By Nicholas Stix
Alex Linder Interview III Transcript, June 27, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com
Linder Interview I
Linder Interview II)
Alex Linder and I spoke for the last time on June 27.
AL: You and I are the only ones who have really written substantively about this. I’m working on another piece myself.
What I did was, I went to the grave of Channon Christian. I tried to find his. I found the cemetery, but I couldn’t find the grave, and it was too late.
I went to the crime house, and that was funny, because there’s a white woman living there, super happy to be in that house.
NS: The house on Chipman Street?
AL: On Chipman Street, yeah. [Recalls what the woman told him.] “I mean, I saw it in the paper, and was like, ‘Oh, it’s come free at last! I’ve had my eye on this house for years.’”
NS: And she knows what happened there?
AL: [Chuckling] Yeah, she knows, they know what happened there! She’s – I wrote this up in my thing – she’s like, “I’m totally happy to be out of Union County.”
NS: Why, Union County’s worse?
AL: [Laughing] It’s like, well, see, this is the thing, it didn’t fit neatly into a racialist paradigm, but I reported it honestly. She said, “You know, ah, it’s a bunch of OD’ing rednecks, and kids running around, and lots of trailers and stuff,” and she was absolutely happy to be in that house. [To her:] Do you realize it’s the worst crime probably ever committed in Tennessee? “Yeah, yeah, no real problem with that….”
[I read Linder the rationalizations of NBC/WBIR news producer, Katie Allison Granju, insisting that the crimes had no connection to race whatsoever, that the fact that the attackers and victims were of different races was purely coincidental, and that anyone seeing a racial nexus is as dumb as the title character in The Jerk, who, upon seeing a bad guy shooting at him but hitting oil barrels, thinks the bad guy has it in for oil barrels.]
AL: That’s typical liberal tripe. They raped her for hours. Now, what do you imagine they were doing? They raped her in front of him. You don’t think there wasn’t some interest in humiliating him, and that wasn’t racial?
What’s dumbest of all about these people [like Granju] is probably they’re going to get that b---h [Coleman] to turn, and she’ll talk about what they were actually saying – is one possible way it will turn out. And then all of these people will have egg on their face, except they’ll just do what they do, which is ignore it.
NS: Well, actually, I don’t know if you recall this, but if you read Stephen Webster’s classic article on the Wichita Massacre, the prosecutor at the time in Wichita, Nola Foulston, avoided asking any questions [of the lone survivor] that could elicit such a response, such as “They said, ‘White this, white that….’”
AL: You probably do what I do, you google “Channon Christian,” and check Google blogs, don’t check the news, check the blogs, that’s where you’ll get not only that Granju stuff, but all kinds of stuff.
Look, Fred Reed wrote about this, like yesterday.
NS: Fred Reed?
AL: Fred Reed wrote about it. Not the rally, but he wrote about the crime and I guarantee, what all these guys are doing, they’re reading us “racists” who are pushing the envelope. But you know, we push the Jew thing, because integration is the real story here. Now, some of the guys get trapped up in was it a hate crime or not. Of course it was, but that’s beside the point. The point is that integration guarantees this stuff happens over and over and over. Until you get rid of that policy, it will continue to happen. And that’s what – they won’t allow you to say that in their media.
No matter what you say your motive is in holding these rallies, they’ll claim that it’s to get it called a hate crime. And I explained it over and over, I’m like, “Look, Sweetie, …”
NS: Explained to whom?
AL: Most of their people are saying something or spraying something. Versus 2 million real interracial crimes.
NS: Who were you explaining that to? You said, “I explained that to somebody.”
AL: I explained it to all the mainstream reporters I talked to. They don’t care; they won’t run it. The most we’ve ever pushed out of them was that Howard Witt, finally, in the very last subhead of his newspaper story, admitted that – he used the figure, I don’t know where he got it – 645,000 interracial crimes, 85 or 90 percent of which are black-on-white. That’s the most we’ve been able to force out of them. Not one will dare to print that there are 40,000 interracial rapes a year that are basically all black on white….
You can’t get that stuff into the junk media, as I’m calling it now. They will not print the stuff. That thing in the Chicago Tribune was the first ever I’ve seen in a big paper, where they’ve printed one statistic.
NS: A friend from Chicago sent me that article, and on his blog he explained – I was ready to explode because of all of the stuff that the article didn’t mention – but he emphasized that this is a mainstream, daily newspaper. With that caveat, it was amazing what the guy put in that article.
AL: We got that from the pressure of maybe a few dozen people doing it. It’s fired people up, I’ll tell you. We need to keep doing it, and keep more pressure on them.
And I called them out by name in my speech at the second [demonstration]. We got a DA here who can’t decide if he wants the death penalty. And there’s nothing but pressure from whites that will cause them to… [breaks off sentence]. They’re all indoctrinated, and they’re all politicized, and it’s a bad deal.
NS: Now, what do you think about the DA not making a stand about the death penalty?
AL: I think it’s going to take pressure from the white community to get him to change his mind. Again, I don’t fully know what his deal is, but from the little bit I’ve been able to gather, he’s basically against the death penalty. He’s made a couple of smartass comments, in that regard. But he also has approved it at least once, that I know of.
So, here’s the thing, the Jews control the country. They head up the white community, so white identity is illegal. According to them, you must never identify racially, because if you could, you’d come together and say, “Geez, this system is crazy. It’s killing us. And then, what do we do when our kids are killed? We go hold a candlelight vigil. This is a problem that has a solution….
Then we got into the whole thing with [Leonard] Pitts, and what have you. And he wrote about us.
[On June 3, Pulitzer Prize-winning, black syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts had mocked whites who are outraged over the Knoxville Horror, writing, “I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized.
“Cry me a river.”
Rather than Pitts getting pilloried and fired, a la Don Imus, the MSM, including his managing editor, Dave Wilson, have celebrated him, and portrayed him as a hero/victim. It seems he received hundreds of angry e-mails and letters, and neo-Nazi Bill White posted his address and telephone number on the Internet. The FBI has reportedly been investigating death threats against Pitts. Somehow, when those of us who expose the socialist MSM’s lies and racism get hate mail and death threats, the socialist MSM do not portray us as victim/heroes.
In a second column about the reaction to his racist column on the Knoxville Horror, Pitts lied about the target of his “Cry me a river” line, saying he just “gave that advice specifically to white supremacists yelling genocide and other stupid things.” I guess he just plum forgot about the “and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized” clause.
I condemn the individual who published Pitts’ personal information, and suggest that Pitts get a gun, if he hasn’t already, and be prepared to use it, if necessary, to defend himself and his loved ones. But so far, I’ve only read four of his columns, and he lied in each. The threats against Pitts do not retroactively vindicate his racism or his lies. Pitts needs to find a more suitable trade for a compulsive, racist liar, such as politics or the law.]
AL: We got four or five national mentions of this [the rallies].
NS: It was VNN that posted the personal information of Pitts, right, or was it …
AL: Bill White did it. We probably have more readers than he does. But he does that, but I approve of it. Personal pressure is the only thing those people understand. They will never treat you fairly.
I challenged the guy to a debate. I put up $5,000 of my money. “I will debate you any time, any place, anywhere.” You know, he’s a syndicated columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner? It’s a symptom of a sick and wrong system.
NS: Now, you contacted Pitts?
AL: All kinds of our guys e-mailed him, and I posted publicly the challenge, whatever, I didn’t contact him personally. I just wrote what I wrote, I kind of [unclear] his article, and made my points. And I said, “I’ll debate you anywhere, anytime, on race and crime.”
