The Hatfill Case: Essential Background

Wall Street Journal ^ | August 19, 2002 | Robert L. Bartley

[EternalHope]

The only problem I see with your scenario is the time it takes. Yes, the extra year would help us prepare at home (a lot!), but I am not sure the Middle East would hold together that long. The whole thing could go up in flames.

Consequently, I suspect we have some kind of plan for a quick war. No nukes, at least not unless we have been hit with weapons of mass destruction first.

We might start with EMP weapons (public reports say they have recently entered testing) to knock out communications and various electronics throughout Iraq. This would take almost all their communications down, with the possible exception of fibre optics (I do not know if EMP induces surges in fibre optics). However, even fibre needs switching stations, and they are vulnerable to both EMP and precision guided bombs.

EMP has never been used in combat before, but I know what it can do. Similar things were under development twenty-five years ago when I was in the Air Force.

Next would be capture of air bases inside Iraq and airlift of airmobile troops to those forward bases. We would be interdicting all road traffic, day and night, at the same time. Nothing with wheels moves.

At that point we are able to launch hit and run raids anywhere in the country. If we find Saddam, we get him. If we get Saddam, the war is over.

The downside, of course, is biowarfare at home. It seems almost certain to me that Saddam has pre-positioned anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction in the U.S. Even with a rapid campaign like I just described, it would be easy for Saddam to order a strike.

However, I am not certain Saddam is as smart as we assume him to be. Saddam has shown he is no strategic genius. It is just possible that he was too short sighted (or mistrustful of his own people) to take this obvious step before 9-11. Alternatively, it is possible that we have good enough intel to have a chance to head the attack off.

I think both of these optimistic possibilities are long shots, but stranger things have happened.

We certainly do live in interesting times. BTW: To live in interesting times is an ancient Chinese curse.

[mrustow]

Calling Agent Frank Black! Leftist Dr. Strangelove Stole Her Anthrax Theory From TV's Millennium

Calling Agent Frank Black! Leftist Dr. Strangelove Stole Her Anthrax Theory From TV's Millennium

Psst! The anthrax-laced letters that killed five people last fall, were sent by a home-grown, American terrorist. In fact, the killer — a heterosexual, Christian, white male wacko, if you'll excuse the redundancy — is a scientist who was doing contract work for the CIA, and who murdered five innocents on orders from the CIA. The feds have covered it all up. Pass it on.

I know who did it, because Barbara Hatch Rosenberg told me. Rosenberg is not only a tenured professor of microbiology at the New York State College at Purchase — which alone obligates me to accept her every statement in a spirit of blind faith — but she is also the chairwoman of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons, and FAS has also posted a report of hers on its web site. And thousands of journalists in America, and across the world, have echoed her pronouncements. Who am I to question her authority?

As David Tell wrote in the April 29 Weekly Standard, "Rosenberg claims the FBI has known the anthrax mailer's precise identity for months already, but has deliberately avoided arresting him — indeed, may never arrest him — because he 'knows too much' that the United States 'isn't very anxious to publicize.' Specifically, according to an account the hazel-eyed professor offered on BBC Two's flagship Newsnight telecast March 14, the suspect is a former federal bioweapons scientist now doing contract work for the CIA. Last fall, you see, the man's Langley masters supposedly decided they'd like to field-test what would happen if billions of lethal anthrax spores were sent through the regular mail, and 'it was left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out.' The loosely supervised madman then used his assignment to launch an attack on the media and Senate 'for his own motives.' And, this truth being obviously too hot to handle, the FBI is now trying very hard not to discover it."

Since when does the FBI grant access to classified information to a loose cannon like Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? And if Rosenberg knows who the terrorist is, why has she not named him? It would be her patriotic (or in her own language, humanitarian) duty to do so. What is the terrorist going to do, sue her for defamation? And if Rosenberg were such a threat to the CIA, the FBI, and the terrorist, why is she still alive?

David Tell noted that Rosenberg's academic title notwithstanding, she didn't understand anthrax or the evidence at hand, "anthrax-related military [projects] ... And [has] a surprisingly unscientific, even Oliver Stone-scale, incaution about the 'facts' at her disposal."

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg appears to be the white, socialist equivalent of black supremacist "scholar," Leonard Jeffries — a chaotic, incompetent, political hack, who under cover of tenure and the protection of political academic organizations, seeks to cause hysteria. According to a March 20 expose by journalist Cliff Kincaid, the founder of usasurvival.org, when the anthrax terrorist's victims started dying, Rosenberg immediately sought to exploit the attacks, in order to discredit our biological warfare defense program, and ultimately get it shut down. To succeed, Rosenberg saw the need to pin the attacks on a rogue, American scientist — the proverbial, "home-grown" terrorist.

