The Crucifixion of Steven Hatfill

The Crucifixion of Steven Hatfill Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2002 Editor's note: This is the last of the series. Part one: FBI and Anthrax: Another TWA 800 in the Making? Part two: FBI Ignored Letter in Anthrax Probe. Part three: FBI Rejects Link Between Anthrax, 9-11 Terrorists. Part four: FBI Overlooks Iraq's Connection to Anthrax Attacks. Part five: The FBI and Dr. Hatfill – A New Richard Jewell Case?

"Reporters bang on Steven J. Hatfill's door at all hours," the Washington Post reported Aug. 11. "An Internet Web site labels him Steven 'Mengele' Hatfill, Nazi swine. Cable talk shows routinely discuss whether he is last fall's anthrax mailer. And twice, the FBI has very publicly swept into Hatfill's Frederick apartment."

And that’s only part of the story of the harassment of Dr. Steven Hatfill by the FBI and their media lapdogs who have swallowed every crumb of misinformation fed to them by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and her left-wing colleagues and by an out-of-control and pitifully incompetent Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Almost oblivious of the fact that they are in effect charging Dr. Hatfill with wantonly murdering five innocent fellow Americans, the media have swarmed around him like angry bees, dredging up incidents in his distant past to justify their continuing attacks.

(On Aug. 11, Hatfill met with the media in front of his lawyer’s office and read a statement that indicted the FBI and its media toadies for their attempts to crucify him.)

What is the case against Hatfill? According to the Associated Press, there is none. "Investigators probing last fall's anthrax attacks have no physical evidence linking Dr. Steven J. Hatfill to the crime, but they are not prepared to clear him, a law enforcement official said Monday [Aug. 12]," according to AP.

AP reported that an unnamed (of course) "U.S. law enforcement official said Monday that Hatfill has been straightforward answering questions from investigators but a number of intriguing items from his past make them unwilling to declare him cleared of any suspicion."

"Investigators continue to be frustrated by the absence of physical clues linking anyone to the mailings, the official told the AP. He said that the Bureau has searched Hatfill's apartment in Frederick, Md., twice, as well as his car, a storage locker in Florida and the home of his girlfriend.

The anthrax letters contained a return address of a nonexistent Greendale School in New Jersey. Hatfill once lived in Harare, Zimbabwe, where there is a school named for Courtney Selous, the namesake of the Selous Scouts, who fought the communist terrorists who were murdering white farmers, their wives, children and their black farmworkers. Because there is no "Greendale School," the FBI and its media stooges now claim that the school is "informally" known as the Greendale school. It doesn’t say by whom.

Investigative journalist Nicholas Stix took the trouble the rest of the media couldn’t bother themselves with. He contacted people in Zimbabwe and asked if anyone knew about the so-called Greendale school. Here are two answers he got:

"There was (and still is) only one school in the neighbourhood. In my day, it was called Courtney Selous primary school. ... I checked on a NGO website which listed all the name changes which the government is proposing presently and discovered that the school is, indeed, still called Courtney Selous (after a famous 'White Hunter,' Frederick Courtney Selous, who featured prominently in early Rhodesian pioneer history). Although the school is located in Greendale, it has never been known as 'Greendale School.' No other schools have ever been built in the area."

"There isn't and never has been a Greendale School. There is a suburb in Harare called Greendale. The schools in that area were Courteney Selous School, which is a school for junior kids. The only other schools in that area were for high school, i.e Oriel Boys, Oriel Girls and Chisipite. There is a school that is called Greengrove but is not in the school zone in the area mentioned although it is fairly close."