I tried to get on CNN, after our rally. They had James Edwards and Hal Turner. I said, get me on there with one of those – with Jesse Jackson or [unclear]
NS: Are you talking about the June 16 rally?
AL: After our first rally [May 26], I came back, and I talked to one of the chicks producing the Paula Zahn show. But you know, I’m out [unclear], it’s been a long day. They got James Edwards on there, he did a great job.
NS: I’m not familiar with James Edwards.
AL: He does The Political Cesspool radio show.
NS: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
[One month later, Edwards had me on as a guest, to talk about the Knoxville Horror. He was a very gracious host.]
AL: He was on there, and so was a pre-recorded clip of Hal Turner, who spoke after I was arrested.
So, that was the first national mention of this case. Well, it wasn’t technically the first, but it was really the first where it was more than about one minute. It was about eight-and-a-half minutes. They went into it. And they kind of took up, “Is the media covering this up?” And then they took the hate crime angle on it a little bit. So, they didn’t really frame it right, but it was the first thing, and it was purely because of our rally. Our rally was the only reason the AP did a story like the Monday before.
They’re so evil and vile. Their whole thing was to put the liberal spin and their own agenda in the mouths of the parents of the victims.
They were working on the Christians. Gary Christian wore a Confederate shirt to like the first hearing that he ever went to [in mid-January], and made the motion of the gun [at defendant Eric Boyd].
Well, they kind of got him to back up, to say, “Well, that was the only shirt in my closet; my wife is kind of mad about that”; and a couple of other little things. So, they’re kind of pressuring him.
But the Newsoms say straight up, they don’t think it started out as a hate crime, “but we think it turned into that.” She said, Mary said, “I don’t know, what else could have motivated it?”
The media is totally interested in that red herring, “Is it a hate crime?” Writing about double-standards won’t do anything. You gotta get rid of this system. And I know who created the system, and I know why they created it.
NS: [chuckling] We’ve been down that road before, so I’m not going to waste any time on it.
AL: No, there’s no point talking, because we probably disagree about that, so I’m just trying to describe to you … There’s one thing I wanted to mention. You would probably know more about this than me, since your black supremacy, etc. There was a report that said overtly that Davidson was a Black Gangster Disciple.
NS: Right. Yes, he was, in jail.
AL: Now, you tell me. Isn’t that prima facie evidence of a hate crime?
NS: Well, that’s what I wrote. I wrote that as one of my arguments in American Renaissance [July, 2007].
AL: What you did, I used. I don’t mean that I quoted you. What I mean was, when I got up there and gave my speech, all of the other guys are Klan guys, and they’re all talking about, “Oh, we got to call this a hate crime,” and they’re yelling about, “Bring back the rope.” That’s nice, but it’s kind of emotional froth.
But I said the only thing we can do for Channon Christian is there’s two things. This is from you: We can get the autopsy report on what actually happened, A. And B, we can demand this a-----e DA give them the death penalty. And that was more or less influenced by what you said. But now, see, these kids at the gravesite that I talked to basically said they didn’t release any reports.
So, the cops are insisting – I’ve had numerous cops say to me, “Oh, no, no, they weren’t sexually mutilated, absolutely not,” and “They were not members of the Black Gangster Disciples.”
But that appeared in one of those local reports, right?
NS: Right.
AL: Isn’t that what you were drawing it from?
NS: Yeah, yeah.
AL: Right, and it appeared one time in one local posting from like a TV station.
NS: Right.
AL: Affiliate. And after that, no one has said anything about it. So, how can we believe anything these cops say?
They were talking about how I assaulted them. “Oh yeah, attacking the police.” B------t!
NS: Wait, is this June 16, they were talking about it?
AL: The cops that I talked to that day [May 26], in the process of being arrested and booked [unclear], and the guards and what have you.
But then, the father of, I think Chris Newsom, said he was in parts. [If Hugh Newsom said that, it could have been the result of his son having been set on fire.]
NS: The father of Chris Newsom said that?
AL: I’m pretty sure there’s somewhere that he said the guy was at least somewhat dismembered. Now, maybe that’s not the same as sexual mutilation, but unless we raise the pressure on these people, they are not going to say anything.
You made a good point, the Wichita thing. Maybe that is how they’ll try to play it.
Another smart guy told me he thinks though [Vanessa] Coleman might roll over, that she realizes that, “Hey, maybe I can get out of this. I didn’t initiate it.” But she joined in on it, too.
So, nothing short of pressure from the white community will move this corrupt elite an inch.
NS: Do you see the white community in Knoxville applying any pressure?
AL: We are. We got some locals. Not that they would ever mention this. They totally played it like, what they did at the first rally is, they’d go up to people and say, “Where you from?” So, it’s the total flip of the so-called civil rights era. They took pains to emphasize that we’re out-of-towners who were there to stir up trouble.
They didn’t accept that when they were bringing about the situation that got Channon and Chris killed. And now they cover it up – and they have to cover it up.
It’s not about bias or double-standards. They have to cover it up. The system is based on opening whites up for Jews and minorities to eat off. And that’s what they fear. I tell you, I can feel that fear. They’re very strong, but man, it’s – they know what’s underneath that. And if we get to people with the message, “Here’s what’s going on. This society’s being operated for Jews for their benefit and they’re using minorities to eat you, and to knock you down, to prevent you from talking about it, that’s what’s actually going on. It’s just bad faith and terrorism, all the way around. This crime can be laid at the feet of integration.
And I’ll tell you what. We haven’t had the last rally. I can’t tell you when we’ll do another, but we’re not done with it. Now, remember, the trials are coming up next May. And the only thing that makes this worth talking about is, it’s equivalent to Martin Luther King.
If integration is good – and that’s how I start off talking about, well this is its fruit – I want all of you people who are for integration to stand up, and look at this and say, “Yes, that’s the fruit of integration. Forty-thousand white women raped a year, tens of thousands of white men killed.” And you know, you’re a big stats guy, maybe I got this from you or someone else. They said before civil rights, I think this figure is from ’58, like three percent of all rapes on both sides were interracial.
So, basically the two communities were [unclear]. And that was freedom. That’s what freedom is. And see, the Jews did it, and you may not want to believe it, but that’s who it was. They’re going to, buying Congress, and they’re writing the laws. It may be white guys out front, but it’s Jews writing the laws. They go in there, and they say, “No, you can’t have that freedom. No, you can’t protect your community with segregation. They smear free association, and they call it “segregation,” and they call it “apartheid.” Of course, they don’t call it that in Israel. You know when they built walls – why can’t we come up with laws or walls to protect our Channon Christians and Chris Newsoms? No, we’re supposed to be open to being preyed on by those, those feral savages. And unless whites identify as white and fight back, the system will just keep a lid on it.
And I’ll tell you what I’ve personally observed and learned is, you see how democracy is supposed to function. The media are supposed to be a check on the cops and the politicians. But the truth of the matter is, the media, the politicians, and the cops are on the same side, and they form an elite that is corrupt and very, very hostile to the ordinary people. And man, did I perceive that. They f----n’ hate me.
Those reporters are talking, the cameramen …
NS: Were they openly hostile?
AL: I’m saying, “We’re telling the people what’s really going on. You’re covering up the truth. How do you call yourselves reporters? You’re obscurers.”
And man, they’re all sniggering, and the little Oriental b---h is rolling her eyes, and tapping her foot.
Oh, f—k them. They’re wrong.
They have very good reason to fear, because I’m just the first of what’s going to be just a pouring out of people sick of what’s going on in this country.
Immigration is probably an even better place to look at it, right now. The elite is corrupt and hostile to the interests of the people. I mean, when you’ve got that kind of a government, that’s a revolutionary situation. All it takes is people not having enough to eat, or TV going off or some kind of calamity.
