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Former Agent Explains What Went Wrong in the Investigation The anthrax investigation, almost from the beginning, was hampered by top-heavy leadership from high ranking, but inexperienced FBI officials, which led to a close-minded focus on just one suspect and amateurish investigative techniques that robbed agents in the field the ability operate successfully. I saw it firsthand as one of the FBI agents assigned to the anthrax case and directly involved in the investigation of Dr. Steven Hatfill. While I cannot comment on the guilt or innocence of Hatfill, I think I have a sense of some of the things that...

If the left wants an example of the Bush Administration’s incompetence in the war on terror, they’ve got it in the case of former government scientist Dr. Steven Hatfill, who was falsely accused of the anthrax murders. The U.S. Government “has determined that settlement is in the best interests of the United States and has agreed to pay Dr. Hatfill and his attorneys $2.825 million dollars and purchase for Dr. Hatfill an annual annuity of $150,000,” the Department of Justice said in a statement released on Friday, June 27. But there was no apology for ruining an innocent person’s life...

Steven Hatfill finally has his life back. Thanks to FBI incompetence, he also has $5.8 million. ... It's worse because it is a virtual confession that the anthrax case is cold. Throughout one of the largest investigations in law-enforcement history, agents were fixated on a "lone wolf" theory that Director Robert Mueller's FBI, for all intents and purposes, now admits was wrong. Helped along by a sympathetic press corps, the obsession with a domestic perpetrator has ended up in a dead end. *** So the FBI needed to cast a wider net all along – which still remains urgent. In...

WASHINGTON -- The federal investigation into the deadly anthrax mailings of late 2001 was undermined by leaks and a premature fixation on a single suspect, according to investigators and scientists involved in the case. More than six years after the mailings, no one has been charged, and the top suspect, former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill was all but exonerated Friday when the U.S. Justice Department agreed to pay him $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001. The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall. Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick...

U.S. to pay $2.8 million to settle anthrax lawsuit Fri Jun 27, 2008 5:36pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday it would pay former Army scientist Steven Hatfill over $2.8 million to settle his lawsuit accusing officials of violating his privacy rights by talking to the media and unfairly implicating him in anthrax attacks in 2001. Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert who formerly worked at the Army Medical Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick in Maryland, has denied any involvement in the mailings of the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people weeks after the September...

The Justice Department on Friday agreed to pay more than $5.8 million to Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist once branded by the Justice Department a person of interest in the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. The legal settlement to Hatfill, in cash and an annual payments, signals the end of a civil lawsuit Hatfill brought against the Justice Department and FBI, accusing them of violating his privacy rights by improperly leaking sensitive information about the anthrax investigation to reporters. "I think it's a gratifying end to a very sad chapter in [Hatfill's] life and that of the FBI and...

I have created a public register of "bump lists" here on Free Republic. I define a bump list as a name listed in the "To" field used to index articles. Free Republic Bump List Register

WASHINGTON (AP) - Biological weapons are among the few capabilities Iraq has improved since being defeated by a U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, government officials say. Working under the noses of U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1998, President Saddam Hussein's government probably developed mobile germ warfare labs and processes to create dried bacteria for deadlier and longer-lasting weapons, U.S. officials and former weapons inspectors say. Pentagon officials say Iraq's biological arsenal could do the most damage, physical and psychological, if it were used to retaliate immediately against a U.S. invasion rather than in later stages of battle....

While discussing an upcoming article in the December 2002 Vanity Fair, David Rose (senior editor/VF) tells Katie "The Affable One" Couric that a New York Times article from October 2002 about Czech President Havel's remarks on Iraq and hijacker Mohammed Atta is a "fabrication".