There are Greendale schools all over the place, 16 in the U.S. alone. Here are several in North America:

Greendale High School and Greendale Middle School 130 Leeds St. Worcester, Mass. 01606

Even more interesting is a fact unearthed by researcher Richard Smith concerning a Greenbrook School located near the sites where the anthrax letters were mailed in New Jersey. Writes Smith:

"The mail box with anthrax spores in it is at the corner of Nassau and Bank in Princeton. It is in the downtown Princeton commercial district right across the street from Princeton University. Nassau St. is also NJ Route 27 which goes north east to Franklin Park, NJ and Kendall Park, NJ. The Greenbrook School is about 1/4 mile off of Route 27 about 10 to 15 miles from the mail box. The main Princeton Post Office is only a couple blocks from this mailbox. It was one of the four post NJ offices that also had anthrax spores …"

Please note that the anthrax letters sent last fall to Sens. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., both carried the same return address:

On his computer, officials found the draft of a novel about a bioterrorism attack. The draft is a couple of years old. It has nothing to do with anthrax.

In 1999, while working for a defense contractor, Hatfill commissioned a report looking at how anthrax might be sent through the mail. That report suggested there would be about 2.5 grams of anthrax in an envelope — and, except for the AMI letter that was thrown away, that's what was in last fall's mailings. Hatfill did not work on the report and wasn’t alone in authorizing the study. The work was done by bioterrorism expert William Patrick III. Under instructions from the CIA, Hatfill and another scientist, Joseph Soukup, commissioned a study of a hypothetical anthrax attack in February 1999 as employees of defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., according to Ben Haddad, spokesman for the San Diego company.

In the wake of Hatfill’s press conference, the FBI flatly denied it had leaked information to the media, which in the days following continued to report data that could only have come from the bureau:

Details about the FBI’s use of bloodhounds by exposing the dogs to gauze rubbed on the anthrax letter envelopes, which were miraculously cleansed of all traces of anthrax spores allegedly without eliminating the sender’s scent, were widely reported in the media. The dogs were said to have visibly reacted when in the presence of Hatfill, two girlfriends, and places where Hatfill and the women had been. Hatfill’s lawyer, by the way, described the bloodhound "evidence" as "bogus" and challenged reporters to check with bloodhound experts on the possibility of an almost year-old scent from envelopes exposed to a cleaning procedure is a valid one.

Allegations that Dr. Hatfill had failed a lie detector test given a month before the anthrax mailings. The tests had nothing to do with the anthrax matter. In addition, on the occasions of both the FBI searches of Hatfill’s apartment, the media were present in large numbers, having been alerted by someone involved in the investigation.

NewsMax.com has no way of knowing what evidence the FBI has that allegedly connects Hatfill to the anthrax atrocity. The FBI says it has nothing to conclusively link him to the mailings, and it insists he is not a suspect but remains just "a person of interest," as are a number of others the bureau is looking at.

If that is so, how can the government be presenting evidence about Hatfill to a federal grand jury, as the New York Times columnist and Dr. Rosenberg ally Nicholas Kristof reported Aug. 12, if he’s not a suspect?

The much more reliable Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post denies that any grand jury has been empanelled in the Hatfill matter. She wrote, "No grand jury has begun hearing evidence, according to people close to the investigation, and interviews with Hatfill have yielded little."

The media campaign against Dr. Hatfill, fed by leaks deliberately calculated to justify continuing the assault on him, raises the possibility that the government will persuade a grand jury to indict him even if it has no physical evidence. That would meet the 9-11 deadline the bureau’s top officials have established for clearing the case.

An indictment would result in a lengthy proceeding stretching out for months if not years, thus taking the pressure off the FBI for a long time. As has been often noted, a good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

On August 11, Hatfill and his attorney Victor M. Glasberg of Alexandria, Va., sat down with a Washington Post reporter and gave their version of allegations against Hatfill.

"I went from being someone with pride in my work, pride in my profession, to being made into the biggest criminal of the 21st century, for something I never touched," Hatfill told the Post. "What I've been trying to contribute, my work, is finished. My life is destroyed."

"Hatfill hasn't been charged," the Post noted. Despite that, his lawyer told the Post: "Steve's life has been devastated by a drumbeat of innuendo, implication and speculation. We have a frightening public attack on an individual who, guilty or not, should not be exposed to this type of public opprobrium based on speculation."