NS: [Laughing] TV; the TV’ll do it.
AL: If the TV’s on, they can probably keep controlling things, but if something goes off, there’s nothing in the refrigerator, or the TV goes off, who knows what will happen. But a lot of people are getting angry, and you can see it building up.
We got four or five kind of national articles out of that. If there’s constant agitation, it will work. ‘Cause everyone’s starting to …
NS: Now, when you say “national articles,” you’re talking about the May 26 rally.
AL: No, I’m talking about – what I mean by national is something that’s basically picked up, it’s not just in Knoxville. I mean, like the AP story before our rally was picked up almost everywhere. Why? Because it put the liberal spin in the mouths of the parents of the victims. Then the AP story and the local stuff after the rally was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune. You had Leonard Pitts, right, the syndicated black columnist, Pulitzer Prize-winner. He wrote an article talking about it, ending with “Cry me a river.” Bill White made that personal, and, you know, we played along with it because that’s the only way you get a response. That’s still going on.
NS: But what do you think about the death threats against Pitts?
AL: Oh, I don’t know that he’s received any death threats. All I know is he’s claimed he’s received 400 e-mails. Death threats? He’s got – I’ve got death threats. I’ve called the FBI about death threats. They couldn’t care less of the death threats.
These are completely corrupt, hostile organizations. I could tell you as many stories as you want to hear about the FBI going in and helping foreign governments who don’t have the First Amendment, shut down white Web sites. That’s what’s going on. I mean, they serve a hostile elite. And, you know, we have to press back, we have to fight back, how we can.
Poor Leonard. He’s got a syndicated column. I mean that thing he wrote, that ended with “Cry me a river,” that was reprinted from coast to coast. He’s basically – and you know what? If you dig up his past words, he’s anti-white. He has fun terrorizing whites with threats of racism.
I mean, I don’t like this system. I’m qualified to be a syndicated columnist. I’d like to have that nice income and nice lifestyle that go with it. You know? Why should he have it? He’s not as talented as I am. He doesn’t know anything. He’s not clever. He’s just another stupid n----r who, unlike a thousand others, he can actually string together two or three sentences. But I guarantee, he’s never written anything worthy of a Pulitzer.
NS: No, no, that was a political award. I’ve read a few of his pieces on black-on-white crime and the Duke rape hoax, and the “Cry me a river” column was actually fairly typical of him, except that he got more dramatic. He didn’t show that he had absolute contempt for white crime victims in the past.
AL: He sure did. And look at his little crybaby response… [Unclear] You have to make it personal.
You can’t get any redress from our controlled media anymore than you can from our controlled politicians.
Look, I say this stuff all day, I write it. The people voted time after time. They vote against affirmative action. They vote against open borders. And what do you get? The people who control the courts just throw it out. They don’t care. They don’t care what the people want.
We are the Democrats who represent whites. We speak for what the people want. They don’t want this insanity. There’s nothing suicidal about the white race. They just want to live as they are, but all the authorities have been so corrupted for so long that people – it’s like being hit by successive waves. You don’t know whether you’re up or down.
So, I’m trying to lead a kind of a new elite, saying “Here’s what’s going on, here’s the cause for all this.” You have to get to what’s causing it, not just endlessly talk about the symptoms, the manifestation. That’s my problem with AmRen.
NS: But you don’t have a lot of followers, right now.
AL: We have probably more than we’ve ever had. We got a good surge from the thing, and we’re not a formal group, either. But maybe we’ll move in that direction, we’re trying to.
NS: Are you familiar with a Village Voice article that came out in June…
AL: About Kelso and them? About Stormfront?
NS: Right. About them having the day of – on May 26, on that weekend – of them having a get-together in New York, I think it was, yeah. That they went to New York City, instead of to the rally. She didn’t mention the rally at all, Maria Luisa Tucker, the writer. But while you guys were in Knoxville, they were in New York.
AL: Yeah, well, we’ve had some hostilities with them, but I tried to mend fences with [unclear]. Kelso was at the June one, and producing it, and getting it up there.
You know, I don’t control what other people do, some of them haven’t liked the way I’ve gone about it, but I don’t care. We’re doing it the right way, and…
NS: No, but I’m just wondering why they would be in New York. Was that intended as a slight against the Knoxville rally … organizers?
AL: I don’t know. [Chuckling] You’d have to ask them.
NS: Were they unaware of it? They couldn’t have been unaware of the Knoxville rally.
AL: Oh, well, no, I don’t know if they allowed ... They may have changed now, they may not have been posting stuff about VNN. Some of them really haven’t liked VNN in the past, and they’ve worked against us or they’ve prevented people from talking about our rallies. That’s just how it is. It’s kind of sad. I hope it’s changed a little, but in the end, you know, we do what we do at VNN, and move forward and don’t worry about that.
And I think it’s a little better after the second one. It wasn’t hosted by them, it was hosted by a third party [the Rev. Ken Gregg], and he invited everyone, and it all seemed to work out fairly well.
NS: The fellow from “ABC.”
AL: Yeah. Well, I think that was a kind of an ad hoc group put together. The guy’s an old-time organizer, old-time Klan guy who used to work with [North Carolina Klansman, White Patriot Party founder, and sometime Linder associate] Glen Miller.
NS: So, he was an old Klan man?
AL: I think so. I think he’s Klan and CI right now.
NS: CI?
AL: Gregg, that is. CI, Christian Identity. Now, I’m not any of that, but it’s kind of a pan-racial gathering.
NS: Now, the news media said that very few people showed up for the second rally.
AL: There were probably more people than at the first one. I would say there were a hundred to 200 people. It’s hard to tell, because there’s photographers in there, and there’s other people you don’t know if they’re pro or not. No, there were plenty of people there.
NS: Now, I have to backtrack here.
AL: I wish there were thousands. But there [unclear]. But there were probably more than the first one. I had Pat tell me there were a hundred at the first one; I’d say there were probably more like 200 at the second one.
NS: Well, the media claimed there were less than 30 for your rally, the first time.
AL: They claimed that.
NS: You think there were about 100 the first time?
AL: That’s what one of my guys told me, but I can’t tell you, because I didn’t really see it.
NS: Right. Because you were…
AL: I was arrested before it started.
NS: This is about the behavior of the reporters. At the first rally, I know from their own videos that they were going up to every demonstrator from your rally, and asking him where he was from. Are you aware of them asking any of the counter-demonstrators where they were from?
AL: No….
It was a curious thing…. We told people, “Just dress up, we’re not going to absolutely ban it, but we really don’t want swastikas and that kind of stuff.” Trying to focus on the crime here. And so one guy – this was very odd. And he was supposedly a local, is what we were trying to determine, so he may well have been a plant or something. He looked o.k., but he had a swastika red shirt on. That was odd, and of course, the cameras focused on that. And that could well be a dirty trick or a plant or something. But other than that, our guys dressed pretty good, they looked pretty good.
NS: So, no one knew who the heck that guy was.
AL: Well, maybe someone does. All I’ve heard is that he was supposedly someone local. But he was certainly no one I knew. And no one that the people I know, no one stepped forward, he hasn’t stepped forward, so I had to assume he was a plant or someone pretending, deliberately there to show that swastika, so they could go, “Hate, swastika came to downtown Knoxville.”
They lie, anyway. I really despise the controlled media.
NS: Now, were reporters again asking demonstrators where they were from during the June 16 rally?
AL: That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. I’ve read pretty much all the news articles, but I haven’t seen all the videos.
