a plausible theory of him as the
> culprit. As fear about the anthrax attacks spread, government and other
> workers who might have been exposed to the deadly spores via the mail system
> were prescribed prophylactic doses of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic that
> protects against infection caused by inhaled anthrax. Unfamiliar to the
> general population before September 2001, Cipro quickly became known as the
> anti-anthrax drug, and prescriptions for it skyrocketed.
> As it happened, at the time of the anthrax attacks, Hatfill was taking
> Cipro.
> Hatfill's eccentricity also generated suspicion among colleagues and FBI
> agents. Bench scientists tend toward the sedate and gymnasium-challenged.
> Steve Hatfill was a flag-waving, tobacco-chewing weight lifter partial to
> blood-rare steaks and black safari suits that showed off his linebacker's
> physique, a physician with a bawdy sense of humor and a soldier's ethos, who
> told stories over cocktails of parachuting from military aircraft and
> battling Communists in Africa. While few people who knew him could deny his
> intellect or his passion as a researcher, some found him arrogant and
> blustery. Others feared him. Even his allies acknowledge that Hatfill could
> sometimes come across as different. "If you try to link Steve and the word
> normal, they're not going to match up," says Jim Cline, a retired Special
> Forces sergeant major and anti-terror expert who worked with Hatfill from
> 1999 to 2002 at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a
> large defense contractor.
> It also happened that Hatfill was familiar with anthrax. He had done his
> medical training in Africa, where outbreaks of anthrax infections have been
> known to occur among livestock herds. In 1999, after going to work for SAIC,
> Hatfill had a hand in developing a brochure for emergency personnel on ways
> to handle anthrax hoax letters. In the long run-up to Operation Iraqi
> Freedom, he also oversaw the construction of a full-scale model designed to
> show invading U.S. troops what a mobile Iraqi germ-warfare lab might look
> like and how best to destroy it. But while he possessed a working knowledge
> of Bacillus anthracis, Hatfill had never worked in any capacity with the
> spore-forming, rod-shaped bacterium.
> "I was a virus guy," he told me, "not a bacteria guy."
> Still, when FBI agents asked to interview him 10 months after the anthrax
> murders, Hatfill says, he wasn't surprised. In their hunt for what he
> believed were the foreign terrorists who had sent the letters, Hatfill
> assumed that agents were routinely interviewing every scientist who'd ever
> worked at USAMRIID, including those, like himself, who had never set foot in
> the high-security laboratory where anthrax cultures were kept. Hatfill
> answered the agents' questions and willingly took a polygraph test, which he
> says he was told he passed.
> "I thought that was the end of it," Hatfill says. "But it was only the
> beginning."
> In June, agents asked to "swab" his apartment. Hatfill complied, feeling he
> had nothing to hide. On June 25, 2002, after signing a consent form at the
> FBI's field office in nearby Frederick, Maryland, he came home to find
> reporters and camera crews swarming. TV helicopters orbited overhead.
> "There's obviously been a leak," Hatfill says one of the agents told him. He
> was driven to a Holiday Inn to escape the crush of news media and sat in a
> motel room, watching incredulously as a full-blown search of his home played
> out on national television. The experience was surreal.
> Agents conducted a second search five weeks later amid a repeated media
> circus. This time they came equipped with a warrant and bloodhounds. The
> dogs, Hatfill would later learn, had been responsible for false arrests in
> other cases. Hatfill says he innocently petted one of hounds, named
> Tinkerbell. The dog seemed to like him. "He's identified you from the
> anthrax letters!" Tinkerbell's handler exclaimed.
> "It took every ounce of restraint to stop from laughing," Hatfill recalls.
> "They said, 'We know you did it. We know you didn't mean to kill anyone.' I
> said, 'Am I under arrest?' They said no. I walked out, rented a car, and
> went to see an attorney about suing the hell out of these people."
> The FBI raided Hatfill's rented storage locker in Ocala, Florida, where his
> father owned a thoroughbred horse farm; the agency also searched a townhouse
> in Washington, D.C., owned by his longtime girlfriend, a slim, elegant
> accountant whom Hatfill calls "Boo." (To guard her privacy, he asked that
> her real name not be used.) Agents rifled through Boo's closets and drawers,
> breaking cherished keepsakes. "They told me, 'Your boyfriend murdered five
> people,'" she said to me recently, unable to talk about it without tears.
