Anthrax scientists under microscope (Hatfill or al-Haznawi

Herald Correspondent Caroline Overington reports from Washington on a key strand of America's anthrax investigation.

It is not easy to kill people with anthrax. Not, at least, without killing yourself in the process. The stuff is so lethal that the FBI thinks only 20 people in the United States would know how to handle it.

Martin Hugh-Jones is one of those people. As a professor of veterinary medicine at Louisiana State University, he is an expert on the disease and, ever since somebody sent it through the mail last October and killed five people, he has been wondering how it was done.

"Let's speak hypothetically. It's 6am on a cool day, with no wind. You could go into your garden and, provided there was only a slight breeze, running from left to right, but not from behind, because that would create turbulence, I think you could open the jar.

"Once you'd done that I think you could stick one of those wooden spatulas you get in coffee shops into the jar, scoop some out and tip it off, into an envelope. Then you'd have to seal the envelope, using a wet cotton ball; you wouldn't want to put your face near the envelope. Some of it would get airborne, for sure, but provided you hosed everything down, provided you really knew what you were doing, I think you'd be OK."

"Handling anthrax is very difficult," Professor Hugh-Jones said. "And whoever killed those people had access to good quality, fine anthrax in powder form, and there would be only six to a dozen people in the United States with access to that."

Professor Hugh-Jones says he is not one of them. He nevertheless suspects the FBI is keeping an eye on him while it continues a year-long investigation into the letters laced with anthrax. "They record my calls," he said, and he is also sure that the FBI is reading his email. "I don't mind. They don't think I did it. They are just interested in what I think."

"Well, basically, I agree with the FBI. I think it must be somebody with scientific knowledge."

And would one of those people be his colleague, Steven Hatfill? Professor Hugh-Jones will not say.

"I have never met the man. If you have questions about that, you will have to ask him."

That, unfortunately, is impossible. Dr Hatfill does not speak to journalists. Not any more, anyway. He used to talk about anthrax all the time, but that was before he became a "person of interest" in the FBI's investigation into the letters that were sent to reporters and politicians in the tense months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The dust escaped from the envelopes, infecting 18 people. Five of them, including two postal workers, died.

The FBI's investigation into the case, and into Dr Hatfill, appeared until recently to have stalled. Then, in a flurry of activity that coincided with the looming first anniversary of the first death, the bureau suddenly took bloodhounds into his flat to try to find evidence to link him to the crime.

The bureau's interest in Dr Hatfill was prompted early in the case, by his interesting resume, which shows he was born in St Louis but that he got his medical degree at a university in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, in the 1970s. Dr Hatfill claims to have fought black rebels during the civil war there. (Curiously, the world's largest outbreak of human anthrax occurred from 1978 to 1980 in rural Southern Rhodesia, where 10,738 cases were recorded and 182 people died. There is evidence that this outbreak was the result of covert action by Rhodesian security forces.)

Dr Hatfill also has access to anthrax, and is vaccinated against it. About two years ago he took a job at the US Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID. The lab does research on deadly biological agents, and grows them to make vaccines. After leaving USAMRIID, he went to work for Science Applications International, and while he was there he commissioned a report about what would happen if anthrax was sent through the mail.

The FBI has also noted that when Dr Hatfill was studying in Zimbabwe he lived in Greendale, which is a suburb of Harare. The return address on the anthrax letters was "Greendale School, New Jersey", which does not exist. The FBI has also suggested that he is loose with the truth. (Dr Hatfill has reportedly told colleagues that he once flew fighter jets for the US military, but his record shows he never progressed above the rank of private).

Dr Hatfill denies he is the anthrax terrorist. He has taken a lie detector test and agreed to let the FBI search his home and car.

In one of his last public comments, which he left on a newspaper editor's answering machine, Dr Hatfill expressed dismay that, after a lifetime "of working until 3am to combat this weapon of mass destruction ... sir, my career is over at this time".

Dr Hatfill's supporters are similarly dismayed, not least because they think the FBI's focus on him distracts them from the theory that the outbreak was linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks. There is some evidence for this, too. In March last year, just six months before those attacks, one of the hijackers, Ahmed al-Haznawi, was treated at a Florida hospital for a severe black lesion on his leg. He told nurses he had bumped into a suitcase, and was treated with antibiotics.