NS: But you’ve read all the articles you could find.
AL: All of the articles are on a thread at VNN Forum that I could find…
NS: Of the June 16 rally.
AL: And they’re all pretty much there. And then I tried to [unclear] the blog stuff I could find.
NS: I want you to tell me about the behavior of the reporters at the June 16 rally, vs. the reports that they wrote up. Were they professional?
AL: That’s hard to say. I can just say, ok, they were shooting the camera, they’re watching me to see if I’d do anything squirrelly, a little bit. [NS chuckles.]
All I can tell you is they interviewed Ken Gregg. A blonde woman interviewed him, I don’t know who she was with, he was the organizer. After I was done speaking, I talked to a kid [Matt Lakin] from the News Sentinel, the main paper there, for a long while. And I noticed, they sent him. The first rally, they’d had it covered by Jamie Satterfield, and she – thank God, they used a good picture that helped our side, but the story itself was remarkably biased. And she basically implied that we who were protesting this crime and the system that produced it were tormenting and torturing the parents. And she doesn’t [unclear] refer to Letalvis and Lemaricus, they were totally, they cover up the details of it.… So, she’s a typical liberal….
Matt Lakin, and I talked to him [at the second rally]. He treated me more fairly, but that’s a little more how it is, when you’re direct and personal with them, and they think you might be coming back. And once you look in their eyes, and kind of talk to them a little bit, and like, “Hey, c’mon, bro, I want to be treated as fairly as anybody else,” but you get those local TV c---s, they are f----n’ …
NS: This is Jamie Satterfield’s story on the May 26 rally, “Slaying victims lost in the furor.”
AL: How are they lost, when we’re holding a rally about them?! Like they’re writing these stories anyway, like the AP cares. And here’s the thing, this may be a point you can use. They act like, “Oh, everyone’s sick of hearing the details,” but they never really put out the details. And they acted like everyone was sick of hearing the details about Day Two onward. Let’s linger on them a little bit. Not one paper has tried to evoke the horror and misery those people went through, right? Not one of them has done any emotional flavor or color piece, where they really dig into what this must have been like. You know, because then it becomes obvious, if you’ve been raped for hours and hours on end, there’s a little bit of hate involved there. They don’t ever dramatize or put into color what happened. And they won’t put it in statistical context, either. So, they play their game like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking about this all along. We’ve covered AP; we’ve covered [unclear]”; blah, blah, blah, since it happened. Explain that the only AP stories that ever get picked up are the ones that are putting the leftist spin on it, that it had nothing to do with race….
I mean, here’s the thing. They can be legitimate reporters. The point is, you’ve got guys 20 miles away who’ve never heard of it [prior to the Internet agitations and rallies.] It just stays within – of course, the town where it is, is going to cover it, to some extent. They’re still not going to really cover it exactly right, I wouldn’t say. But it’s never allowed to escape there. And then, yeah, I would say the [May 18] AP story was where it started getting really propagandistic. When they realized, what, these guys are going to try and make it a national issue and a famous case, and now we’ve got to go and preventively, and defuse any racial anger and give them a bogus explanation of what happened, “Oh, it’s nothing to do with race,” and just keep a lid on. Never report the crime in true context. And they uniformly do that.
And just the little pressure we’ve been able to put on them has forced concessions from them. I mean, that’s the Chicago Tribune story, right there.
Why would they even write about it, or talk about it, unless they – a lot of them, the ones who aren’t Jews, they really do have some concept that they’re not doing their job. They know that they’re subject to these political pressures, right? They know that if they tell the truth about crime, you just can’t do that. You can’t really explain to white people what’s going on. That’s, that [chuckling], the system will blow at that point.
NS: How is it that the only reporter that’s put the story in context is a Jew?
AL: You haven’t put it in context.
NS: Oh!
AL: I’ve put it in context. [NS laughs.] No; you pretended not to understand that integration, which is a Jewish production, is the cause of this. That’s the difference. You’ve done a good job reporting a lot of the details, but you haven’t ultimately explained, we have a system in which blacks are allowed to prey on whites. Who set up that system? That’s the point that matters. And my answer, [chuckles] easily demonstrable, it’s the Jews who set it up, and then they cover up the crimes. All those papers are run by Jews; you know that. The Chicago Tribune’s even owned by Jews….
NS: I want to go over another thing that we talked about last time, so that I have it on tape. You told me that you do not identify yourself as a neo-Nazi.
AL: I never really identify what I am. I usually say, conservative. They’re such a useless bunch of cowards that [chuckles]. My background is Edmund Burke, and solid conservative thinkers, and then mixed in with them, some of the Germans.
NS: And you also said you don’t think of yourself as a white nationalist.
AL: No, I do. I just don’t like to go in for [names?]. I want people to focus on what I say, not what I call myself. Whatever. It doesn’t matter; they call me whatever they want [unclear]. I’m focused on my message, and putting it out in every possible forum, and get the labels out of the way. Judge based on what I’m saying. Check it out for yourself. See, that’s what honest men say. They say, “Check it out for yourself.” They don’t smear you, like the controlled media do.
They don’t have a case. Their case is loaded into the terms, so that everyone knows they’re supposed to hate our people without ever thinking about it, or questioning what they say.
NS: Now, put yourself in the position of people reading about you, say from this interview, when it comes out, or hearing something you said, and they read about your charges against the Jews. How do you think they’re going to identify you, politically?
AL: I don’t know – let me put it this way. The AP story that came out after my arrest said I fought the police. Now, there’s visual evidence that’s not the case. But when the media has it loaded against you, you’re this evil, hateful Nazi, well, what would an evil, hateful Nazi do? Why, of course, he would attack the police. They’re very violent people. So, that’s the fictional story put out by the controlled media, and they maintain a blockade against the facts. They are not reporters, they’re simply agenda-pushers and obscurers.
The great part is now that everyone in America has a digital camera, and can go to these events and tape it among themselves, I’m not even sure why we talk about those guys any longer….
NS: Is there anything else that’s on your mind that you’d like to say?
AL: I want to win you over to make you a Jewish Nazi….
Anyway, it’s good to talk to you.
NS: Same here.
AL: You, Satterfield, and me are probably three who’ve written about it more than anyone, I would think. And isn’t that kind of scary, in a way?
NS: Yes, yes, it is….
AL: The liberals can be – essentially, they’re cultists, because you can’t be a liberal and admit evidence into your head. You have to be with a bunch of other people who are all agreed on thinking a certain way, and [say to] reality, “Just stay out of there.” And they don’t like anything that intrudes on that. And the Jews have channeled this.
I consider it like, probably only a minority of whites would be liberal naturally, and they’d be controlled by the sane majority. But the Jews use this, and they channel liberalism for their own ends, and they are much better organized than any other class in society. I mean, that’s easily provable. And they use their organizing to prevent us from organizing. All they have to do when they control these top organs is demonize us, and just call us “haters,” and imply that we have some moral or medical problem, rather than we’re honest men making our case. That’s why we say “We’re the good guys.” We make our case honestly. We back it up with evidence, and that’s how you do it.
NS: I have to warn you, I’m going to have to cherry pick this interview, because I’ve already got something like 4,000 words from the first one….
AL: I have mixed feelings about you, I’m sure you have mixed feelings about me, but you’re writing about this, you’re talking about this, I’m learning from what I’m hearing from you, and hopefully, you’re getting some stuff from me that maybe you haven’t seen. You gotta really check the links on there [at VNN].
Basically, what’s happened is the media’s not really relevant. But for the actual coverage of this stuff, they’re completely irrelevant. It’s all our guys doing video and writing about this. And guys like you, who are writing and using some of the facts. I don’t think you’re going as far as you can, but I understand. How are you gonna see Jews as bad people? You have an inherent reason not to see it that way.