> Hatfill was fired from SAIC. The official explanation given was that he had
> failed to maintain a necessary security clearance; the real reason, he
> believes, was that the government wanted him fired. He immediately landed
> the associate directorship of a fledgling Louisiana State University program
> designed to train firefighters and other emergency personnel to respond to
> terrorist acts and natural disasters, a job that would have matched the
> $150,000 annual salary he'd been getting at SAIC. But after Justice
> Department officials learned of Hatfill's employment, they told LSU to
> "immediately cease and desist" from using Hatfill on any federally funded
> program. He was let go before his first day. Other prospective employment
> fell through. No one would return his calls. One job vanished after Hatfill
> emerged from a meeting with prospective employers to find FBI agents
> videotaping them. His savings dwindling, he moved in with Boo.
> By this time, the FBI and the Justice Department were so confident Hatfill
> was guilty that on August 6, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly
> declared him a "person of interest"—the only time the nation's top
> law-enforcement official has ever so identified the subject of an active
> criminal investigation. Agents grilled Hatfill's friends, tapped his phone,
> installed surveillance cameras outside Boo's condo, and for more than two
> years, shadowed him day and night, looking for any grounds on which to
> arrest him.
> Many of Hatfill's friends, worried for their own reputations, abandoned him
> as the FBI gave chase. Certain of Hatfill's innocence, his former colleague
> Jim Cline was among the few who stood by him, afraid that his increasingly
> socially isolated friend would kill himself to escape his torment. "When you
> have the world against you," Cline says, "and only a few people are willing
> to look you in the eye and tell you, 'I believe you'—I mean, to this day, I
> really don't know how the guy survived."
> Virtually everywhere Hatfill went, the FBI went too, often right behind
> him—a deliberately harassing tactic called "bumper locking." Hatfill
> believes that local authorities joined in tormenting him at the behest of
> the Justice Department. Coming home from dinner one Friday night, he was
> pulled over by a Washington, D.C., police officer who issued him a warning
> for failing to signal a lane change. Three blocks later, another cop stopped
> him, again for not using his turn signal. The officer asked if he'd been
> drinking. Hatfill said he'd had one Bloody Mary. He was ordered out of his
> car. "Not unless you're going to arrest me," Hatfill says he responded
> indignantly. The officer obliged. Hatfill spent the weekend in jail and
> would later be ordered to attend a four-day alcohol counseling program. The
> police, he says, refused to administer a blood-alcohol test that would have
> proved he wasn't drunk.
> Connolly, Hatfill's attorney, offered to have Hatfill surrender his passport
> and be outfitted with a tracking device, to have FBI agents ride with him
> everywhere, to show them that they were wasting their time. The offer was
> rejected. "They were purposely sweating him," Connolly says, "trying to get
> him to go over the edge."
> Much of what authorities discovered, they leaked anonymously to journalists.
> The result was an unrelenting stream of inflammatory innuendo that dominated
> front pages and television news. Hatfill found himself trapped, the
> powerless central player in what Connolly describes as "a story about the
> two most powerful institutions in the United States, the government and the
> press, ganging up on an innocent man. It's Kafka."
> With Hatfill's face splashed all over the news, strangers on the street
> stared. Some asked for his autograph. Hatfill was humiliated. Embarrassed to
> be recognized, he stopped going to the gym. He stopped visiting friends,
> concerned that the FBI would harass them, too. Soon, he stopped going out in
> public altogether. Once an energetic and ambitious professional who reveled
> in 14-hour workdays, Hatfill now found himself staring at the walls all day.
> Television became his steady companion.
> "I'd never really watched the news before," Hatfill says, "and now I'm
> seeing my name all over the place and all these idiots like Geraldo Rivera
> asking, 'Is this the anthrax animal? Is this the guy who murdered innocent
> people?' You might as well have hooked me up to a battery. It was sanctioned
> torture."
> Hatfill decided to redecorate Boo's condo as a distraction from the news. He
> repainted, hung wallpaper, learned to install crown molding. He also began
> drinking.
> An afternoon glass of red wine became three or more. At night, Hatfill would
> stay up late, dipping Copenhagen tobacco and getting drunk while waiting in
> a smoldering rage for his name to appear on television, until finally he
> would pass out and wake up gagging on the tobacco that had caught in his
> throat, or stumble around and "crash into something." Boo would help him to
> bed. After a few anguished hours of sleep, Hatfill would see her off to
> work, doze past noon, then rise to repeat the cycle, closing the blinds to
> block the sun and the video camera the FBI had installed on a pole across
> the street. For a while, Boo bought newspapers, so the two of them could
> fume over the latest lies that had been published about him. But soon he
> asked her to stop bringing them home, because he couldn't take it anymore.