Depending on whom she is talking to at any given moment, Rosenberg has a direct line to the FBI or no contact to the Bureau, and has had to do all her "profiling" on her own; the anthrax killer was trying to kill as many people as possible, or didn't want to kill anyone, and was merely trying to warn people of the dangers posed by our biological warfare defense program. She has changed her story more often than Jesse Jackson did, when he led the Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax, following the 2000 presidential election. And as in Jackson's case, seeing in her a political ally, the media have uncritically echoed her wild, contradictory claims.

The moment I heard Rosenberg's claim that the anthrax murders were sanctioned by the CIA, and that the federal government had since orchestrated a cover-up, an alarm went off in my head. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg had snatched her story straight out of the Chris Carter (of X-Files fame) TV show, Millennium (1996-1999).

Seeking to tap into millennium fever (remember Y2K?) and the public's enthusiasm for stories featuring serial killers (Silence of the Lambs, etc.), Chris Carter and his crew (Glen Morgan, James Wong, Patrick Harbinson, Chip Johannessen, Frank Spotnitz, et al.) told the saga of profiler "Frank Black." In the role of his life, craggy-faced Lance Henriksen gave a heroic performance, as a man tortured by visions in which he sees the crimes committed by serial murderers — often with a theological angle — as they are committed, through the murderer's own eyes. Millennium was arguably more infused with religious passion than any show on the air then or since. It was a story of intrigue, betrayal, violence, sacrifice, love and redemption.

Although Millennium trafficked in Revelations-style apocalyptic visions, Frank Black was a cross between the Jewish "tzaddik" (righteous man), Christian saint, and maybe the Old Testament Messiah. Far from being a Superman with a big S emblazoned on his chest, Black is a deeply disturbed man who passionately loves his wife and daughter, and seeks to honor and protect them, while carrying out a seemingly impossible task. He tries to carry on as a stoic warrior, but he is a man of volcanic passions. Made entirely of flesh and blood, he is subject to human, all-too-human infirmities. The things he sees, the burden of carrying the fate of the world on his shoulders, and the personal losses that burden entails, causes him to suffer a series of nervous breakdowns, his face showing ever deepening, multiplying lines. Some observers have argued that Frank was really on the hunt for the Devil, in whatever "deliberate disguises" Lucifer wore.

Initially, Frank, a retired FBI agent, is recruited by the Millennium Group, an organization of former Bureau agents who act as unpaid consultants, helping local police departments solve serial murders and other bizarre crimes. When it becomes clear to Frank that the world is not in danger of being destroyed by lone wolf, serial killers — the apparent, but rather by the existence of the Millennium Group, he returns to the FBI, in order to secretly fight the Group.

My portrayal of Millennium may sound looney. But imagine if, six years ago, someone had told you that an international terrorist conspiracy, fueled by nihilistic, millenarian fever, and funded by sovereign nations, including one of America's leading "allies" (Saudi Arabia), sought to destroy the United States?

In the show's second season, the Millennium Group is rent by a schism between "theists" and "secularists." an airborne, anthrax-style virus kills 70 people in the Pacific Northwest, among them Frank's wife, Catherine (Megan Gallagher). Frank had already been vaccinated against the virus. But he had only one dose with which to save either Catherine, or Frank and Catherine's seven-year-old daughter, Jordan (who shared Frank's gift, and who was played without cuteness or cloying sentimentality by Brittany Tiplady). Catherine chose death, so that Jordan might live.

It turned out that the Millennium Group had deliberately unleashed the virus as an experiment in germ warfare; the government covered up the crime. (If you think the similarity to Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's story is mere coincidence, I've got a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge.)

Frank had been deluded into thinking that "the Group" was the good guys. (The show was one of the inspirations of the excellent, new ABC series, Alias, in which a rogue spy network seeking mystical powers, and posing as a CIA "black ops" unit, recruits unwitting CIA agents. Alias' producers paid homage to Millennium, by having one of its co-stars, Terry O'Quinn, appear as an FBI investigator.)

As a Third Force, "doing what the government cannot do" to protect national security, the Millennium Group routinely engages in mass murder. It might destroy the world, to save it. At series' end, Frank takes Jordan on the run from the Group.

Millennium was one of the most powerful works of art ever created for TV. I think that, due to Millennium's superior cast and story line, and its writer-producers' theological sophistication, it left its sister series, The X-Files, in the dust. But hardly anyone watched Millennium, which is probably why Barbara Hatch Rosenberg felt safe in stealing one of its story lines.