NS: Well, of course, I know that we’re the chosen people. [AL laughs]. But I can warn you; people are going to have very strange responses to this piece. They’re going to have strange responses not just to you, but to me.
AL: Just quote me correctly, and try to get out the essence of my point of view, and I’m happy.
Friday, October 26, 2007
The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror, Part II
By Nicholas Stix
Alex Linder Interview II Transcript, June 7, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com))
Linder Interview I
Linder Interview III
On June 7, I spoke with Alex Linder about his May 26 arrest.
The following interview is choppier than the first, with many indirect quotes, because it is from my notes, which could not keep up with Linder’s rapid-fire speech. But since much of the content repeated the previous conversation – Jews, Jews, Jews – the losses were minimal.
NS: Were you trying to get arrested?
AL: "No, I was not. I walked where I needed to go to speak to the public….
"It wasn’t posted or anything [that demonstrators were not permitted in the street].
"They came up, threw me on the ground…. The whole thing took about 15-20 seconds.
"What they did was – the officer’s foot, he’s tripping me – they took me down very quickly. They were grinding away [pushing his face bloody into the street, and giving him sore ribs]. They didn’t punch me."
Linder couldn’t figure out what the vandalism charge referred to, speculating that perhaps police “claim I broke their camera."
AL: “I know that I didn’t grab them. It’s amazing.
“As you know, I didn’t file a permit for this…. I didn’t want to. They just acted as if I filed the permit.
“People – it’s just so long since they’ve seen an American.” [Linder is referring to what he understands to be the proper exercise of a citizen’s First Amendment rights.]
“They assaulted me, as if I’d applied for a permit, as if I’d agreed to the conditions.”
Linder insisted he didn’t resist police. I believe him.
Linder would not call himself a neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
“A lot of times I would say, ‘conservative.’ A lot of the background is conservatives.”
He spoke of “The Germans – Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler and Goebbels,” and of American Lothrop Stoddard.
Linder also cited the Italian conservative revolutionary, Julius Evola: “I don’t see the stuff as very complex. It’s basically the Jews took over.” (According to this Evola passage, Linder has misinterpreted him.)
Linder maintains that he is “a Burkean conservative,” which will likely come as a shock to fans of Edmund Burke, who emphasized the natural, free-flowing character of social institutions, and who shunned radicalism, as well as to the WS/NN/W world. (I am unaware of any passages in Burke that call for slaughtering Jews.)
Linder suggests I visit the German Propaganda Archive, which contains, among other things, speeches by Hitler and Goebbels: “It’ll turn you into a Jewish Nazi.”
(Would a “Jewish Nazi” kill other Jews, or simply commit suicide?)
At one point, Linder notes of the motivation for the rally, “If this were just a one-off [a unique crime], we wouldn’t be rallying.”
In case anyone suspects I’ve exaggerated Linder’s genocidal anti-Semitism, I’ll quote him one more time from the interview:
“Every Jew in the world ought to be afraid of true justice. I would set up a world trial [for the Jews] like American Idol. Once the people heard the evidence, they’d say they have to be done away with.”
Note that Linder is also a Holocaust-denier. I’ve never understood why admirers of Hitler would deny that the Holocaust took place. Holocaust-denial makes the Führer sound like a failure. I would think that Hitlerites would be shouting from the rooftops, “He did it! The Führer killed half the world’s Jews!”
In spite of his plan to kill all of the world’s Jews, Linder is a most gracious interview subject. When my defective Maxell tape snaps, he offers suggestions for technical alternatives to tape recorders, and agrees to permit me to interview him a third time.
Alex Linder Interview II Transcript, June 7, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com))
Linder Interview I
Linder Interview III
On June 7, I spoke with Alex Linder about his May 26 arrest.
The following interview is choppier than the first, with many indirect quotes, because it is from my notes, which could not keep up with Linder’s rapid-fire speech. But since much of the content repeated the previous conversation – Jews, Jews, Jews – the losses were minimal.
NS: Were you trying to get arrested?
AL: "No, I was not. I walked where I needed to go to speak to the public….
"It wasn’t posted or anything [that demonstrators were not permitted in the street].
"They came up, threw me on the ground…. The whole thing took about 15-20 seconds.
"What they did was – the officer’s foot, he’s tripping me – they took me down very quickly. They were grinding away [pushing his face bloody into the street, and giving him sore ribs]. They didn’t punch me."
Linder couldn’t figure out what the vandalism charge referred to, speculating that perhaps police “claim I broke their camera."
AL: “I know that I didn’t grab them. It’s amazing.
“As you know, I didn’t file a permit for this…. I didn’t want to. They just acted as if I filed the permit.
“People – it’s just so long since they’ve seen an American.” [Linder is referring to what he understands to be the proper exercise of a citizen’s First Amendment rights.]
“They assaulted me, as if I’d applied for a permit, as if I’d agreed to the conditions.”
Linder insisted he didn’t resist police. I believe him.
Linder would not call himself a neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
“A lot of times I would say, ‘conservative.’ A lot of the background is conservatives.”
He spoke of “The Germans – Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler and Goebbels,” and of American Lothrop Stoddard.
Linder also cited the Italian conservative revolutionary, Julius Evola: “I don’t see the stuff as very complex. It’s basically the Jews took over.” (According to this Evola passage, Linder has misinterpreted him.)
Linder maintains that he is “a Burkean conservative,” which will likely come as a shock to fans of Edmund Burke, who emphasized the natural, free-flowing character of social institutions, and who shunned radicalism, as well as to the WS/NN/W world. (I am unaware of any passages in Burke that call for slaughtering Jews.)
Linder suggests I visit the German Propaganda Archive, which contains, among other things, speeches by Hitler and Goebbels: “It’ll turn you into a Jewish Nazi.”
(Would a “Jewish Nazi” kill other Jews, or simply commit suicide?)
At one point, Linder notes of the motivation for the rally, “If this were just a one-off [a unique crime], we wouldn’t be rallying.”
In case anyone suspects I’ve exaggerated Linder’s genocidal anti-Semitism, I’ll quote him one more time from the interview:
“Every Jew in the world ought to be afraid of true justice. I would set up a world trial [for the Jews] like American Idol. Once the people heard the evidence, they’d say they have to be done away with.”
Note that Linder is also a Holocaust-denier. I’ve never understood why admirers of Hitler would deny that the Holocaust took place. Holocaust-denial makes the Führer sound like a failure. I would think that Hitlerites would be shouting from the rooftops, “He did it! The Führer killed half the world’s Jews!”
In spite of his plan to kill all of the world’s Jews, Linder is a most gracious interview subject. When my defective Maxell tape snaps, he offers suggestions for technical alternatives to tape recorders, and agrees to permit me to interview him a third time.
The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror
Alex Linder Interview I Transcript, April 6, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com)
Linder Interview II
Linder Interview III
Nicholas Stix (NS): You told me [in your email] that you’re holding the rally on May 26th.
Alex Linder (AL): Correct.
NS: So that will be Memorial Day Weekend?
AL: Yeah.
NS: And do you have any idea how many people you expect, or hope to get to show up?
AL: No, I really don’t. We’re advertising it on our forum, and wherever we can. And we are going to do some prep work to get the general public, but all are welcome, so we’ll see.
NS: Right. And do you have any idea of speakers you intend to invite?
AL: Yeah, I’m going to speak, we’re going to have Hal Turner speak, probably have Ed Fields speak.
NS: Ed Field [sic]?