> Steven Hatfill was born on October 24, 1953, and raised with a younger
> sister in Mattoon, Illinois. His father designed and sold electrical
> substations. His mother dabbled in interior decorating. He studied piano,
> soloed a glider at 14, and wrestled for the varsity team in high school. By
> his own admission, he was a poor student. "I never took a book home,"
> Hatfill says. But he read plenty on his own, especially about science and
> the military. In 1971, he enrolled at Southwestern College, a small
> liberal-arts school in Kansas affiliated with the Methodist Church, where he
> majored in biology and signed up for a Marine Corps summer leadership course
> with dreams of piloting jet fighters. But when his vision was measured at
> less than 20/20, he opted out of the program rather than accept a navigator
> slot. Midway through his sophomore year, he left college and went to Africa.
> Hatfill says he always wanted to help people in the developing world. He got
> his chance at a remote Methodist mission hospital in what is now the
> Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he learned blood chemistry,
> parasitology, and basic hematology in a rudimentary lab. A year later, he
> returned to the United States; he graduated from Southwestern in 1975, and
> signed up for the Army.
> He took a direct-enlistment option to join the Green Berets, attended
> parachute school, trained as a radio operator, and was assigned to the
> Army's 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When a back
> injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an operational A-Team,
> Hatfill reentered civilian life. He joined the National Guard, married the
> daughter of a Methodist surgeon he had worked with in Africa, and returned
> to Mattoon to work the night shift as a security guard at a radiator
> factory. His marriage soon faltered. After they separated, his wife
> delivered their only child, a girl. Hatfill would not see his daughter for
> 27 years.
> From 1978 to 1994, Hatfill lived in Africa. He earned a medical degree from
> the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, Rhodesia, and saw
> combat as a volunteer medic with the territorial forces of the Rhodesian
> army, eventually being attached to a unit called the Selous Scouts, which
> was renowned for its ruthlessness in battle. While he was in Rhodesia,
> Hatfill says, a truck he was riding in was ambushed by Marxist insurgents.
> Leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose. For
> decades afterward he would have trouble breathing—which is why, in September
> 2001, he finally elected to have surgery on his sinuses, an operation that
> would lead doctors to prescribe him Cipro, to guard against infection.
> Following his medical internship in Africa, he spent 14 months as the
> resident physician at an Antarctic research base. He went on to obtain three
> master's degrees in the hard sciences from two South African universities
> and finish a doctoral thesis in molecular cell biology that described a new
> marker for radiation-induced leukemia.
> Hatfill returned once more to the United States in 1994. He painted barns
> for six months on his father's horse farm before taking a one-year
> fellowship to study a cancer protein at Oxford University. He parlayed the
> Oxford fellowship into a job researching cancer, HIV, and Lyme disease at
> the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In September 1997,
> Hatfill accepted a two-year fellowship as a medical doctor and hematologist
> to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers at USAMRIID. He was earning
> $45,000 a year.
> Part of his research involved fatal viral experiments on macaque monkeys.
> Sometimes, with permission from staff veterinarians, Hatfill would slip the
> animals Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to assuage his own guilt over helping
> cause them harm. He found his USAMRIID assignment both anguishing and
> rewarding. Some months, he never took a day off. "It's altruism, in a way,"
> Hatfill says. "You're trying to find cures for diseases to help people who
> have no other means of help. It was a privilege just to be there."
> The FBI would later speculate that Hatfill had somehow gained access to
> anthrax cultures while working at USAMRIID, perhaps through an inadvertently
> unlocked door. Drawing in part on the work of the Vassar professor Foster
> and the anti-bioweapons activist Rosenberg, federal investigators began
> trying to connect bits of circumstantial evidence, assembling them into a
> picture of Hatfill as the anthrax killer.
> He'd been in Britain and Florida, respectively, when two letters with fake
> anthrax were mailed from those locations. His girlfriend was
> Malaysian-born—and a hoax package had been sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft
> office in Nevada. He'd been in Africa during a major anthrax outbreak in the
> late 1970s. Rhodesia's capital city has that suburb called Greendale—and, as
> noted, "Greendale School" was the return address on the anthrax letters sent
> to Daschle and Leahy. He'd written that unpublished novel, which Don Foster
> had unearthed, about a bioterror attack on Washington. He was close to Bill
> Patrick, widely recognized as the father of America's bioweapons program,
> whom he'd met at a conference on bioterror some years earlier. And, of
> course, he'd taken Cipro just before the anthrax attacks.
> The government became convinced all of it had to amount to something.
> It didn't.
> The FBI's sleuthing had produced zero witnesses, no firm evidence, nothing
> to show that Hatfill had ever touched anthrax, let alone killed anyone with
> it. So thin was the bureau's case that Hatfill was never even indicted. But
> that didn't stop the FBI from focusing on him to the virtual exclusion of
> other suspects.