<p>Adrian Ponce's job as a Caltech chemist is preventing spacecraft from contaminating distant planets with dangerous microbes from Earth.</p> <p>But now he has turned his technology to develop what he calls an "anthrax smoke detector" that would quickly signal whenever terrorists have loosed a cloud of potentially deadly bacterial spores into buildings, stadiums or subways.</p>

Lackawanna has a previous terrorism connection --an anthrax hoax---Report 1999 WMD Terrorism Chronology: Incidents Involving Sub-National Actors and Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Materials Upstate NY had quite a few Anthrax Hoaxes in January and February of 1999 Summary: An anonymous phone call threatening anthrax, placed to the central switchboard of the West Seneca, New York, Town Hall on 21 January, resulted in the building's closure for the lunch hour. Summary: A 22 January Buffalo News report stated that Niagara County, New York, sheriff's deputies arrested two high school students and charged them with falsely reporting an anthrax incident to...

It wasn’t long ago when the mention of the word “anthrax” had everyone in this country scared to open their mail. For Dr. Steven Hatfill, the word association has now cost him his job. Chancellor Mark Emmert fired Hatfill Tuesday, but said the decision to terminate him was not made based upon any assumptions in the FBI’s investigation. Hatfill is still a “person of interest” in the FBI’s investigation of last year’s anthrax attacks. The FBI’s interest in Hatfill stemmed from his employment at the Fort Detrick Army bioweapons lab in Maryland, where scientists had access to anthrax. LSU hired...

Two officials fired from leadership posts in a counterterrorism program at Louisiana State University, one of whom is a figure in the federal anthrax investigation, have no appeal rights under university policies, said school officials, who refused to elaborate on what prompted the terminations. Stephen Guillot, director of LSU's National Center for Biomedical Research, and Steven J. Hatfill, hired in July as associate director for the program while he was a subject of FBI scrutiny, were unclassified workers who served at Chancellor Mark Emmert's pleasure under powers granted by the LSU Board of Supervisors, officials said. Working in a continuing-education...

<p>Federal agents are renewing their search of the anthrax-infected American Media Inc. building in Boca Raton, returning to check for clues that may have been missed in the original investigation last fall.</p> <p>''The Justice Department advised us that the FBI wanted to make another investigation into the building,'' American Media spokesman Gerald McKelvey said Sunday.</p> <p>Investigators, sources said, will be looking for an envelope or envelopes that may have carried anthrax into the site -- the first in several anthrax attacks along the East Coast that killed five people and sickened 13 others.</p>

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug 26, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The biowarfare expert under scrutiny in the anthrax attacks says the FBI has accepted his offer to undergo a blood test he says will prove his innocence. "I am not the anthrax killer," Dr. Steven J. Hatfill said Sunday as he lashed out against Attorney General John Ashcroft for calling him a "person of interest" in the investigation. Hatfill said he has waived privacy rules to allow the release of the results of the blood test. He said he has also offered to compare his handwriting to that appearing...

FBI Overlooks Iraq's Connection to Anthrax Attacks Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com Saturday, Aug. 17, 2002 Editor's note: Part one of series: 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. BOCA RATON, Fla. – Plenty of evidence implicates Iraq in the anthrax attacks on America. But the FBI doesn't seem interested. Creating, or weaponizing, deadly inhalation anthrax spores is a highly sophisticated process. Some say that the spores involved in the attacks had all the earmarks of having been produced in some government's facility...

FBI to Renew Anthrax Search in Fla. The Associated Press Monday, August 26, 2002; 8:19 AM BOCA RATON, Fla. –– The FBI wants to take another look at an anthrax-infested building owned by tabloid publisher American Media Inc., where an employee was fatally infected last fall. It would be the first search of the building since November, FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said Sunday. She declined to comment further, pending an FBI news conference Monday to announce additional details.

Hatfill files complaint against Ashcroft NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES Aug. 25 — Dr. Stephen Hatfill, who the FBI has named as a “person of interest” in the investigation into last fall’s anthrax attacks, has filed an ethics complaint against Attorney General John Ashcroft and others in the Justice Department for leaking information to the press and sullying his reputation. Hatfill has said that payroll records at his employer, Science Applications International Corp., show that he was at his job in Virginia over the dates that the letters were mailed. Two weeks ago, Hatfill first identified himself as a target...

Just watched the Hatfill press conference. FBI continuing on its theory that this was something that originated from the US and that Atta must have had athlete's foot or something. Hatfill, if innocent, is rightly indignant at his treatment.