AL: Yeah, and possibly one or two others.
NS: Now, I don’t have to tell you that this, these crimes have undergone a media blackout, in terms of the national media.
AL: That’s correct.
NS: How do you explain that?
AL: Well, it’s the Jewish media control. And the fact that any kind of non-white crime doesn’t fit their agenda, so they suppress it.
NS: Now, various reports have been published in, on blogs – both white and black blogs, oddly enough – which have claimed that both victims were sexually mutilated. I’m sure you’re familiar with these reports.
AL: Yes.
NS: No officials in local law enforcement in Knoxville or federal law enforcement have made these reports, to my knowledge. I’ve spoken with people, and they’ve refused to make any statements. Well, they’ve variously said they don’t know, the feds have, and local law enforcement has refused to confirm or disconfirm any of these reports. Do you have any idea where these reports have emanated from?
AL: Well, as best I can tell, they’re coming from people who are inside there who are relating it through [sighs] oh, by the time you get in a blog it’s either second or third person, but what are you gonna do? This stuff is always hushed up.
[Chuckles]. I would have to [pauses] Oh, God. I spent a couple of nights reading through everything and there’s, that’s out there, and it’s pretty clear it’s coming from the cop, investigation that they, that they sodomized ‘em, and they pissed on ‘em, and they dumped chemicals on ‘em.
NS: No, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about.
AL: They covered it up. They cover it up.
NS: The documents, no the documents, the official documents show that they’ve been charged formally with having raped both members of the couple, the man and the woman. And with having raped the woman orally, vaginally, and anally. This is not at issue.
AL: Yeah.
NS: The issue is the charge, the claims that the, Mr. Newsom was sexually dismembered, and which would presumably be while he was alive, and that um that Ms. Christian had her breasts chopped off.
But there’s actually no apparent beef. The mainstream media outlet, the Knoxville News [Sentinel], did publish reports that the killers poured cleaning fluid down Ms. Christian’s mouth while she was alive, supposedly to get rid of DNA. So that’s not, I mean, that’s actually been in the mainstream media, the local media, of course. So, but the issue, the reports that have not been published by any mainstream media outlet are the blog reports charging the sexual mutilation of the victims.
AL: So, what?
NS: Hmm?
AL: So, what?
NS: No, I was just wondering if you had any sources.
AL: Look, you’re writing for AmRen [American Renaissance].
NS: Right.
AL: AmRen wants to focus on the crime.
NS: Right.
AL: And obsess about it. I’m interested in the systemic nature of this problem, which is why it’s being suppressed. And that goes to the Jewish control. The Jews are the ones who produce the policies that ensure that this stuff happens. That’s the important thing here. Yeah, the fact is they were, any way you want to cut it, they were murdered, they were raped, and they were tortured, a combination of those. I know [American Renaissance editor Jared] Taylor wants to get people obsessing about that but that’s not the important thing here. The important thing here is that the Jews set up the system that allows this stuff to happen. It literally facilitates it. These kind of crimes weren’t happening fifty years ago, because niggers knew they would be lynched, and they were kept out of white communities, and white communities were allowed by law to protect themselves.
Now, the Jews re-wrote the laws, and that is the main issue here. Now, I know you don’t want to say that, and I know that you are probably a Jew yourself.
NS: I most certainly am.
AL: You are a Jew, and yet you are writing for a ostensibly [laughs], a publication that, that represents white people. That’s what’s such a joke about Jared Taylor’s approach. Whites are second-class citizens at AmRen, just as they are in the broader society. It’s the Jews who set up the so-called civil rights that denied whites the free association. That’s what produces crimes like this. And Jared Taylor damn well knows that, but he won’t allow his people to say it on his Web site. So, we don’t take the same view that AmRen takes. That’s assuming that AmRen is honestly motivated, which I don’t assume personally.
NS: What do you think AmRen’s motivations are?
AL: I think it may well be just a false front.
NS: A false front for…?
AL: The Jews. The Jews are putting money into it. He’s allowing Jews to speak. He’s allowing Jews to criticize whites on a site; he does not allow whites to criticize Jews. You tell me how that’s any different from the New York Times or any other major media. Same system of taboos applies at AmRen that does everywhere else in society. And he wants his people to be obsessed about blacks and black crime. Blacks are a headless community. They’re not capable of leading themselves or organizing themselves. The Jews set up the NAACP [reader’s note: this is actually true], and the Jews re-wrote the rules so the white communities were left open to exactly this kind of crime. Which we have named a “hush” crime, ‘cause it focuses not only on the black criminals but the Jews who hush up what’s going on even while they’re trumping up the garbage allegations at Duke, and reporting on that crap for a year.
NS: [Writing feverishly.] I’m trying to keep up with you.
AL: I mean, I’ve written a bunch on our site, so if you have any problem, you’ll find what I’m telling you written there.
NS: Let me just go back here. Alright, I know you told me in your email that the Web site will announce the time and place, the exact time and location of the rally.
AL: Well, we have the time, but we don’t have the exact location or the [unclear] we’re not going to talk about it quite yet.
NS: Yeah, no, I, would imagine not. And so, I’ll just check around that time.
AL: Yeah, so if you check the week of the rally, we …. We might do it multiple places. It just depends. We want to have some access to the public. We don’t want, we’re tired of going to these events and applying for a permit and being shoved away in some little corner, and having to stick mirrors up our asses and fly helicopters overhead.
We’re just going to, simply – we’re going to use our rights.
NS: Oh, so, in other words, you might not – you might do it without a permit.
AL: [Chuckles] We’re going to do – yeah, we’re going to do it without a permit.
We’re going to assemble and speak where we feel it’s appropriate, not where the cops or any other group feels it’s appropriate.
NS: Alright, so I’ll send your love to Jared Taylor.
AL: Well, he I’m sure knows what I think.
NS: I’m sure he does.
AL: He knows damn well there’s a reason that all of this is going on. He knows exactly what it is, and there’s a reason that he doesn’t allow his people to talk about it, and that he doesn’t talk about it himself. So, either he’s being paid to, or he’s just a coward. And there’s no third option.
But we’re going to do right; fear no man, as [the late neo-Nazi leader and National Alliance founder, William] Pierce advised.
NS: I’m sorry, what…?
AL: I enjoy your articles; I’ve read ‘em in the past. I was disappointed to find out you’re a Jew. But …
NS: [Laughs out loud.]
AL: You still do pretty good work. I’ve seen, I can’t remember precisely, but I spent at least one day a couple of years ago reading through everything you’ve written, so.
NS: That’s a lot of writing.
AL: You’ve done quite a bit. I mean, do you freelance, or…?
NS: Well, sure. I’m a homeless writer.
AL: Yeah.
NS: Freelancing is what you do by necessity, not by choice.
AL: It’s a difficult thing, I know that. Should you write on anything touchy, even if you leave the Jew out of it.
NS: [Laughs] You know, one of your readers thought he did me a favor by stating that I’m only a half-Jew. He’s mistaken. There’s no half-Jews [NS chuckles].
AL: Well, I appreciate your admitting it.
NS: Well, of course, it’s not something to admit or to hide. It’s a simple matter of fact. Either – it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
AL: I think a lot of Jews try to hide that they’re Jews.
NS: I don’t know about that. But there, no there are a lot of people who don’t know that there’s no such thing as a half-Jew. Actually, the Nazis started that notion that you could be a part-Jew.
AL: Well, they had, what did they say, if one in four of your grandparents was, that qualified you?
NS: Oh, well, that’s not what I’m talking about. Either you have a Jewish mother or you don’t. That’s what makes a Jew. Or else you have to convert. That’s the issue of whether you had a grandparent, that’s irrelevant, unless you’re talking about your mother’s mother. That’s all that.
AL: I’m not sure that Israel sees it that way.
NS: What does Israel say?
AL: I think Israel has just that, that if you can prove one of your grandparents, even if it was not a female, you can still get in by their blood laws. And I know the Nazis at least to some degree talked to the rabbis and tried to base what they did on Jewish law.
NS: Well, that’s no, no, Jewish law is what I just said. I don’t know what Israel’s doing, but Jewish law is that either your mother’s a Jewish woman, or you have to have converted – that’s it. [This is true within Israel, as well as without, though Reform Jews perversely claim that someone who does not practice Judaism is not a Jew, regardless of whether his mother was a Jew. I say perversely, because the vast majority of Reform Jews – whose movement is reducible to Enlightenment atheism plus matzoh brei – are non-practicing.]
AL: That may be a little different from what Israel says.
NS: That’s possible, but that would be a political matter, not a religious matter, whatever they did.
AL: But you know, the main point about this here, is that we’re not going there to tie balloons, and it’s so pitiful when you read through the guest book that they have in the local paper where all the family and friends of these people respond, and they just, ‘Oh what can we do?’ these horri…, no these tragedies happen for a reason. And it’s, the reason is that the people running our society are Jews, and they intend our extermination. And they put in place these words and terms and frames and arguments, and this [unclear] safe way for whites to respond, having stupid candlelight vigils. And that’s absolutely the wrong way. There needs to be a hell of a lot of anger. And eventually, we’re going to have to physically displace the Jews. It’s just that simple.
And I don’t mind telling you that, because I’ve written that many times. I don’t know what it’s going to take to bring that about, but that’s the only solution.
NS: Well, seeing as I’m the head of the ZOG, I think that would be very difficult to pull off.
AL: [Laughs, chuckles, and coughs repeatedly.] Well, if you’re deflecting attention from the Jewish cause of this, then yeah, you’re helping ZOG, there’s no doubt about it. And that may well be what AmRen was set up to do, I don’t know, I have to judge it by its results.
NS: Well, no, no, I’m not trying to deflect anything. I mean, I’m perfectly, uh, I hadn’t planned on saying this, but since you’re talking about physically, violently displacing the Jews, you should know that guys like me are ready, willing, and able to kill to defend their own.
AL: So are we.
NS: [Laughs] O.k., just so that we understand each other.
AL: That’s the difference.
NS: Hmm?
AL: You Jews are the aggressor.
NS: The aggressor? Well, I’m an aggressive kind of guy, you know. So, you’ve read my work?
AL: Aggressor. [NS laughs loudly.] And not all whites are going to put up with it. And more and more are going to come to see that what we’re saying is correct.
NS: Well, we shall see. Thank you for your time, Mr. Linder.
AL: You bet. Good talking to you.
NS: Good luck with your rallies.
AL: Alright.
NS: Bye, now.
AL: Thanks, bye.
NS: Bye.
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com)
Linder Interview II
Linder Interview III
Nicholas Stix (NS): You told me [in your email] that you’re holding the rally on May 26th.
Alex Linder (AL): Correct.
NS: So that will be Memorial Day Weekend?
AL: Yeah.
NS: And do you have any idea how many people you expect, or hope to get to show up?
AL: No, I really don’t. We’re advertising it on our forum, and wherever we can. And we are going to do some prep work to get the general public, but all are welcome, so we’ll see.
NS: Right. And do you have any idea of speakers you intend to invite?
AL: Yeah, I’m going to speak, we’re going to have Hal Turner speak, probably have Ed Fields speak.
NS: Ed Field [sic]?
AL: Yeah, and possibly one or two others.
NS: Now, I don’t have to tell you that this, these crimes have undergone a media blackout, in terms of the national media.
AL: That’s correct.
NS: How do you explain that?
AL: Well, it’s the Jewish media control. And the fact that any kind of non-white crime doesn’t fit their agenda, so they suppress it.
NS: Now, various reports have been published in, on blogs – both white and black blogs, oddly enough – which have claimed that both victims were sexually mutilated. I’m sure you’re familiar with these reports.
AL: Yes.
NS: No officials in local law enforcement in Knoxville or federal law enforcement have made these reports, to my knowledge. I’ve spoken with people, and they’ve refused to make any statements. Well, they’ve variously said they don’t know, the feds have, and local law enforcement has refused to confirm or disconfirm any of these reports. Do you have any idea where these reports have emanated from?
AL: Well, as best I can tell, they’re coming from people who are inside there who are relating it through [sighs] oh, by the time you get in a blog it’s either second or third person, but what are you gonna do? This stuff is always hushed up.
[Chuckles]. I would have to [pauses] Oh, God. I spent a couple of nights reading through everything and there’s, that’s out there, and it’s pretty clear it’s coming from the cop, investigation that they, that they sodomized ‘em, and they pissed on ‘em, and they dumped chemicals on ‘em.
NS: No, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about.
AL: They covered it up. They cover it up.
NS: The documents, no the documents, the official documents show that they’ve been charged formally with having raped both members of the couple, the man and the woman. And with having raped the woman orally, vaginally, and anally. This is not at issue.
AL: Yeah.
NS: The issue is the charge, the claims that the, Mr. Newsom was sexually dismembered, and which would presumably be while he was alive, and that um that Ms. Christian had her breasts chopped off.
But there’s actually no apparent beef. The mainstream media outlet, the Knoxville News [Sentinel], did publish reports that the killers poured cleaning fluid down Ms. Christian’s mouth while she was alive, supposedly to get rid of DNA. So that’s not, I mean, that’s actually been in the mainstream media, the local media, of course. So, but the issue, the reports that have not been published by any mainstream media outlet are the blog reports charging the sexual mutilation of the victims.
AL: So, what?
NS: Hmm?
AL: So, what?
NS: No, I was just wondering if you had any sources.
AL: Look, you’re writing for AmRen [American Renaissance].
NS: Right.
AL: AmRen wants to focus on the crime.
NS: Right.
AL: And obsess about it. I’m interested in the systemic nature of this problem, which is why it’s being suppressed. And that goes to the Jewish control. The Jews are the ones who produce the policies that ensure that this stuff happens. That’s the important thing here. Yeah, the fact is they were, any way you want to cut it, they were murdered, they were raped, and they were tortured, a combination of those. I know [American Renaissance editor Jared] Taylor wants to get people obsessing about that but that’s not the important thing here. The important thing here is that the Jews set up the system that allows this stuff to happen. It literally facilitates it. These kind of crimes weren’t happening fifty years ago, because niggers knew they would be lynched, and they were kept out of white communities, and white communities were allowed by law to protect themselves.
Now, the Jews re-wrote the laws, and that is the main issue here. Now, I know you don’t want to say that, and I know that you are probably a Jew yourself.
NS: I most certainly am.
AL: You are a Jew, and yet you are writing for a ostensibly [laughs], a publication that, that represents white people. That’s what’s such a joke about Jared Taylor’s approach. Whites are second-class citizens at AmRen, just as they are in the broader society. It’s the Jews who set up the so-called civil rights that denied whites the free association. That’s what produces crimes like this. And Jared Taylor damn well knows that, but he won’t allow his people to say it on his Web site. So, we don’t take the same view that AmRen takes. That’s assuming that AmRen is honestly motivated, which I don’t assume personally.
NS: What do you think AmRen’s motivations are?
AL: I think it may well be just a false front.
NS: A false front for…?