> In law enforcement, there is a syndrome known as "detective myopia." Former
> Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told me he suspected that FBI agents
> had succumbed to this condition, becoming so focused on Hatfill that they
> lost their objectivity. "This mostly happens when the case is important and
> there is pressure to solve it," Gates says. "In the case of the FBI, the
> pressure most certainly can be, and is, political. When a congressman may be
> a victim of anthrax—well, the case needs to be solved or the suspect made
> impotent."
> Special Agent Harp, who initially headed the anthrax investigation, conceded
> after Hatfill sued the government in August 2003 that the FBI had been
> sensitive to accusations that it had stumbled in other high-profile
> investigations, and that it had consciously sought to assure the public that
> it was working hard to crack the anthrax murders. Part of providing such
> assurance involved actively communicating with news reporters. Questioned
> under oath, Harp admitted to serving as a confidential source for more than
> a dozen journalists during the case, but he insisted that he had never
> leaked privileged information about Hatfill, or anyone else for that matter.
> Hatfill's attorney has his doubts. After taking Harp's deposition, Connolly
> says, he went home and half-jokingly told his wife, "We're building a bomb
> shelter. If these are the guys in charge of our national security, we're all
> in serious trouble."
> In their own depositions, both John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller, the FBI
> director, said they had expressed concern to underlings about news leaks
> that appeared to single out and smear Hatfill. Both, however, denied any
> knowledge of who specifically was doing the leaking.
> In August of 2002, following the searches of his apartment, Hatfill held two
> press conferences to proclaim his innocence. He offered to undergo, and
> eventually took, blood and handwriting tests in an attempt to help clear his
> name. "I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the eye and declare to
> them, 'I am not the anthrax killer,'" Hatfill told reporters. "I know
> nothing about the anthrax attacks. I had absolutely nothing to do with this
> terrible crime. My life is being destroyed by arrogant government
> bureaucrats who are peddling groundless innuendo and half-information about
> me to gullible reporters, who in turn repeat this to the public in the guise
> of news."
> One newspaper reporter even called Boo's former in-laws in Canada, inquiring
> whether Hatfill had had anything to do with the death of her late
> husband—who had succumbed to a stroke a year before Boo met Hatfill. The
> call, Boo says, prompted her former brother-in-law to fly to Washington and
> demand, "What are you doing, living with this murderer?"
> Months passed with Hatfill cloistered in Boo's condominium, watching
> television and drinking alone. He binged on chocolate and fried chicken,
> putting on weight, growing too lethargic and depressed to even get on the
> bathroom scale. He developed heart palpitations. He wondered whether he was
> losing his mind.
> Remembering what her boyfriend was like back then, Boo grows emotional. "I
> got tired of cleaning up your vomit," she tells him over dinner at an Indian
> restaurant down the street from her condo. Tears stream down her cheeks.
> Hatfill chokes up too, the trauma still raw nearly eight years later.
> "Every human being has to feel a part of a tribe," he explains. "It's
> programmed into us. And you have to feel that you're contributing to
> something. They tried to take all that away from me. No tribe wanted me. I
> just didn't feel of value to anything or anyone. I had Boo. Boo was my only
> tribe."
> The next morning, driving through Georgetown on the way to visit one of his
> friends in suburban Maryland, I ask Hatfill how close he came to suicide.
> The muscles in his jaw tighten.
> "That was never an option," Hatfill says, staring straight ahead. "If I
> would've killed myself, I would've been automatically judged by the press
> and the FBI to be guilty."
> Some journalists became convinced there was plenty pointing to Hatfill's
> guilt. Among those beating the drum early and loud, in the summer of 2002,
> was Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times. At least
> initially, Kristof stopped short of naming Hatfill publicly, instead
> branding him with the sinister-sounding pseudonym "Mr. Z." Without
> identifying his sources, in a July column Kristof wrote:
> 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.
> One of those threads, Kristof reported, pointed to the possibility that Mr.
> Z was a genocidal racist who had carried out germ warfare to slaughter
> innocent black Africans. Kristof addressed his column directly to the FBI:
> 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?
> Kristof didn't mention that the majority of soldiers in the Rhodesian army,
> and in Hatfill's unit, were black; or that many well-respected scientists
> who examined the evidence concluded that the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak
> emerged naturally when cattle herds went unvaccinated during a turbulent
> civil war. Kristof also failed to mention that Mr. Z had served in that war
> as a lowly private. To have been involved in some sort of top-secret
> Rhodesian germ-weapons program "would've been like a Pakistani army private
> being brought in to work on a project at Los Alamos," Hatfill says today.