Glasberg told the Post that Hatfill had no motive to commit bioterror. He added that Hatfill was not disgruntled or unhappy. "He was totally satisfied that this was an all-out effort to move the [bioterror] program forward," Glasberg said. "You're going to find no expression of frustration."

Hatfill never worked with anthrax or had access to the bacteria. At Fort Detrick, "there's bacteriology research and there's virology research," Glasberg said.

"They each have their separate labs. They each have separate decontamination chambers. The lab Steve had access to dealt with viral diseases. ... The two were separate and didn't mix. ... He never worked with anthrax at Fort Detrick. He's a viral guy. That [anthrax] is a bacteria."

Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for Fort Detrick, confirmed Hatfill's work history. "It's true he didn't work on anthrax and was never issued vials of anthrax," Dasey said. He said Hatfill was assigned to the virology division as a research associate. Dasey later said it was possible that Hatfill might have had some access to anthrax.

One by one Glasberg ticked off the allegations against Hatfill and refuted them.

That he had unfettered access to the Army bioresearch lab at Fort Detrick after his grant ended in 1999. He did not, Glasberg said. "After he stopped working there, he had to be escorted, like everybody," Glasberg said. Dasey confirmed that.

That he had been given a booster vaccine for anthrax. He was not, Glasberg said. His last anthrax vaccination was in December 1998, and he has not received a shot since then, making him as vulnerable as anyone else, Glasberg said.

That he removed cabinets from Fort Detrick that could be used to culture anthrax and carried them to his car. The fact is that the cabinets, weighing more than 350 pounds, were moved by truck to a training site for a military exercise and then blown up, Glasberg revealed. This whopper was among Rosenberg’s allegations.

That the "Greendale School" listed as a return address on the anthrax mailings is in Harare, Zimbabwe, near Hatfill's medical school. "To the best of our knowledge, there isn't any Greendale School," Glasberg said. "There is a subdivision near Harare called Greendale, but there are Greendales everywhere."

That Hatfill was disgruntled at losing his security clearance. At Fort Detrick, Hatfill never had nor needed security clearance, Glasberg and Dasey said. Once at Science Applications International, he got low-level security clearance for one project. When he was detailed to work for the CIA on another project, a CIA lie-detector test was ambiguous when he was asked about his days in Africa, Glasberg said. His clearance was revoked pending an appeal. Virtually none of Hatfill's work at Science Applications International required a clearance, Glasberg told the Post, but the company used its revocation as a reason to fire Hatfill in February. He said the company has since offered Hatfill settlement payments, which he rejected, and more work, which he accepted.

In May, Esteban Rodriguez, a supervisor at the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote a letter lauding Hatfill's "unsurpassed technical expertise, unique resourcefulness, total dedication and consummate professionalism" in helping the military prepare for possible biowarfare in Afghanistan.

In June, still with no anthrax suspect in sight, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg met with the staff of Sens. Daschle, Leahy and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Rosenberg is a biological weapons expert from Federation of American Scientists and had published two scathing letters attacking the FBI's lack of results. Rosenberg said she has been careful never to mention Hatfill's name, but several media reported that his name was raised in the meeting, which the FBI also attended.

Several days later, agents asked for and received Hatfill's permission to search his apartment. "They cart out 23 bags of stuff from his apartment," Glasberg said. "They swab the walls for anthrax. And if they came up with something, we don't know about it. An agent told Steve, 'This is on instruction from on high.'"

Next, the agents asked Hatfill to take a second lie-detector test. Glasberg wanted to know why, and advised against it. He said the FBI called Hatfill on July 31 and wanted to talk. Glasberg called the agent and left a message offering to schedule a meeting. The next day, the second search occurred.

Glasberg said Hatfill's father received a phone call from a reporter the night before the search, warning him that "something significant" was about to happen. The day of the search, Hatfill hired another Alexandria lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro. Shapiro called Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kohl to introduce himself, Glasberg said, and not long after, Shapiro received a call from a reporter.

Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said his office was not speaking to reporters about Hatfill. Glasberg said, "It's just absolutely clear this stuff is being leaked to the press for the purpose of giving their investigation high profile, to demonstrate the FBI is on the case, without any regard to the consequences to this man."

Hatfill found a new job at Louisiana State University, teaching federal agents and police how to handle bioterror, for $150,000 annually. But after the second search, LSU put him on paid leave for 30 days.

At Science Applications International and LSU, Glasberg said, Hatfill has been laid off because they were in "the difficult position of having to contend with unproved, defamatory allegations against someone who's becoming increasingly visible."

Glasberg compared the case to that of Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who was a suspect in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing and who became a household name even though he had done nothing wrong. "One would think that incidents like Richard Jewell," Glasberg said, "would alert the authorities to the importance of proceeding fairly and discreetly in these investigations."

The FBI says it could find no traces of anthrax on Hatfill, or his apartment or car, or anyplace he’s been known to have been. Yet it refuses to eliminate him as a "person of interest" even though it has used the absence of anthrax traces in its cars or anywhere it had been to eliminate the 9-11 terrorists in Florida as suspects.

Assistant FBI Director John Collingwood played down the possible anthrax connection to the terrorists in a written statement "This was fully investigated and widely vetted among multiple agencies several months ago. Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been. While we always welcome new information, nothing new has, in fact, developed."

With all of the furor surrounding the Hatfill case, all other investigative leads have been ignored, including the fact that a case far more solid than that against Hatfill can be made. The bureau has steadfastly ignored, for unexplained reasons, the strong possibility that the anthrax-letter culprits were foreign terrorists with ties to Iraq and the 9-11 hijackers who all but surrounded the AMI headquarters before Sept. 11.

Take, for instance that high-tech fine-food particulate mixer capable of weaponizing anthrax that David Tell wrote about. The bureau apprehended the Pakistani national who bought the mixer, jailed him for kiting checks and reportedly never applied heavy pressure on the man to reveal where the blender went after it left his hands. That mixer is still out there in the hands of unknown parties, available to create more anthrax atrocities.

The case has revealed the FBI to be a bumbling bureaucracy that leaks like a sieve – a bureaucracy subject to political pressures that operates under an agenda yet to be revealed. The FBI is not only driven by media pressures generated by Dr. Rosenberg and her allies, but by its obvious leaking of information to trusted reporters it increases the media pressure on itself.

While Dr. Hatfill may turn out to be the guilty party, which given the absence of any physical evidence is unlikely, the FBI’s handling of the matter is an atrocious assault on the doctrine that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Using a stream of unfavorable information about Hatfill, information unrelated to the case, the bureau has created a picture of a guilty man and all but indicted him on the pages of America’s newspapers.

Finally there is this: Hatfill is a fierce patriot who has taken positions at odds with those held by Rosenberg, her leftist science colleagues and the liberal media. He is identifiably a patriot, a gun fancier (he belong to an informal skeet shooting club), and a political conservative, which makes him a prime target of this left-wing crowd. After all, he is said to have fought against the murderous communist terrorists in Rhodesia, which in the eyes of the liberals somehow makes him a racist.

They don’t bother to notice what has happened in that sad nation now known as Zimbabwe under its dictatorial President Robert Mugabe. He has unleashed terrorism against white farmers who just happen to be the major source of food for an oppressed population facing mass starvation as a result of his policies.

As we said in Part One of this series, in all likelihood the answer to the anthrax mailing puzzle lies in Boca Raton, Fla., the home of American Media, the first victim of this act of terrorism. Nothing we have seen changes that opinion.

There is a mass of circumstantial evidence tying the terrorists to the anthrax attack on AMI, but absolutely none tying the anthrax letters to Hatfill or any other domestic source. The FBI set off on its blind alley excursion by concocting a "profile" of the alleged lone-wolf anthrax mailer that was, in effect, based not on solid scientific methods but upon its collective imagination. Remember the FBI’s Unabomber profile that was comically off the mark by about 180 degrees?