However, the doctor who treated him is now convinced that al-Haznawi had anthrax. In the tense weeks after September 11 the doctor asked an anthrax expert, Dr Tara O'Toole, director of the Centre for Civilian Biodefence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to look at al-Haznawi's file. She did, then passed it on to a colleague, who is also a germ expert. Both concluded that the "most probable and coherent" diagnosis was anthrax.

If that could be proven, then the outbreak would almost certainly be linked to events on that day. But it cannot be proven: al-Haznawi died on one of the hijacked aircraft.

For his part, Professor Hugh-Jones does not buy the "international terrorism theory. I think it was domestic."

Dr Hatfill is right in thinking that his career is probably over. He lost his last job, at Science Applications International, after he failed a lie detector test unrelated to this case. Shortly after, the publicity about his possible involvement reached a peak, and he found himself unemployed for almost a year. Then, on July 1, he was finally hired for a new, $US150,000-a-year job as associate director at, of all places, Louisiana State University's National Centre for Biomedical Research and Training. The centre gets $US11 million

($20 million) a year to teach FBI agents and other law enforcement officials to deal with things like, say, an anthrax outbreak.

But how could a "person of interest" in the anthrax case get a job funded by the Justice Department to teach FBI agents about anthrax?

A university spokesman said he could not really explain it, but he denied reports that Dr Hatfill had FBI agents in his class, even though most of those reports quoted the head of the centre saying exactly that.

"Dr Hatfill conducted one really short course before being put on leave with pay, and now we're checking out various things about him and then we'll decide what to do," the spokesman said.

The university had known Dr Hatfill was a person of interest to the case when they employed him, "but that's not unusual. His background is in anthrax, that's his area of expertise, and they are interviewing a number of people in that situation, so that wouldn't unduly concern us."

So why put him on leave? "I can't really say much, except we're reviewing a number of issues."

The military *anthrax vaccine* remains unproven and with resultant potential side effects, to include blindness and death, and weaponized military variants of anthrax may well be much less succeptable to post-exposure prophylactic treatment with Cipro or other antibiotics.

If I were in the position of packaging such materials in a home lab enviornment, I'd prefer to risk my life with the best anti-exposure gear I could come up with instead, investing heavily in military MOPP-4 chemical/biological warfare protective gear, to be worn over a closed-cell scuba diver's *drysuit* and air supply and readily available HAZMAT responder's protective equipment.

That, plus the basic *downwind* procedure described in the article should do it, followed by disposal of the contaminated gear by burning.

-archy-/-

There is evidence that this outbreak was the result of covert action by Rhodesian security forces.

Huh? First I've ever heard it - or is this just a chance to get in a jab at Rhodesia?

al-Haznawi died on one of the hijacked aircraft.

THIS really spooks me out. I don't like too many coincidences.

Here's a question y'all might want to ask yourselves. Suppose for a moment it were really true that a rogue US Army scientist was responsible for the post-9/11 anthrax threats, as left-wing activist Barbara Rosenberg has been claiming for the last ten months. Now say you're George W. Bush. You can do practically anything. You make people disappear into secret custody and never even publish their names. The heads of the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ answer to you. The press hangs on your every word. When do you think you'd want to go public with this hideously embarassing revelation? Would you want to splash it all over the news at the exact same time as you are trying to turn the country to dealing with Saddam Hussein and his biological WMD? Does that seem like a sensible thing to do? Or would you want it to be "old news" by now, or "no news," or maybe something that turns up in the history books thirty years later, like the assassination of Diem? How would you handle it?

This is all being stage-managed to the hilt. The highly publicized due diligence search of Hatfill's home is to set the stage for something else. We are going to find out what that something else quite soon now.

What's the coincidence that he died on the plane? He was one of the HIJACKERS.

My bad, I read it too quick and missed that part. So much for speed-reading. I'm only familiar with the name of one of the hijackers - Atta - and I got the impression that al-Haznawi was someone in the scientific community who worked with Anthrax.