> Kristof wrote that Mr. Z had shown "evasion" in repeated FBI polygraph
> examinations. He also claimed that following the anthrax attacks, Mr. Z had
> accessed an "isolated residence" that Kristof described as a possible safe
> house for American intelligence operatives where, the columnist reported,
> "Mr. Z gave Cipro to people who visited it." Other journalists would later
> describe this mysterious residence as a "remote cabin," a kind of Ted
> Kaczynski–style hideout where a deranged scientist could easily have
> prepared anthrax for mailing.
> In fact, the "cabin" was a three-bedroom weekend home with a Jacuzzi on 40
> acres of land in rural Virginia owned by a longtime friend of Hatfill's,
> George R. Borsari Jr., an avuncular Washington communications lawyer and
> retired Army lieutenant colonel. Borsari says he found speculation that his
> place had been a haven for spies or bioterrorists laughable.
> When an FBI agent asked Borsari if he would allow a search of the property,
> Borsari said no. "I told him, 'I'm not going to be a part of your publicity
> game,'" Borsari says. No search was ever conducted, but by then the damage
> to Hatfill had been done.
> In late 2001, before being publicly implicated in the anthrax attacks,
> Hatfill had attended a weekend dinner party at Borsari's Virginia retreat
> along with more than a dozen other guests, including some of Hatfill's
> co-workers at the defense contractor where he was then employed. Borsari,
> who'd read a recent article about anthrax-fighting drugs, said he jokingly
> asked Hatfill, "Hey, by the way, we're your friends. How come we don't have
> any Cipro?" Hatfill advised him to go to a hospital if he felt he'd been
> exposed to anthrax. In subsequent news reports, Hatfill was alleged to have
> warned everyone to begin taking Cipro, as if to suggest that another attack
> was imminent. "You can't make this stuff up," Borsari later told me. "But,
> apparently, they did."
> Though he cannot prove it, Hatfill says he believes that a
> friend-turned-political-enemy heard about the Cipro conversation from a
> co-worker who was at Borsari's house that night, misconstrued it, and passed
> it on to federal agents. The same former friend, Hatfill asserts, also was
> responsible for undermining his efforts to secure a higher security
> clearance that would have enabled him to work on top-secret CIA projects
> when he was employed at SAIC.
> The former friend, who works today at a high level within the intelligence
> community and requested anonymity after I contacted him, denies Hatfill's
> version of events. He says he never approached the FBI regarding Hatfill,
> but would not discuss whether he ever talked with agents about him,
> suggesting instead that simmering workplace conflicts between Hatfill and
> former colleagues at USAMRIID could have prompted someone there to "drop a
> dime to the bureau." "Steve always saw himself as having the purest of
> motivations. I don't think that was always apparent to everyone around him,"
> the former friend says. "There's a line from Tom Jones, 'It's not enough to
> be good. You have to be seen as being good.' I don't think Steve ever
> learned that lesson."
> Though the two have not spoken in more than a decade, he says he still
> regards Hatfill warmly.
> The feelings are hardly mutual. Hatfill believes that his former friend
> helped perpetuate false and damaging rumors about him. As evidence for this
> assertion, Hatfill says he once confided to him about having taken a shower
> with a female colleague inside the decontamination area of a USAMRIID lab.
> The story, according to Hatfill, was a fiction meant to amuse and titillate.
> He says he told the story to no one other than this one friend. As the FBI
> began focusing on Hatfill in July 2002, The Times's Nicholas Kristof would
> report Hatfill's fictitious laboratory dalliance as fact.
> Hatfill would later sue The New York Times for that and a host of other
> alleged libels. The case would eventually be dismissed, after a judge ruled
> that Hatfill was a public figure. To successfully sue for defamation, public
> figures must prove that a publication acted with "actual malice."
> In late 2002, news bulletins reported that either an unnamed tipster or
> bloodhounds, depending on which report was to be believed, had led FBI
> agents to a pond in the Maryland countryside about eight miles from
> Hatfill's former apartment. There, divers discovered what was described as a
> makeshift laboratory "glove box." Reports speculated that Hatfill, a
> certified scuba diver, had used the airtight device to stuff anthrax
> microbes into envelopes underwater to avoid contaminating himself. The
> Washington Post reported that "vials and gloves wrapped in plastic" also
> were recovered from the water. Tests to determine the presence of anthrax
> produced "conflicting results," The Post reported, yet so "compelling" were
> these finds that the FBI would later pay $250,000 to have the pond drained
> in search of more evidence. Nothing retrieved from the pond ever linked
> Hatfill, or anyone else, to the murders. According to some news reports, the
> laboratory "glove box" turned out to be a homemade turtle trap. But the pond
> story helped keep alive the public perception that FBI agents were hot on
> the trail, with Hatfill in their sights.