Rosenberg may have a professorship in microbiology, but she long ago left science behind her, and has no more idea than I do, who the anthrax terrorist is. She feels such a consuming enmity towards America, that she has admitted to having wished, pre-9/11, for a deadly anthrax attack, for the sole purpose of discrediting the federal government! Rosenberg is apparently the sort of "scientist," who upon getting up in the morning and seeing that it is raining outside, indicts that "damned, vast, right-wing conspiracy!"

In the real world, profilers cannot see into other men's minds. They must work instead with the mundane tools of the social and behavioral sciences. In the real world, the Ames strain of anthrax, has circulated among an unknowable number of scientists in America, Canada, the United Kingdom and beyond. In the real world, the FBI has dozens, even hundreds of possible anthrax suspects. In the real world, the people seeking to destroy America, Israel, and possibly the world through biological warfare, are swarthy, foreign Moslems, not white, American Christians. And in the real world, we are faced with people who, like Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, are willing to betray their scientific training, their profession, and their nation, for the sake of gaining 15 minutes of fame, and making some political mischief. "Frank Black" is a towering, dramatic character; Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is just "a character."

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .

[mrustow]

Hunting America's Leading Anthrax Hoaxer:
Dr. Strangelove Strikes Again – In Scotland!

By
Nicholas Stix

Toogood Reports [Thursday, June 20, 2002; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/

There she goes again! Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg – or as I call her, Dr. Strangelove – has started a new propaganda cycle. Nick Peters tarted up her most recent press release in journalistic drag in the June 16 edition of The Scotsman. Peters' rewrite job, "War on Terror: FBI 'Guilty of Cover-Up' over Anthrax Suspect," looks like a real girl – unless you're familiar with the species, and look past the pancake make-up to see the stubble.

Peters led with, "AMERICAN investigators know the identity of the killer who paralyzed the US by sending anthrax in the post but will not arrest the culprit, according to leading US scientists.

"For several months the Federal Bureau of Investigation has claimed it has few leads and little evidence about the group or individual who targeted politicians and media organisations....

"At a time when the Bush administration is beefing up America's Homeland Security defences any indication of progress by the FBI should be good news, but one prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert believes the FBI has not only known the identity of the terrorist for months but has conspired with other branches of the US government to keep it secret."

It is not until the seventh paragraph that Peters mentions Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/Strangelove, who turns out to be the only American scientist behind his story, which is to say, that NO LEADING U.S. SCIENTISTS support his story:

"Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the biological warfare division at the Federation of American Scientists, first accused the FBI of foot-dragging in February with a scathing investigation that included a portrait of the possible perpetrator so detailed that it could only match one person.

"Rosenberg said she knows who that person is and so do a top-level clique of US government scientists, the CIA, the FBI and the White House."

Note that when Peters finally does name Rosenberg, he does so in such an ambiguous passage, that it is not clear whether he is claiming that the "scathing investigation" was carried out by the FBI or by Rosenberg.

Dr. Strangelove has typically told one of two different stories, depending on her audience of the moment – what I call the soft story or the hard one. In the soft story, she tells of how, despite being out of the loop, as a private citizen, she has followed the publicly available trail of evidence, out of which she constructed a "profile" of the anthrax terrorist. In the hard story, Dr. Strangelove claims to be very much in the loop, and to know the exact identity of the terrorist, who she insists committed acts of terror, murdering five people, on orders from the CIA. She insists, as well, that the FBI has covered up the crime.

Nick Peters comes up with what is for me a new wrinkle, in blending the "soft" and "hard" stories: Rosenberg developed a profile, but one which – in contradistinction to the standard meaning of "profile" as a type, rather than an individual – excludes all but one possible suspect. But this is a word game – you don't exclude potential suspects based on a profile, but based on facts. Facts: A person's having an alibi or a lack of access to the toxin. A lack of motive would also tend to exclude someone as a suspect. To exclude all but one possible suspect, presupposes that one is in possession of all of the relevant facts, something that is rarely the case, and an impossibility in this one, because no one knows the names of everyone who had access to Ames strain anthrax.

Rosenberg assumes the anthrax terrorist got his hands on the Ames strain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. But since 1997, when federal law mandated that all such transactions be recorded with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Fort Detrick has shared Ames strain anthrax spores with researchers at no less than seven institutions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Before 1997, it's anyone's guess how many institutions received Ames spores from USAMRIID. The seven institutions we know of for sure are: Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio; Dugway Proving Ground, Salt Lake Desert, Utah; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque; the Defence Research Establishment, Suffield, Canada; and the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research at Porton Down, UK. Note that scientists at Suffield and Porton Down shared the Ames strain with an unknown number of scientists at additional, unreported locations. Note too, that at some point, the Iraqis also acquired Ames strain anthrax.

