The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill

...And, most notably, he developed a habit of going through Dylan's garbage can and publicizing whatever he found...

...It has sometimes, miraculously, helped track down and save the lives of kidnapped children...

...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...

...But it is an unusual and interesting biography just the same...

...That practice must end forthwith, because it has become terribly unfair—to the Federation of American Scientists...

...Newsweek reports that the U.S...

...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...

...On a postgraduate training fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, Hatfill worked at NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and other civilian federal laboratories until the fall of 1997...

...Realistically, though, the "potential" here is limited at best, and many forensic experts seem inclined to think it nonexistent...

...Still, there are the bloodhounds, one of whom is reported by Newsweek to have "excitedly bounded right up to Hatfill" on August 1, inspiring an FBI observer to exclaim, "Damn...

...My life has been completely and utterly destroyed," he says...

...The FBI had conducted an earlier, prearranged and consensual search of the place in late June and had apparently come up empty...

...But Weberman eventually suspended his full-time practice of Dylan "garbology," moving on to the trash bins of such as Jackie Kennedy and Norman Mailer...

...No question, it was the FBI who outed him," she feebly insists...

...Nice turn of phrase...

...Documentary and testimonial corroboration of this "fact" (sometimes attached to vaguely sourced "suspicions" that Hatfill helped the racists kill black people with germs) is very hard to find, as it happens...

...To wit: Hatfill is a "Nazi" who "participated in genocide...

...Hatfill at all...

...Gould has apparently located and interviewed the man who was Hatfill's direct superior in the Rhodesian army, and that man rejects the notion that Hatfill's duties were at all unusual or important or sinister...

...The dogs were brought to a series of locations "frequented" by Hatfill, including a Denny's restaurant in Louisiana, and at each spot, according to "one law-enforcement source," the beasts "went crazy...

...2 Why is Hatfill a "person of interest" to the FBI...

...Rosenberg's most energetic and irresponsible media accomplice in the Fry Hatfill crusade, Nicholas Kristof, should need no introduction...

...Now floating around the Internet is what appears to be a version of Hatfill's curriculum vitae dating from sometime after 1998, and that document refers to "active combat experience with C Squadron Special Air Service" during his medical school years...

...Weberman...

...Hatfill finally left Africa in the summer of 1994 and spent a year | doing clinical research at I Oxford University before I returning home to the States for good...

...3 Where does the notion that Hatfill is a racist come from...

...Excellent question...

...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" exposes...

...Whoa, something may be going on here," burbled "bioterrorism expert" Kyle Olson on ABC News...

...Just the same, however discreditable they might be, and assuming that's what we're dealing with here, inaccurate boasts about past accomplishments, even when a man is attempting to secure a government job, are not enough to raise an inference that the fellow is a racist or a murderer...

...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...

...Yes, but the facts are murky and the "racism" now being automatically ascribed to Hatfill in this context is unsubstantiated...

...The Associated Press reports that "sources linked to Rhodesian security forces have no memory of [Hatfill...

...For which crime Levy was sent to prison...

...Nothing has yet emerged to corroborate Hatfill's association with the Selous Scouts...

...But, so far as anyone can tell, there isn't any basis on which to level such an accusation...

...Before Hatfill's first year of med school was done, Muzorewa had been elected prime minister outright, in a successful popular election protected from violence by the Rhodesian army...

...As was the Times's willingness to run Kristof's columns in the first place...

...Weberman...

...Whatever technical information was included in Patrick's draft, incidentally, he appears to have put there on his own initiative...

...Hatfill is a 48-year-old scientific researcher who specializes in emerging infectious diseases...

...Also floating around the Internet is what appears to be a biographical sketch Hatfill may once have sent his Southwestern College alumni magazine, which mentions a "military background" in both the SAS and another Rhodesian unit, the Selous Scouts...