> At Connolly's urging, Hatfill reluctantly agreed to a few informal,
> one-on-one get-togethers with journalists to show them he was no monster.
> The effort did little to stanch the flow of negative reporting. Two weeks
> after Hatfill met with CBS correspondent Jim Stewart, in May 2003, Stewart
> aired a story on the CBS Evening News. The anchor, Dan Rather, read the
> lead-in:
> Rather: It has been more than a year and half now since the string of deadly
> anthrax attacks in this country, and still no arrests, even though
> investigators believe they know who the culprit is and where he is. CBS News
> correspondent Jim Stewart is on the case and has the latest.
>
> Stewart: Bioweapons researcher Dr. Steven Hatfill, sources confirm, remains
> the FBI's number-one suspect in the attacks, even though round-the-clock
> surveillance and extensive searches have failed to develop more than what
> sources describe as a "highly circumstantial" case.
>
> And now one possible outcome, sources suggest, is that the government could
> bring charges against Hatfill unrelated to the anthrax attacks at all, if
> they become convinced that's the only way to stop future incidents. Not
> unlike, for example, the income-tax evasion charges finally brought against
> Al Capone, when evidence of racketeering proved elusive.
> After watching Stewart's report that night, Hatfill recalls, "I just lost
> it." He left an angry message on Stewart's voice mail, vowing to sue. It
> was, as Hatfill looks back, the last straw. "I just decided I wasn't going
> to let it get to me anymore. Screw 'em," Hatfill says. "I mean, what more
> could the press and the FBI do to me than they already had?"
> Plenty, as it turned out.
> Boo was driving Hatfill to a paint store a week later when FBI agents in a
> Dodge Durango, trying to keep up with them, blew through a red light in a
> school zone with children present. Hatfill says he got out of his car to
> snap a photo of the offending agents and give them a piece of his mind. The
> Durango sped away—running over his right foot. Hatfill declined an ambulance
> ride to the hospital; unemployed, he had no medical insurance. When
> Washington police arrived, they issued him a ticket for "walking to create a
> hazard." The infraction carried a $5 fine. Hatfill would contest the ticket
> in court and lose. The agent who ran over his foot was never charged.
> "People think they're free in this country," Hatfill says. "Don't kid
> yourself. This is a police state. The government can pretty much do whatever
> it wants."
> Sitting alone day after day, Boo's condo by now completely redecorated,
> Hatfill realized that he needed something else to keep his mind occupied
> while waiting for his day in court. He decided to act as though he were
> starting medical school all over. He dug out his old textbooks and began
> studying. The hours flew by.
> "I was back on familiar ground, something I knew and understood. It was
> therapy," Hatfill says. "There wasn't any doubt in my mind that there would
> be a payday eventually," from lawsuits against those who had destroyed his
> reputation. "At that point, it became a waiting game for me. Everything else
> became tolerable."
> One afternoon, Hatfill was reading a scientific publication about problems
> researchers were having in developing promising new antibiotics, when he had
> a life-changing thought. Many antibiotics and anti-cancer agents, he knew,
> are synthesized from plants or derived from fungi found in jungles and
> rainforests. Instead of transporting samples to the lab, why not take the
> lab to the samples? The concept so excited him that Hatfill ran out and
> bought modeling clay to begin crafting his vision of a floating laboratory.
> FBI agents tailed him to a local hobby shop and back.
> In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 200,000
> people, Hatfill joined a relief effort and flew to Sri Lanka in early 2005.
> Tending to the sick and injured reminded him that he still had something to
> contribute to the world. Finally, he says, he stopped worrying about the
> press and the FBI. He stopped constantly looking over his shoulder.
> By early 2007, after fresh investigators were brought in to reexamine
> evidence collected in the anthrax case, the FBI came to believe what Hatfill
> had been saying all along: he'd never had access to the anthrax at USAMRIID;
> he was a virus guy. The FBI, meanwhile, began to focus on someone who had
> enjoyed complete access: senior microbiologist Bruce Edward Ivins.
> Ivins had spent most of his career at USAMRIID, working with anthrax. Agents
> had even sought his advice and scientific expertise early in their
> investigation of Hatfill. Now they subjected Ivins to the same harsh
> treatment they'd given Hatfill, placing Ivins under 24-hour surveillance,
> digging into his past, and telling him he was a murder suspect. Soon Ivins
> was banned from the labs where he had labored for 28 years. In July 2008,
> following a voluntary two-week stay in a psychiatric clinic for treatment of
> depression and anxiety, Ivins went home and downed a fatal dose of Tylenol.