Henceforth I shall endeavor to read more slowly.

The heads of the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ answer to you. The press hangs on your every word.

There’s the problem with your theory.

There’s plenty of people (Clinton holdovers and others) in those agencies who are not fans of the president. They would happily leak any embarrassing information they got their hands on.

And the press would trip over themselves trying to get out any story that would embarrass “the right wing.” It wouldn’t even have to be true. It’s true they “hang on Bush’s every word” because they don’t want to miss a gaffe or a inaccuracy that they can use to embarrass or smear him with.

I have no idea what the deal with Hatfil is, but I don’t think they have anything concrete on him. And nobody in the media or the government wants to discuss the fact that there is substantial indications that at least one of the hijackers may have had anthrax.

And the press would trip over themselves trying to get out any story that would embarrass “the right wing.”

And how would pinning 9-11 on Saddam Hussein embarass the "right wing," exactly?

Bush has leveraged the prejudices of the left to pursue his own policy objectives, the #1 objective of the past year being to buy time to deal with the anthrax threat. That's what Hatfill is all about. And, if you remember, before the "rogue right-wing Army scientist" theory, who were we supposed to think the FBI was focused on? Right-wing militias. And who started that story? Bob Woodward, confidante of Cheney and Powell, in the quintessentially liberal Washington Post.

But now it appears that we are ready to move on. All of a sudden, for some reason nobody understands, everybody is talking about what to do about Saddam Hussein -- and all the commentators are saying, "Well, I'd be for it, but's where's the connection to 9/11?" And, over the next few days, the "domestic perp" mythology is going to be very publicly discredited. And then what will everybody suddenly, magically be talking about? Why, gosh, darnit, who did send those anthrax letters, anyway?

See how this works?

See how this works?

No. Who, exactly, has “pinned” this on Iraq?

Or is your conjecture also your “proof”?

And I'm curious, who do you think is behind the anthrax attacks? Hatfil? Iraq? The Bush Administration? Somebody else?

The anthrax threat is an attempt by the state sponsor of 9/11 to blackmail the US government into directing the blame for that attack solely on its terrorist proxies.

That state sponsor, BTW, is the country we've been in a state of war with since 1991.

Wait and see. The blackmailer will be exposed, most likely within the next four weeks. And, by all means, bookmark this post and check back with me on 9/11/2002 to see how the picture is shaping up.

This article contains a number of demonstrably untrue statements, like:

Dr Hatfill also has access to anthrax

, and that anthrax is his area of expertise.

If Australia's libel laws are at all like the UK's (and I believe they are,) Hatfill now has a pretty clear cause of action against this paper. Since this reporter was apparently one of those getting FBI leaks, I think he also has more reason now to complain about what the FBI is doing.

The anthrax threat is an attempt by the state sponsor of 9/11 to blackmail the US government into directing the blame for that attack solely on its terrorist proxies. That state sponsor, BTW, is the country we've been in a state of war with since 1991.

OK, so you believe it was the Iraqi government that is responsible for both 9/11 and the anthrax. And you think Iraq “unleashed” the anthrax so we wouldn’t attack them immediately after 9/11. (It would help if you talked in declarative statements rather than cryptic innuendo, but I think I understand you now.)

Wait and see. The blackmailer will be exposed, most likely within the next four weeks. And, by all means, bookmark this post and check back with me on 9/11/2002 to see how the picture is shaping up.

Alright Satan. Will do.

BTW, I think Iraq has provided covert funds to Al Qaeda, but did not directly organize and plan 911. I also believe they provided the weaponized anthrax to certain organizations, hoping it would find its way to Israel or the US, but again was not involved directly in the planning or execution.

If the US finds a way to prove either you or I correct, the world will have to just shut its collective mouths when we vaporize that cesspool.

But how could a "person of interest" in the anthrax case get a job funded by the Justice Department to teach FBI agents about anthrax?

I didn't connect these dots earlier, but they sure cause one to think deeply. I thought he was connected to LSU as a government contractor, whose company name escapes me. I didn't realize the funds were funneled from DoJ.

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