...Without exception, news reports from late last year, when preliminary examination of the anthrax letters was still underway, describe a process by which federal investigators first collected all extant bacterial spores for biochemical and physical analysis, next decontaminated the envelopes and Xeroxed enclosures, and only then delivered that paper evidence to FBI laboratories for forensic testing and development...

...Trouble is, too, that transparent innuendo like this— in sanitized, journalism-school, "some say," "is alleged" form—has now entered the American news-media bloodstream (thanks most prominently to New York Times columnist Kristof), casting an awful cloud of "racism" over Steven Hatfill's head...

...And, pending review of that refusal, Hatfill's basic-level "secret" clearance had been suspended, as well...

...But it is nevertheless extremely uncommon, and the Justice Department has so far declined to offer any official public explanation for its current application to Hatfill...

...But Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, while still ridiculous and screechy as ever, is suddenly squirmy and defensive, as well...

...Most saliently: "I'm unemployed" and "my professional reputation is in tatters...

...Initial, partial descriptions of the book—this bit of the story was broken, very excitedly, by a local television station in Washington, D.C.—made it out to involve a deadly biological attack on Congress with eerie and frightening parallels to the real-life events of last September and October...

...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...

...One day in August 1989, for example, when process servers attempted to present him with legal papers in a libel action brought against the JDO by a leader of the rival JDL, Levy mounted the roof of a Manhattan apartment building and opened fire on his visitors with an automatic rifle, missing the intended targets and wounding a 69-year-old bystander instead...

...10 Where will the Hatfill investigation go fromhere...

...And that appears to be the case...

...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...

...an Army spokesman says Hatfill "flunked out" of Special Forces school after just one month...

...So if the scents supposedly lifted from the anthrax letters were obtained by the FBI after such a decontamination procedure, they are very likely worthless as a tool of identification...

...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...

...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...

...Hatfill helped Symington and the "white supremacist regime" start an epidemic of anthrax "in the latter phase of Zimbabwe's liberation war...

...Then he took another two-year fellowship, this one from the National Research Council, to the nation's top biowarfare defense laboratory, the U.S...

...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...

...That designation, which has no formal legal meaning or consequence, is not exactly unprecedented in federal law enforcement practice...

...Hatfill would stick around for another four years...

...But according to numerous published reports, Hatfill was no longer working at USAMRIID by then...

...In any case, whatever the exact circumstances of his separation from SAIC, that incident alone had no immediately damaging effect on his career as a whole...

...Posted on the Bureau's informational "Amerithrax Investigation" website is an interview to that effect with Joseph A. DiZinno, chief of the FBI Laboratory's Scientific Analysis Section (www.fbi.gov/anthrax/dizinno/ transcript.htm...

...Grant, it turned out, was not the rapist...

...In short: As a bill of particulars against Steven J. Hat-fill, the dogs and the dumpster and the dime-store novel are rather less than a bolt of lightning...

...We have met Rosenberg before in these pages...

...This and much, much else besides is contained in an extraordinary, 50-some-page, always expanding dossier, "soon to be a paperback book," entitled The Bioevangelist and purporting to prove that "he did it...

...What these claims might mean, and what part of them is true, are wide open questions that probably can't and won't be settled until Hatfill comes forward with a clarification...

...And nothing links Hatfill to Eugene Terre Blanche (Terre Blanche denies the connection)— except a risibly amateurish South African news-service story, which cites a photograph that no one can find, and an unnamed "former colleague" who says Hatfill once claimed to have run a Resistance Movement training session (whose leader denies that...

...Asked by e-mail for his name, and for additional evidence to buttress his case against Hatfill the "Nazi," the author of The Bioevangelist has sent The Weekly StandARD a reformatted version of the same essay, with many additional but entirely peripheral citations, and he has identified himself as A.J...

...So federal investigators must have, or must think they have, some further solid reason to make Hatfill a special focus of anthrax-case attention...

...Hatfill did not request it...

...Still, the scenario seems more than a little dubious...