Nick Peters calls Dr. Strangelove a "prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert," but she is neither "well-respected" nor an "expert" in biowarfare, and notorious is a more accurate adjective than "prominent." As Cliff Kincaid of America's Survival showed on March 20, in the first and still the best expose of Rosenberg/Strangelove, she immediately seized on the anthrax attacks as an opportunity to destroy, in one fell swoop, America's biowarfare defense program, and indeed, her sovereignty. On April 29, David Tell showed in the weekly standard, that Rosenberg was a rank amateur in matters of biological warfare, with a fevered imagination to rival Oliver Stone's. And as I showed in my June 9 Toogood Reports expose, rather than having gotten her explanation of the anthrax terrorist's ID from the FBI, she ripped it off entirely from the brilliant but little-watched Chris Carter TV series, Millennium, which ran from 1996-1999.

But those exposes have so far had little effect on Dr. Strangelove, whose wild tale is comforting to anti-American media outlets, especially those in Europe.

While Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is always identified as a "State University of New York" professor, that identification is highly misleading. Every state institution of higher education in New York, is part of the "State University of New York," including community colleges. Would one describe a community college biology professor as a "professor at the State University of New York"? Of course, not. The only instructors who should be so identified are those who teach at the four state university centers at Buffalo, Albany, Binghamton, and my alma mater, Stony Brook. Among the four, Stony Brook is the biggest center of biological and medical research.

But Dr. Strangelove does not work at a university center, with state-of-the-art laboratories. She does not even teach at a scientifically-oriented four-year college. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg teaches at the SUNY College at Purchase, which is respected for its programs in... the performing arts. If Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/Strangelove has performed any serious research on biological warfare, I have been unable to find it.

Her Ph.D. and tenured professorship notwithstanding, Rosenberg/Strangelove is no scientist, but rather a political activist who holds scientific method in contempt.

Dr. Strangelove's modus operandi is, every month or two, to write a slight variation on the same press release she has been using since late last year, and e-mail it anew to the media and political organizations on her list. It is not clear if she does all her e-mailing at the same time, or hits the Europeans first. What is clear, however, is that the Europeans have always been more receptive to her story, and have even helped her embellish on it. After American "reporters" see her press release repeated by European colleagues, they jump on the bandwagon. Again and again and again.

As David Tell showed, the BBC was only too happy to unquestioningly help Dr. Strangelove spread her CIA-Millennium story. And as I found, the German TV news magazine, The Monitor, went the BBC one better (my translation):

"Microbiologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg knows the results of investigations by U.S. officials. Their analyses have meanwhile unambiguously confirmed their initial suspicion: The anthrax attacker came not from bin Laden's bioterror laboratory, but rather from an American government lab."

Immediately after discussing Rosenberg's charges, Monitor producers added embellishments of their own, "reporting" that "The FBI now has a new, hot clue. And according to information in The Monitor's possession, it leads straight to the American secret police (Geheimpolizei), the CIA. The FBI is working on the assumption that the criminal is employed by a corporation that experimented with biological weapons for the CIA."

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is the only person to make that claim before or since the Monitor interview. The Monitor producers' claim of independent corroboration was designed to enhance both their credibility and Rosenberg's.

Like Dr. Strangelove, Nick Peters is also dressing up a twice-told tale as something new. He opens his story by emphasizing the Jose Padilla story – though he misspells Padilla's name as "Padile" – and beats on the FBI both for the Padilla case and for the Bureau's supposed failure to prevent 911.

I say "supposed," because the FBI's failure to stop the 911 attacks was due to its fear of being charged with ethnic profiling. As a socialist, Peters should be applauding the Bureau for its restraint. But in perfect "Heads I win, tails you lose" fashion, Peters condemns the FBI for being insufficiently aggressive in failing to prevent 911, and for being TOO aggressive in nabbing Padile [sic] immediately, instead of waiting for him to procure a "dirty bomb."

Just imagine what Peters would have said, had the FBI failed to catch Padilla in time! 'Following its failure, in spite of warnings by top field agents, to stop the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the FBI failed to stop the detonation of a "dirty bomb" in San Francisco. Leading American scientists and biowarfare experts are calling for the agency to be disbanded.'

But Peters' coldcocking of the FBI was a diversion tactic, to hide the fact that he was re-writing another Dr. Strangelove press release.

Not only has Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/Strangelove borrowed fantasies from TV's Millennium, in order to conjure up a "home-grown" terrorist. She has also ignored a veritable treasure trove of published evidence – which will require at least one column to review – pointing to a foreign terrorist, most likely Al Qaeda, working in concert with the terrorist organization's 911 attack on America.

If European and American propaganda officers (aka journalists and editors) are going to keep resurrecting this dead horse of a story, I am perfectly willing to keep kicking it, until it stays dead.

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .