The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill (cont.)

No. Hatfill maintains that he has never worked with anthrax bacteria or seen a sample of the organism outside of photographs. He further maintains that he knows nothing about either the bug or the disease it causes beyond what he has randomly picked up in the normal course of his scientific career — and, lately, in the normal course of reading about himself in the newspaper. So far as we know, these avowals remain completely uncontradicted. Which fact cannot by itself, however, resolve the question whether Hatfill might, while at Fort Detrick, have been able secretly to gain access to the installation’s anthrax and then steal a quantity of spores; it is next to impossible to prove that something can’t have happened. Still, the scenario seems more than a little dubious.

Most of us remember the blizzard of stories that appeared last winter about a history of lax security at the Detrick laboratories. Most of us do not remember that most of the security lapses at issue in those stories, and all of the worst ones, dated back to the early 1990s. And that the principal evidence adduced for those lapses was derived from documents released in connection with an employment-discrimination lawsuit brought against USAMRIID by a scientist who claims the agency had fired him without cause. And that this man, along with another, similarly disgruntled ex-USAMRIID researcher involved in another, similarly bitter wrongful-discharge suit, were the primary quoted sources for last winter’s “Fort Detrick in Chaos” expos s.

It is true that even current Fort Detrick scientists, some of them, have lately told reporters that they can conceive of methods by which they might, if they wished, sneak out of the labs with samples of those pathogens they are authorized to use in official experiments. But making off with pathogens they are not authorized to use is a very different matter. Current and former officials familiar with security arrangements at USAMRIID tell The Weekly Standard that the place has considerably tightened up since the early 1990s. Even before last fall’s anthrax attacks, key cards issued to Fort Detrick scientists granted them access only to their own labs and associated facilities — and were programmed to set off security alarms whenever misused. Steven Hatfill was a virology researcher when he worked at Fort Detrick. Consequently, as USAMRIID has publicly confirmed, he was never authorized to enter the bacteriological buildings where anthrax was kept and studied; he was never tasked to perform anthrax-related work of any kind; and he was never issued vials of anthrax for his own, private use.

Finally, as the New York Times reported on June 23, FBI technicians, through some form of radiocarbon dating, seem to have satisfied themselves that last fall’s anthrax letters contained powders prepared from a freshly grown batch of bacteria, no more than two years old. If so, that would suggest that the perpetrator cannot have acquired the anthrax spores from which he cultured his weaponry any earlier than September 1999. Hatfill’s National Research Council Grant at Fort Detrick, by its formal terms, ended that same month. But according to numerous published reports, Hatfill was no longer working at USAMRIID by then. He had been full-time at SAIC since the previous February.

7 Hasn’t it been established that Hatfill had an up-to-date anthrax vaccination at the time last fall’s letters were mailed? No. All Fort Detrick laboratory workers are required to undergo vaccinations against a broad range of pathogens, including anthrax bacteria, whether or not it’s something they’re likely ever to come in contact with. The standard course of immunizations for anthrax involves six initial shots over a period of eighteen months and then one regular booster shot every succeeding year. Hatfill, through his attorneys, says that his last anthrax shot came in late 1999, and that he hasn’t had a booster since — which, if true, means that he was out of sequence and many months overdue for the relevant vaccination when the anthrax killer was putting last fall’s powders together. Yes, the scientific literature, such as it is, suggests that anthrax vaccinations may continue to provide certain individuals, in widely varying degrees and according to factors that aren’t yet fully understood, with significant protection against disease — even after a final booster shot has “expired.” But that is not a bet you’d think an experienced scientist like Hatfill would be willing to make.

Of course, Hatfill could be lying about his vaccination history. But, so far as anyone can tell, there isn’t any basis on which to level such an accusation.

8 Hasn’t it been established that Hatfill once commissioned a secret study detailing exactly how a terrorist could effectively ship anthrax through the mail? No. The now-infamous “blueprint” study by retired U.S. bioweapons scientist William Patrick III, commissioned by SAIC on Hatfill’s recommendation in February 1999, was treated as a case-breaking blockbuster when its existence was first publicly disclosed more than three months ago. “Whoa, something may be going on here,” burbled “bioterrorism expert” Kyle Olson on ABC News; “our attacker may very well have used this report as something of a — if not a template, then certainly as a rule of thumb.” Reactions like Olson’s look foolish in retrospect, though. According to the latest published reports, vouched for to The Weekly Standard by a scientist who’s read the Patrick study and is familiar with the circumstances under which it was written, the document seems not to have discussed, much less revealed, any sensitive information about how one might best use the postal service to kill someone with anthrax. Rather, Patrick’s (very short) report was designed to serve as the first draft of a mass-distribution advisory pamphlet concerning the public health and emergency response issues raised by a then-much-publicized wave of anthrax hoax letters mailed to abortion clinics. Clinic employees around the country were being hosed down with misted bleach by well-meaning but ill-informed local police and ambulance crews. Hatfill, SAIC, and Patrick thought the nation could and should do better.

Whatever technical information was included in Patrick’s draft, incidentally, he appears to have put there on his own initiative. Hatfill did not request it. And none of it constituted a missing scientific ingredient for the preparation of anthrax terror letters.

9 If the allegations addressed in items 6 through 8 above haven’t any certain foundation, where are they coming from, and why have they so often been repeated as fact by the media, without attribution or elaboration? Excellent question. Each of these “suspicions” about Hatfill — and many others, too, like the now thoroughly debunked X-Files story concerning a “conveniently located but remote location” where Hatfill skulked around “without risk of observation” last year, only to leave the place “contaminated with anthrax” — have originated with, or been most aggressively circulated by, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a professor of environmental science at the State University of New York in Purchase. We have met Rosenberg before in these pages. But it is time to amend her entry in the anthrax Who’s Who. Rosenberg directs a working group on chemical and biological weapons for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and so she has generally been identified, here and elsewhere, in news accounts of the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation. That practice must end forthwith, because it has become terribly unfair — to the Federation of American Scientists. At least since mid-June, the group has properly and palpably and publicly recoiled from Rosenberg’s heedless, one might even say unscientific, defamation campaign against Steven Hatfill. “I would like to make clear that Rosenberg’s remarks on this topic do not represent the views of the Federation of American Scientists,” FAS president Henry C. Kelly has announced. “FAS opposes any effort to publicly identify possible suspects or ‘persons of interest’ in the anthrax investigation outside of a formal law enforcement proceeding,” the Federation’s website now honorably proclaims.

Rosenberg’s most energetic and irresponsible media accomplice in the Fry Hatfill crusade, Nicholas Kristof, should need no introduction. And, alas, the institution with which he is most obviously affiliated definitely does not yet deserve protection or respite from the criticism his Hatfill work may have engendered. On August 26, New York Times editorial page editor Gail Collins briefly descended from Olympus to tell the rest of us mortals what the paper of record thinks about the many fascinating ethical questions raised by Kristof’s months-long series of Hatfill slanders. Collins said this: “We have confidence in our columnists.” Which is an unfathomable journalistic judgment, really. As was the Times’s willingness to run Kristof’s columns in the first place.

Kristof has passed many of Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s rumors about Hatfill directly onto the pages of the nation’s most important newspaper, with hardly a paraphrase, and without ever once giving the man an opportunity to explain himself in advance. Some of Rosenberg’s fairy tales Kristof has actually “improved,” as when, in the July 2 Times, he proposed that Hatfill’s “isolated residence” may have been a “safe house operated by American intelligence.” And other bits of especially lurid business Kristof appears to have come up with all by himself: Hatfill was “once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard ‘hot suite’ at Fort Detrick, surrounded only by blushing germs.” Nice turn of phrase. But how, pray tell, can we be sure it’s true — since so much else that the phrasemaker has written is already beginning to stink?

10 Where will the Hatfill investigation go from here?

Hard to predict. One does detect signs, however, that even the most obsessional of Hatfill’s private-sector stalkers — and the Justice Department officials whose recent indiscretions make them look very much like stalkers, too — have started to feel pangs of nervousness about the project. Okay, maybe not A.J. Weberman. But Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, while still ridiculous and screechy as ever, is suddenly squirmy and defensive, as well. “No question, it was the FBI who outed him,” she feebly insists. “I have never said or written anything that pointed only to one specific person. If anyone sees parallels, that’s their opinion.” Yeah, sure, lady. Nicholas Kristof mumbles briefly to the Baltimore Sun, “I stand by the columns.” But he is otherwise nothing but gooey, hypocritical piety: There must be “a genuine assumption that [Hatfill] is an innocent man caught up in a nightmare” — and we don’t want to go ruining people’s lives “by tossing their names out there before they’ve been subject to any kind of criminal process,” do we? Tu quoque, mister.

One “law enforcement official” admits to the Los Angeles Times that, “to be honest, we don’t have anybody that is real good [as a possible anthrax suspect]. That is why so much energy has gone into Hatfill — because we didn’t have anybody else.” Other “senior law enforcement officials” express “embarrassment” to the New York Times over last week’s e-mail directive to Louisiana State University, acknowledging that the Justice Department “acted improperly” by demanding the firing of a man who isn’t even technically suspected of a crime. Yet another “senior Justice Department official” tells the Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Ashcroft “blundered” when he called Hatfill a “person of interest.”

Fine, honest words, all of them. But to what practical effect, at this point? How many millions of Americans, you wonder, must already have seen a nightly telecast or two, noticed a lowered voice about “Rhodesia” or an eyebrow raised about “bloodhounds,” and moved quickly from these hints to the only and obvious and probably indelible impression: that Steven J. Hatfill, M.D., must be some kind of monster?

11 Should we be ready to exonerate him, then? Should the FBI no longer be thinking about Dr. Hatfill at all?

That’s not the point, really. If it’s truly the case that “we don’t have anybody that is real good” — if the Justice Department, after a massive, historically unprecedented hunt for evidence, still isn’t ready to consider ruling anybody in as a serious suspect in the anthrax murders — well, then it can’t, as a matter of prudence, be ready to rule all that many people out as suspects, either. Some terrorist or group of terrorists has sent virulent bacteria through the mail and killed five Americans more or less at random. The FBI can’t very well simply stop looking for the perpetrator. The FBI has to keep nosing widely around. It has to keep checking out “persons of interest,” in the old-fashioned, informal, pre-Hatfill sense of the term. And in the old-fashioned, informal, pre-Hatfill sense of the term, yes, Hatfill himself might well be such a person.

But he might simultaneously be as innocent as a lamb. And if so, the way things have worked out, hasn’t he been done a horrible wrong?

Under the system of justice we’re supposed to enjoy, according to the canons of journalism we’re supposed to observe, and by the rules of simple decency A.J. Weberman and Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s mommies are supposed to have taught them, none of us at this point should ever have heard the name Steven J. Hatfill.

David Tell is opinion editor at The Weekly Standard