...Louis, attended high school in Mattoon, Illinois, and studied basic biology and chemistry at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas...

...Trouble is, nothing in the many, impressive-looking footnotes appended to The Bioevangelist substantiates these assertions...

...Weberman retains a casual interest in Dylan even today, it would seem...

...First, agents exposed police bloodhounds to a set of "scent packs" which had been "lifted from anthrax-tainted letters mailed to Sens...

...The White Man having lost that war, Hatfill then took his wares to the "Medical Special Operations Battalion of the South African Army founded in 1981 by Wouter Basson," the Afrikaner regime's notorious biowarfare capo...

...Hatfill with bodily harm, though visitors to the organization's website—every American reporter on the anthrax beat has surely been there—immediately discover that its top-featured section (www.jdo.org/hatfill.htm) includes a lovingly imagined account of some future day, very soon, when "Dr...

...Around the same time, surveillance teams posted outside Hatfill's apartment building noticed him chucking great lots of stuff into a backyard trash bin and became worried that he was attempting to destroy evidence...

...If anyone sees parallels, that's their opinion...

...For now, he is operating under an attorney's instructions not to answer media inquiries about his past...

...Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy . . . hoping some faint, telltale trace of the perpetrator's smell still remained months after the fact...

...Yet another "senior Justice Department official" tells the Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Ashcroft "blundered" when he called Hatfill a "person of interest...

...5 A.J...

...Be that as it may, Hatfill next showed up in Africa around the summer of 1978 to begin his M.D...

...So there remains a quite considerable leap of speculation between what is known for certain about Hatfill's student days, on the one hand, and the widely circulating charge, on the other, that he "served in the armed forces of two white racist governments," as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has put it...

...It was from the rooftop of A.J...

...It was founded in the 1980s as a radical, breakaway faction of Meir Kahane's already-quite-radical Jewish Defense League (JDL) by a man named Mordechai Levy...

...Yeah, sure, lady...

...Because, though the fact appears to have escaped the attention of everyone else who has so far publicly commented on the subject, by the time Steven Hatfill enrolled at medical school in Rhodesia, the country was no longer governed by a white-minority regime...

...Steven Hatfill was a virology researcher when he worked at Fort Detrick...

...There Hatfill investigated therapeutic responses to "filoviridae," the family of primate-borne tropical viruses, Ebola and Marburg specifically, that cause lethal hemorrhagic fever in humans...

...Weberman as named co-defendant that Levy and his organization were very recently and successfully sued for libel again—by a man whom JDO's website had called a "pathological liar" and "psychopath...

...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...

...But no other such "person of interest" has ever been identified by name...

...By the time Hatfill's Fort Detrick grant expired in September 1999, he had already undertaken related research at a private-sector laboratory in McLean, Virginia, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which does federal biodefense work on contract...

...Which is not the sort of thing one would expect to find in the background of a man who, three years later, is supposed to have taken up arms on behalf of Rhodesian white supremacists...

...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...

...The dogs have since become a fixture of news features about the Hatfill case, invariably accorded the status of potentially incriminating physical evidence...

...Eight months earlier, an unrelated CIA polygraph examination—which reportedly generated unresolved questions about Hatfill's account of his life in Africa—had led that agency to refuse him the "top-secret" security clearance necessary for certain SAIC projects...

...Various details on his resume—to say nothing of a televised FBI raid on his apartment—have inspired a mini-industry of speculation that he may somehow be implicated in last fall's deadly anthrax attacks...

...And, oddly enough, what little, shaky evidence there is, insofar as anyone ever bothers to cite it, inevitably traces from—or through, or back to—an outfit called the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO...

...6 Let's get out of Africa...

...Hatfill, SAIC, and Patrick thought the nation could and should do better...

...Hatfill's attorneys say the company later offered him a financial settlement, and the company itself has acknowledged having retained him, following his formal dismissal, as an outside consultant...

...Weber-man...

