Anthrax
Do you remember the anthrax attacks?
The on-line Wall St. Journal has an interesting article today about the obsessive, single focus on a scientist, Dr. Steven Hatfill, and how the government is finally admitting that Dr. Hatfill was innocent. And they have paid up - 5.8 mil.
Steven Hatfill finally has his life back. Thanks to FBI incompetence, he also has $5.8 million.
In a late Friday news dump, the Justice Department announced it had settled a lawsuit with Mr. Hatfill, a former military scientist whom then-Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly identified in 2002 as a “person of interest” in the investigation into the anthrax attacks in the aftermath of 9/11. Mr. Hatfill sued, claiming the FBI had libeled him in leaks to the media. Justice’s mea culpa is a major embarrassment, exceeding even the Richard Jewell debacle.
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.
The anthrax letters, which killed five and infected 17 others in the fall of 2001, targeted the offices of several publications and two Senators. A Capitol Hill office building was so contaminated that it took months to clean up. Anthrax spores, dispersed by mail sorting machines, turned up at the Supreme Court, as well as Florida, New Jersey and Missouri.
FBI psychologists and handwriting analysts drew up a behavioral profile concluding that the assailant was a domestic loner without links to terrorist groups. But a Unabomber in a shack wouldn’t have the sophistication to produce what were believed to be near weapons-grade biological weapons. So the FBI decided the attacks must have been carried out by a military scientist or someone with access to a U.S. defense lab.
Suspicion settled on Mr. Hatfill, a bioweapons expert and former Army microbiologist. The FBI began a relentless pursuit, including constant surveillance and a high-profile raid of his apartment in hazmat suits. It drained an entire pond near Washington in search of incriminating evidence, at a cost of a quarter-million dollars. Mr. Hatfill maintains his innocence.
The FBI’s mad scientist theory also fit the agenda of the political left, which didn’t want the trail of evidence to prove state-sponsorship of terror – particularly by Iraq. (Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times pushed the Hatfill theory of the case especially hard.) But the possibility of a foreign source should never have been downplayed. Saddam Hussein had deployed chemical attacks in the Iran-Iraq war and against the Kurds. In 1995, Iraq admitted to U.N. weapons inspectors that it had added thousands of liters of anthrax and other toxins to its biological arsenal.
I remember those days. The usual suspects were extremely eager to convict Dr. Hatfill because they didn’t want the anthrax attacks to be coming from outside sources, particularly Arab sponsored sources. If you even suggested that it seemed more likely, given the September 11th attacks, that the anthrax came from an Islamic extremist organization, (or God Forbid… Iraq!!) you pretty much got your head bitten off. But today, when it looks as if we at least should have explored the possibility more fully, those folks have gone quiet.
It’s summer. They’re probably fishing.
- Aggie