> He was 62.
> Less than two weeks later, the Justice Department officially exonerated
> Steven Hatfill. Six years had passed since he was first named a person of
> interest.
> As it had done with Hatfill, the press dissected the pathology of Ivins's
> life, linking him, however speculatively, to the murders. Ivins was a devout
> Catholic, which could've explained why anthrax was sent to two pro-choice
> senators, Daschle and Leahy. Reports said that Ivins harbored homicidal
> urges, especially toward women. He had purportedly been obsessed with a
> particular sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, ever since being rebuffed by one of
> its members while attending the University of Cincinnati, which could've
> explained why the anthrax letters were mailed from a box near a storage
> facility used by the sorority's Princeton chapter. Ivins, of course, was no
> longer alive to defend himself. But in him, the FBI had found a suspect
> against whom tangible evidence existed.
> Ivins had been the sole custodian of a large flask of highly purified
> anthrax spores genetically linked to those found in the letters. He had
> allegedly submitted purposely misleading lab data to the FBI in an attempt
> to hide the fact that the strain of anthrax used in the attacks was a
> genetic match with the anthrax in his possession. He had been unable to
> provide a good explanation for the many late nights he'd put in at the lab,
> working alone, just before the attacks. Agents found that he had been under
> intense pressure at USAMRIID to produce an anthrax vaccine for U.S. troops.
> A few days after the anthrax letters were postmarked, Ivins, according to
> the FBI, had sent an e-mail to a former colleague, who has never been
> publicly identified, warning: "Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax
> and sarin gas," and have "just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans."
> The language was similar to the anthrax letters that warned, "We have this
> anthrax … Death to America … Death to Israel."
> Following his suicide, some of Ivins's friends insisted that the FBI had
> pressured him into doing what Hatfill would not. Ivins's own attorney, Paul
> F. Kemp, disagrees. "Dr. Ivins had a host of psychological problems that he
> was grappling with, that existed long before the anthrax letters were
> mailed, and long after," Kemp told me.
> Though Hatfill's apartment in Frederick was less than a quarter mile from
> Ivins's modest home on Military Road, and both men worked at Fort Detrick at
> the same time, Hatfill says the two never met. Hatfill was surprised when
> the FBI ultimately pinned the anthrax murders on a fellow American
> scientist.
> "I thought it would eventually be proven that al-Qaeda was behind the
> attacks," he says.
> In the years since the attacks, postal officials have equipped more than 270
> processing and distribution centers with sensors that "sniff" the air around
> virtually every piece of incoming mail to detect deadly biohazards. The
> sensors have never picked up so much as a whiff of anthrax, according to a
> Postal Inspection Service spokesman, Peter Rendina. "Your mail," Rendina
> says, "is safer today than at any other time in our history."
> The same, Hatfill believes, cannot be said about American civil liberties.
> "I was a guy who trusted the government," he says. "Now, I don't trust a
> damn thing they do." He trusts reporters even less, dismissing them as
> little more than lapdogs for law enforcement.
> The media's general willingness to report what was spoon-fed to them, in an
> effort to reassure a frightened public that an arrest was not far off, is
> somewhat understandable considering the level of fear that gripped the
> nation following 9/11. But that doesn't "justify the sliming of Steven
> Hatfill," says Edward Wasserman, who is the Knight Professor of Journalism
> Ethics at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. "If anything, it's a
> reminder that an unquestioning media serves as a potential lever of power to
> be activated by the government, almost at will."
> In February 2008, Reggie B. Walton, the U.S. District Court judge presiding
> over Hatfill's case against the government, announced that he had reviewed
> secret internal memos on the status of the FBI's investigation and could
> find "not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had
> anything to do with" the anthrax attacks.
> Four months later, the Justice Department quietly settled with Hatfill for
> $5.82 million. "It allowed Doc to start over," Connolly, his lawyer, says.
> For Hatfill, rebuilding remains painful and slow. He enters post offices
> only if he absolutely must, careful to show his face to surveillance cameras
> so that he can't be accused of mailing letters surreptitiously. He tries to
> document his whereabouts at all times, in case he should ever need an alibi.
> He is permanently damaged, Hatfill says. Yet he still professes to love
> America. "My country didn't do this to me," he is quick to point out. "A
> bloated, incompetent bureaucracy and a broken press did. I wouldn't be doing
> what I'm doing today if I didn't still love my country."
> Much of Hatfill's time these days is devoted to teaching life-saving medical
> techniques to military personnel bound for combat. They are his "band of
> brothers," and the hours he spends with them, Hatfill says, are among his
> happiest. He also serves as an adjunct associate professor of emergency
> medicine at George Washington University.
> Then there is his boat.
> Hatfill has committed $1.5 million to building his floating genetic
> laboratory, a futuristic-looking vessel replete with a helicopter, an
> operating room to treat rural indigenous peoples, and a Cordon Bleu–trained
> chef. Hatfill intends to assemble a scientific team and cruise the Amazon
> for undiscovered or little-known plants and animals. From these organisms,
> he hopes to develop new medications for leukemia, and for tuberculosis and
> other diseases that have been growing increasingly resistant to existing
> antibiotics. Any useful treatments, he says, will be licensed to
> pharmaceutical companies on the condition that developing nations receive
> them at cost. Hatfill hopes to christen the boat within two years.
> Scientists at USAMRIID, where the FBI once suspected him of stealing
> anthrax, have expressed tentative interest in helping him mount his
> expedition.
> In addition to suing the Justice Department for violating his privacy and
> The New York Times for defaming him, Hatfill also brought a libel lawsuit
> against Don Foster, Vanity Fair, and Reader's Digest, which had reprinted
> Foster's article. The lawsuit led to a settlement whose dollar amount all
> parties have agreed to keep confidential. The news media, which had for so
> long savaged Hatfill, dutifully reported his legal victories, but from where
> he stands, that hardly balanced things on the ledger sheet of journalistic
> fairness.
> Three weeks after the FBI exonerated Hatfill, in the summer of 2008,
> Nicholas Kristof apologized to him in The New York Times for any distress
> his columns may have caused. The role of the news media, Kristof wrote on
> August 28, is "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
> Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted."
> Many others who raised critical questions about Hatfill have remained silent
> in the wake of his exoneration. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the molecular
> biologist who spurred the FBI to pursue Hatfill, retired two years ago.
> Through a former colleague, she declined to be interviewed for this article.
> Jim Stewart, the television correspondent whose report compared Hatfill to
> Al Capone, left CBS in 2006. Stewart admitted in a deposition to having
> relied, for his report, on four confidential FBI sources. When I reached the
> former newsman at his home in Florida, Stewart said he couldn't talk about
> Hatfill because he was entertaining houseguests. When I asked when might be
> a good time to call back, he said, "There isn't a good time," and hung up.
> "The entire unhappy episode" is how Don Foster, the Vassar professor who
> wrote the Vanity Fair article, sums up Hatfill's story and his own role in
> it. Foster says he no longer consults for the FBI. "The anthrax case was it
> for me," he told me recently. "I'm happier teaching. Like Steven Hatfill, I
> would prefer to be a private person."
> Foster says he never intended to imply that Hatfill was a murderer, yet
> continues to stand by his reporting as "inaccurate in only minor details." I
> asked if he had any regrets about what he'd written.
> "On what grounds?" he asked.
> "The heartache it caused Hatfill. The heartache it caused you and Vanity
> Fair."
> Foster pondered the question, then said, "I don't know Steven Hatfill. I
> don't know his heartache. But anytime an American citizen, a journalist, a
> scientist, a scholar, is made the object of unfair or inaccurate public
> scrutiny, it's unfortunate. It's part of a free press to set that right."
> This past February, the Justice Department formally closed its investigation
> of the 2001 anthrax attacks, releasing more than 2,500 pages of documents,
> many of them heavily redacted, buttressing the government's assertion that
> Bruce Ivins was solely responsible for the anthrax letters.
> When I asked FBI spokesperson Debra Weierman how much money had been spent
> chasing Hatfill, she said the bureau was unable to provide such an
> accounting. She would neither confirm nor deny that the FBI ever opened any
> administrative inquiries into the news leaks that had defamed him. The FBI,
> she said, was unwilling to publicly discuss Hatfill in any capacity, "out of
> privacy considerations for Dr. Hatfill." Weierman referred me instead to
> what she described as an "abundance of information" on the FBI's Web site.
> Information about the anthrax case is indeed abundant on the bureau's Web
> site, with dozens of documents touting the FBI's efforts to solve the
> murders. Included is a transcript of a press conference held in August 2008,
> a month after Ivins's suicide, in which federal authorities initially laid
> out the evidence they had amassed against him. But beyond a handful of
> questions asked by reporters that day, in which his last name is repeatedly
> misspelled, and a few scant paragraphs in the 96-page executive summary of
> the case, there is no mention anywhere on the FBI's Web site of Steven
> Hatfill.
> This article available online at:
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/05/the-wrong-man/8019/
>
>
>
> --
> Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 8/01/2011 09:22:00 AM
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