...Clinic employees around the country were being hosed down with misted bleach by well-meaning but ill-informed local police and ambulance crews...

...Some terrorist or group of terrorists has sent virulent bacteria through the mail and killed five Americans more or less at random...

...And one particularly candid FBI official has conceded to the Washington Post that "we're obviously doing things related to [Hatfill] that we're not doing with others...

...4Who is A.J...

...But as we shall see, much of that speculation pretends to be something more: certainty of his guilt, and certainty that in every nook and cranny of his life must be found some blot or scar or mark of the devil that proves his guilt...

...But to what practical effect, at this point...

...For an extensive and skeptical consideration of that profile, see "Remember Anthrax...

...Weberman aside, might Hatfill actually have served a role in the Rhodesian or South African armed forces...

...He would spend three pretrial months in jail before anyone thought to test his blood against DNA evidence retrieved from three separate crime scenes...

...Nothing links Hatfill to Wouter Basson...

...He had been full-time at SAIC since the previous February...

...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...

...More recently, in April 2000, Levy pled guilty to charges of assault after a 12-year-old boy told police that the man had kicked him in the face and testicles...

...in The Weekly Standard of April 29, 2002...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...One would like to think that the FBI long ago tracked down and resolved what's true and false in all this "information...

...And, crucially, as Newsweek itself mentions in passing, without elaboration, those letters have been "long since decontaminated...

...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...

...Nothing links Symington to anthrax, and nothing explains how Hatfill, then a first-year medical student with no biochemical laboratory training, could have helped Symington weaponize anthrax spores in the first place...

...Reactions like Olson's look foolish in retrospect, though...

...And none of it constituted a missing scientific ingredient for the preparation of anthrax terror letters...

...Hatfill, for his part, at two public press conferences organized by his attorneys, has vehemently denied any involvement in or knowledge of the anthrax murders...

...Steven 'Mengele' Hatfill," having first "attempted suicide," will be "awakened at 4 a.m...

...Inside the dumpster, agents found only innocuous personal belongings that Hatfill explained he was purging in anticipation of his move to Baton Rouge...

...A.J...

...So far as we know, these avowals remain completely uncontradicted...

...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...

...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...

...But it is time to amend her entry in the anthrax Who's Who...

...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...

...the two men were named co-defendants in the libel action Levy was attempting to evade...

...But making off with pathogens they are not authorized to use is a very different matter...

...And if so, the way things have worked out, hasn't he been done a horrible wrong...

...After graduating from Southwestern in June 1975, Hatfill served what Newsweek, citing "a copy of his military records," calls "a three-year stint in the Army, stationed in the United States...

...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...

...JDO is located at the farthest, shadowy margins of American public life...

...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...

...it is next to impossible to prove that something can't have happened...

...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...

...This because, feeling liberated to do so by Hatfill's public outing as a "person of interest," American journalism has lately rushed before the nation's eyes almost every unflattering story and rumor and outre theory that anyone has ever privately advanced against the man—up to and including the possibility that he has a history of white-supremacist violence...

...and he was never issued vials of anthrax for his own, private use...

...Collins said this: "We have confidence in our columnists...

...Which stands to reason...

...Nicholas Kristof mumbles briefly to the Baltimore Sun, "I stand by the columns...

...program in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), drawn, those same friends say, by the interest in tropical medicine he'd developed in Zaire, and by the convenience of study in an English-speaking country...

...Fine, honest words, all of them...

...And ten months later, in another election, this one highly irregular but also, nevertheless, protected by the Rhode-sian army, Mugabe replaced Muzorewa as prime minister and quickly imposed a dictatorship on the newly renamed Zimbabwe...

...The curriculum vitae alluded to above indicates that while Hatfill was subsequently living in South Africa, which was itself then undergoing a troubled but ultimately triumphant transition to majority rule, he may have been "assigned to" a reserve medical unit of that country's army, and may also have been a "consultant flight surgeon" with an air/sea rescue squadron of its air force...