The abrupt resignation of Assistant FBI Director Dale Watson, who oversaw the anthrax investigation, might be a hopeful sign that the whole Hatfill matter is unraveling.

One of Watson's deputies, Tim Caruso, who has also played a key role in the anthrax letters investigation, is on his way out, due to leave next month, and John Collingwood, the FBI's longtime head of congressional and public affairs, has said he’ll be leaving next month to go to work at MBNA Corp., a credit card issuer, where former FBI Director Louis Freeh and several other former top FBI officials work.

In a bizarre coincidence, until recently, MBNA was headquartered around the corner and down the block from - guess what – AMI’s headquarters in Boca Raton, now shut down because it is infested with anthrax spores.

From all appearances, after all, this is a replay of the Richard Jewell case and another FBI TWA Flight 800 abomination in which the bureau not only ignored, but actually sought to cover up, a mass of eyewitness testimony pointing clearly to a missile attack on the aircraft.

If the investigation of the attack on AMI and the killing of Bob Stevens had been left in the able hands of the Boca Raton Police Department and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, they probably would have wrapped up the case by now. Unlike the FBI, both tend to rely on common sense and hard evidence rather than imaginative profiles and the conspiratorial fantasies of politically motivated left-wing academics and their liberal media stooges.

I sense, a la OKC, that Demos wanted some "points" and were excited with the "Profile" that would absolve Arab terrs. So they instigated the hearing to make it sound like Bush was doing nothing.

Then Babs' "research" seemed interesting, and it pinned Hatfill ("Knows Dr. _______" for example, as well she knew Hatfill did). Problem is, as I said before, her "profile" is not a "profile" so much as an after the fact selection of facts she thought fit Hatfill. Not deduction, but construction. Perhaps some FBI bureaucrat types found her "profile" "scientific" or otherwise convincing.

To give her one thing, the FBI "profiled" a domestic right winger type before she started. And I see now they're being kind and saying that the perp was actually "concerned" about America...Ha! Hatfill again...of course this fact fits Babs and probably anyone in that business. Babs said she herself joked about such an attack waking up America or such.

I wonder about the "profile" process. Besides maybe not being accurate...a la the Green River Killer...does the "profiling" database include examination of foreigners? Islamists? All the ins and outs of people from foreign cultures who obsess about Israel and America? Why do I have this suspicion that the psychological group samples behind the "profile" do not include anyone but Americans - and maybe based on past American germ hoaxers? Why? Because I bet I'm right. I bet there are no analyses of, say, male Pakistani science-grad students that inform the "profiling" equation.

One thing isn't clear about the "Lie detector" tests in this article, and I think this writer is inaccurate in using the word "second." I recall Hatfill did take a lie detector test (as presumably many did) after the Anthrax attack. He said the test taker said he passed. WE NEVER GOT ANY LEAKS ABOUT THIS ONE CONTRARY! Instead, we got innuendo that he didn't answer some questions "right" - which was finally revealed to be questions about his services in Rhodesia - which led me to believe he exaggerated the level of "special services" he served in (resume puffing) or hiding some intelligence background. Also may tell us that he can't fake passing a polygraph. Pointing to the prior test is essentially a deflective smear. Perhaps there is a THIRD test he declined recently at the advice of his lawyer...but he did take a post-9/11 test. Why doesn't the govt leak this???

And with the reporter's calls and such, this author makes clear that there were plenty of leaks.

My feeling...demo senate staffers and FBI bureaucrat types got "excited" when they saw Babs' profile and other research which was impressive to them (but always a joke to us here at FR) and acted rashly.

Another thing...this author points out the highway. My guess, my profile if you will, is that it was someone connected to Princeton - perhaps a researcher or student - or someone working nearby - whom had a familiarity with the Franklin Park area. May he/they live there and commute to Princeton, or are otherwise familiar with it. My profile is based on some facts, so maybe it won't fly. :)

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

by Nicholas Stix

Toogood Reports
June 9, 2002

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 .

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

By
Nicholas StixToogood 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 .

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