...Should the FBI no longer be thinking about Dr...

...The raid was covered live on national television...

...Hatfill's "mentor" at the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine was supposedly one Robert Burns Symington, "father of Rhodesia's biological warfare program...

...He took out newspaper classified ads: "If anyone has a sample of Dylan's urine, please send it to me...

...These two factors, "the dogs and the dumpster," the Newsweek story suggests, are what prompted the FBI to obtain permission for an involuntary, unannounced criminal search of Hatfill's property...

...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...

...It might bear mentioning, however, that Nelson Mandela was president of South Africa when Hatfill finally departed for England and home...

...A Dylan song plays in the background on the JDO Bioevangelist web page, if you have the right browser...

...That is why so much energy has gone into Hatfill—because we didn't have anybody else...

...It has to keep checking out "persons of interest," in the old-fashioned, informal, pre-Hat-fill sense of the term...

...Hatfill spent the first six of those years in Harare, earning his medical degree from what is now the University of Zimbabwe...

...African Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa had already taken charge of a biracial transition government, whose majority-black army was fighting a desperate counterinsurgency war against Soviet-bloc-backed guerrillas led by the hideous Robert Mugabe...

...Consequently, as USAMRIID has publicly confirmed, he was never authorized to enter the bacteriological buildings where anthrax was kept and studied...

...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...

...Okay, maybe not A.J...

...Hatfill quickly found a new and important job as associate director of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training at Louisiana State University...

...That group's current role as a central clearinghouse of Hatfill demonology is never acknowledged by mainstream reporters who make use of the material—and for obvious reasons...

...That's not the point, really...

...And Weberman then, at some point, abandoned garbology altogether— and hooked up with Mordechai Levy and the JDO...

...Hatfill has lived in two different African countries formerly ruled by white minority regimes, and he appears in the past to have claimed a "military background" or "combat experience" in one of those countries, and "reserve" and "consultant" relationships with the army of the other...

...Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Justice Department has somehow managed to recover a microscopic trace of the killer's characteristic aroma, where the FBI's sniffer canines have gone barking with the stuff should be interpreted with a measure of caution...

...Levy and the JDO have not yet threatened Dr...

...And under Levy, JDO has established a long record of scurrilous, sometimes even homicidal attacks on its real or imagined enemies...

...In fact, the FBI more or less admits straight out that it was unable to pursue its standard evidentiary protocols with the anthrax letters until after they'd been permanently altered by irradiation...

...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...

...And so on...

...Nor, apparently, has the department clarified the matter privately to Hatfill's attorneys, whose multiple letters of complaint have yet to win a substantive response...

...The now-infamous "blueprint" study by retired U.S...

...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...

...More precisely, for a window on particular evidence the FBI may believe makes Steven Hatfill uniquely interesting among American scientists with training and experience in agents of biological warfare, we now have at our disposal Newsweek's exclusive report on the Bureau's August 1 apartment search...

...Most of us remember the blizzard of stories that appeared last winter about a history of lax security at the Detrick laboratories...

...Hatfill's National Research Council Grant at Fort Detrick, by its formal terms, ended that same month...

...But it has sometimes, disastrously, helped track down and falsely accuse an innocent man...

...Inside the apartment, on the hard drive of Hatfill's computer, agents found the draft of a never-published Tom Clancy-like thriller the scientist had once toyed with writing in his spare time...

...Whether what's true in it actually ties Hatfill to a multiple murder, of course, is another matter entirely...

...And in the old-fashioned, informal, pre-Hatfill sense of the term, yes, Hatfill himself might well be such a person...

...For one thing, Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun has phoned the managers of all 12 Denny's restaurants in the state of Louisiana, each of whom insists that no such bloodhound search as is recounted by Newsweek has ever been performed on his premises...

...In June 1984, he relocated to South Africa for his clinical internship and residency—and for a decade's worth of additional study during which he was awarded three master's degrees (microbial genetics and recombinant DNA, medical biochemistry and radiation biology, and hematological pathology) and completed at least some of the work necessary for a doctorate in molecular cell biology...

...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...

...Weberman's apartment building that Levy sprayed lower Manhattan with automatic rifle fire that day in 1989...

...One does detect signs, J_ W however, that even the most obsessional of Hat-fill'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...

...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...

...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...

...And it was to this new job in Baton Rouge that he was preparing a final move when, on August 1, the FBI—with whose earlier anthrax-case inquiries Hatfill had, by all accounts, cooperated fully—suddenly executed a court-issued criminal search warrant at his Frederick, Maryland, apartment...

...Subsequent accounts of Hatfill's novel, however, their accuracy confirmed to The Weekly Standard by one man who has read the entire manuscript, suggest a plot centered around mad cow disease and bubonic plague, not anthrax, with no mention at all of pathogenic powders delivered by mail...

...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...

...Decontamination (by irradiation) would structurally transform or outright destroy any organic material left on a piece of paper—like the skin cells or body oils necessary to construct an evidentiary "scent pack...

...Furthermore, Shane and the handful of other journalists who have troubled to consult technical specialists knowledgeable on the question all report considerable skepticism about the possibility that any kind of "scent evidence" from the anthrax letters might at this point remain available for use in a police dog's nostrils...

...Nothing links Hatfill to a "Special Operations Battalion" in South Africa...

...But we have a wide array of would-be reasons to consider, in a variety of combinations...

...Even before last fall's anthrax attacks, key cards issued to Fort Detrick scientists granted them access only to their own labs and associated facili-ties—and were programmed to set off security alarms whenever misused...

...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...

...The evidence of his biography, that which is publicly available, cannot sustain such absolute conviction...

...The extent to which this security issue figured in SAIC's eventual decision to fire Hatfill remains unclear, however, and there are indications that SAIC may have been less than fully confident about the move...

...In an effort to prove the point, Weberman then began collecting . . . things...

...Despite those denials, however, the past month's developments and attendant publicity appear to have overwhelmed him...

...Hasn't it been established that Hatfill had experience with and access to anthrax while he was working at Fort Detrick...

...Hatfill listed on that same resume has never actually been awarded to him for some reason—though his dissertation research seems incontrovertibly real, having been published and cited in more than one medical journal or report, and though he later took steps to correct his federal personnel records...

...No less authoritative a spokesman than Attorney General John Ashcroft has since confirmed, also on national television, that Hatfill is a "person of interest" to the Bureau's anthrax investigation...

...Hatfill maintains that he has never worked with anthrax bacteria or seen a sample of the organism outside of photographs...

...SAIC fired him in March of this year shortly after a newspaper reporter phoned the company seeking a response to rumors that Hatfill, whose name had not yet dribbled into public view, was under FBI investigation in connection with last fall's anthrax murders...

...I have never said or written anything that pointed only to one specific person...

...Hatfill was born in St...

...He once broke into Dylan's home to confront the singer...

...Those letters were mailed nearly a year ago, by a perpetrator who apparently left no trace of his fingerprints and no recoverable sample of his DNA...

...In September 1998, a dog named TinkerBelle, her nose full of a "scent pack" very much like the ones employed by the FBI at Hatfill's apartment, led local police to a Long Beach, California, recreation department staffer named Jeffrey Allen Grant—who on the basis of TinkerBelle's wagging tail was promptly arrested, and advertised throughout the state, as a serial rapist...

...University officials deny that these personnel actions were taken in response to instructions from Washington to "cease and desist" with respect to Hatfill, but LSU chancellor Mark Emmert concedes the school's general desire to "fulfill its contractual obligations to funding agencies...

...But he might simultaneously be as innocent as a lamb...

...Hard to predict...

...History suggests that bloodhound evidence is a feast or famine enterprise...

...Six months ago, a Brooklyn, New York, jury unanimously assigned Weberman responsibility for $300,000 of a total $850,000 judgment...

...Weberman was briefly famous (in certain circles) for having decided, by virtue of extremely close, drug-fueled analysis of the lyrics to Bob Dylan songs, that Dylan was a heroin addict...

...Then, too, it might bear mentioning that some—or more than some—of the military adventures attributed to Hatfill could well represent pure fancy or embellishment on his part...

...Hatfill first traveled to Africa as a college undergraduate when he took eight months off from school—at the recommendation of his Methodist pastor, friends say—to change the bedpans of indigent villagers at a volunteer mission hospital in Zaire...

...Finally, Newsweek says that interviews and "military records in Zimbabwe" indicate that Hatfill "did serve in the military in Rhodesia" in some unspecified capacity...

...The Newark Star-Ledger, also claiming to have reviewed his personnel records, says Hatfill remained on some form of reserve or National Guard duty until January 1981, but by all accounts his regular Army active duty ended in the spring of 1978, and a few months later he moved to Africa, where he would live and work for the next 16years...

...Just for good measure, LSU also fired the man who'd hired Hatfill to begin with...

...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...

...and transported to a cold, damp, and dirty holding cell," then tried, convicted, and given a lethal injection, "just like the lethal injection his former boss, Wouter Basson, gave to hundreds of black South Africans...

...11 Should we be ready to exonerate him, then...

...Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Maryland...

...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...

...Weberman reports, without explanation or comment, that an "SAS web site" has "denied that [Hat-fill] was ever a member" of that squadron...

...While in South Africa, Hatfill was a "close associate of Eugene Terre Blanche," head of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement and a convicted murderer...

...But here things get tricky...

...Of course, Hatfill could be lying about his vaccination history...

...We do not know for certain what that reason might be...

...Army Special Forces duty he once claimed on a resume submitted to NIH was exaggerated...

...The FBI can't very well simply stop looking for the perpetrator...

...No independent confirmation of these claimed experiences has yet appeared, and nothing more is known about what they might have entailed—or when, exactly, they might have occurred...

...Nothing links Hatfill to Robert Burns Symington...

...He is obviously of more interest to us than others on the list at this point...

...During the 1970s, A.J...

...But during the final week of July, Newsweek says, two things happened that made the Bureau think it ought to try again...

...Tu quoque, mister...

...But that is not a bet you'd think an experienced scientist like Hatfill would be willing to make...

...It's possible to fashion a reasonably educated guess about why that might be...

...7 Hasn't it been established that Hatfill had an up-to-date anthrax vaccination at the time last fall's letters were mailed...

...he was never tasked to perform anthrax-related work of any kind...

...The FBI has to keep nosing widely around...

...Which is an unfathomable journalistic judgment, really...

...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...

...But he is otherwise nothing but gooey, hypocritical piety: There must be "a genuine assumption that [Hat-fill] 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...

...And it was with A.J...

...Even when speaking on background to reporters, Justice "sources" routinely defend the propriety of their approach to Hatfill by insisting that he has not received "any more attention than any other person of interest to the investigation...

...Relatedly, and potentially more damaging a reflection on his character, the Ph.D...

...our attacker may very well have used this report as something of a—if not a template, then certainly as a rule of thumb...

...Early last week, having been advised by the attorney general's Office for Domestic Preparedness not to use Hatfill on programs receiving federal law enforcement funding, Louisiana State University took steps to "terminate the employment of Steven J. Hatfill as associate director of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training," which depends on the Justice Department for 97 percent of its annual budget...

...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...

...And National Public Radio reports that a forthcoming United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research study by South African expert Chandre Gould will throw "cold water" on any suggestion that Hatfill fought with elite troops of the "white minority government" of Rhodesia—or had anything to do with an anthrax epidemic...

...Most basically, Hatfill—along with hundreds, if not thousands, of other people—fits the FBI's "behavioral analysis" suspect profile, announced as the anthrax investigation was just getting underway last November...