AL: The Jews. The Jews are putting money into it. He’s allowing Jews to speak. He’s allowing Jews to criticize whites on a site; he does not allow whites to criticize Jews. You tell me how that’s any different from the New York Times or any other major media. Same system of taboos applies at AmRen that does everywhere else in society. And he wants his people to be obsessed about blacks and black crime. Blacks are a headless community. They’re not capable of leading themselves or organizing themselves. The Jews set up the NAACP [reader’s note: this is actually true], and the Jews re-wrote the rules so the white communities were left open to exactly this kind of crime. Which we have named a “hush” crime, ‘cause it focuses not only on the black criminals but the Jews who hush up what’s going on even while they’re trumping up the garbage allegations at Duke, and reporting on that crap for a year.
NS: [Writing feverishly.] I’m trying to keep up with you.
AL: I mean, I’ve written a bunch on our site, so if you have any problem, you’ll find what I’m telling you written there.
NS: Let me just go back here. Alright, I know you told me in your email that the Web site will announce the time and place, the exact time and location of the rally.
AL: Well, we have the time, but we don’t have the exact location or the [unclear] we’re not going to talk about it quite yet.
NS: Yeah, no, I, would imagine not. And so, I’ll just check around that time.
AL: Yeah, so if you check the week of the rally, we …. We might do it multiple places. It just depends. We want to have some access to the public. We don’t want, we’re tired of going to these events and applying for a permit and being shoved away in some little corner, and having to stick mirrors up our asses and fly helicopters overhead.
We’re just going to, simply – we’re going to use our rights.
NS: Oh, so, in other words, you might not – you might do it without a permit.
AL: [Chuckles] We’re going to do – yeah, we’re going to do it without a permit.
We’re going to assemble and speak where we feel it’s appropriate, not where the cops or any other group feels it’s appropriate.
NS: Alright, so I’ll send your love to Jared Taylor.
AL: Well, he I’m sure knows what I think.
NS: I’m sure he does.
AL: He knows damn well there’s a reason that all of this is going on. He knows exactly what it is, and there’s a reason that he doesn’t allow his people to talk about it, and that he doesn’t talk about it himself. So, either he’s being paid to, or he’s just a coward. And there’s no third option.
But we’re going to do right; fear no man, as [the late neo-Nazi leader and National Alliance founder, William] Pierce advised.
NS: I’m sorry, what…?
AL: I enjoy your articles; I’ve read ‘em in the past. I was disappointed to find out you’re a Jew. But …
NS: [Laughs out loud.]
AL: You still do pretty good work. I’ve seen, I can’t remember precisely, but I spent at least one day a couple of years ago reading through everything you’ve written, so.
NS: That’s a lot of writing.
AL: You’ve done quite a bit. I mean, do you freelance, or…?
NS: Well, sure. I’m a homeless writer.
AL: Yeah.
NS: Freelancing is what you do by necessity, not by choice.
AL: It’s a difficult thing, I know that. Should you write on anything touchy, even if you leave the Jew out of it.
NS: [Laughs] You know, one of your readers thought he did me a favor by stating that I’m only a half-Jew. He’s mistaken. There’s no half-Jews [NS chuckles].
AL: Well, I appreciate your admitting it.
NS: Well, of course, it’s not something to admit or to hide. It’s a simple matter of fact. Either – it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
AL: I think a lot of Jews try to hide that they’re Jews.
NS: I don’t know about that. But there, no there are a lot of people who don’t know that there’s no such thing as a half-Jew. Actually, the Nazis started that notion that you could be a part-Jew.
AL: Well, they had, what did they say, if one in four of your grandparents was, that qualified you?
NS: Oh, well, that’s not what I’m talking about. Either you have a Jewish mother or you don’t. That’s what makes a Jew. Or else you have to convert. That’s the issue of whether you had a grandparent, that’s irrelevant, unless you’re talking about your mother’s mother. That’s all that.
AL: I’m not sure that Israel sees it that way.
NS: What does Israel say?
AL: I think Israel has just that, that if you can prove one of your grandparents, even if it was not a female, you can still get in by their blood laws. And I know the Nazis at least to some degree talked to the rabbis and tried to base what they did on Jewish law.
NS: Well, that’s no, no, Jewish law is what I just said. I don’t know what Israel’s doing, but Jewish law is that either your mother’s a Jewish woman, or you have to have converted – that’s it. [This is true within Israel, as well as without, though Reform Jews perversely claim that someone who does not practice Judaism is not a Jew, regardless of whether his mother was a Jew. I say perversely, because the vast majority of Reform Jews – whose movement is reducible to Enlightenment atheism plus matzoh brei – are non-practicing.]
AL: That may be a little different from what Israel says.
NS: That’s possible, but that would be a political matter, not a religious matter, whatever they did.
AL: But you know, the main point about this here, is that we’re not going there to tie balloons, and it’s so pitiful when you read through the guest book that they have in the local paper where all the family and friends of these people respond, and they just, ‘Oh what can we do?’ these horri…, no these tragedies happen for a reason. And it’s, the reason is that the people running our society are Jews, and they intend our extermination. And they put in place these words and terms and frames and arguments, and this [unclear] safe way for whites to respond, having stupid candlelight vigils. And that’s absolutely the wrong way. There needs to be a hell of a lot of anger. And eventually, we’re going to have to physically displace the Jews. It’s just that simple.
And I don’t mind telling you that, because I’ve written that many times. I don’t know what it’s going to take to bring that about, but that’s the only solution.
NS: Well, seeing as I’m the head of the ZOG, I think that would be very difficult to pull off.
AL: [Laughs, chuckles, and coughs repeatedly.] Well, if you’re deflecting attention from the Jewish cause of this, then yeah, you’re helping ZOG, there’s no doubt about it. And that may well be what AmRen was set up to do, I don’t know, I have to judge it by its results.
NS: Well, no, no, I’m not trying to deflect anything. I mean, I’m perfectly, uh, I hadn’t planned on saying this, but since you’re talking about physically, violently displacing the Jews, you should know that guys like me are ready, willing, and able to kill to defend their own.
AL: So are we.
NS: [Laughs] O.k., just so that we understand each other.
AL: That’s the difference.
NS: Hmm?
AL: You Jews are the aggressor.
NS: The aggressor? Well, I’m an aggressive kind of guy, you know. So, you’ve read my work?
AL: Aggressor. [NS laughs loudly.] And not all whites are going to put up with it. And more and more are going to come to see that what we’re saying is correct.
NS: Well, we shall see. Thank you for your time, Mr. Linder.
AL: You bet. Good talking to you.
NS: Good luck with your rallies.
AL: Alright.
NS: Bye, now.
AL: Thanks, bye.
NS: Bye.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The FBI’s War on Richard Jewell
By Nicholas Stix
Part II of a series.
Why bother with investigating and evidence-gathering, when you can just call reporters and railroad some poor sap?
(In Part I, “Remembering Richard Jewell,” I wrote of the terrorist bombing, which killed one person directly and wounded 111, at the Atlanta Olympics in the wee hours of July 27, 1996. Via excerpted 911 transcripts, I showed the criminal incompetence of the Atlanta Police Department. And via other writers’ work, I recounted the vindictive campaign by Richard Jewell’s former employer, Piedmont College president Ray Cleere, to rob a hero of his finest hour, and to insinuate that he was instead a terrorist.)
Whispers and Shouts: Louis Freeh, Don Johnson, & Co.
Ray Cleere would later say that he felt that the folks at the FBI hadn’t paid sufficient heed to what he was saying, when on July 27, 1996 he called the Bureau’s hotline. That’s an odd complaint from a man who insisted he hadn’t said anything dramatic. In fact, Cleere set off a wave of hysteria at the Bureau and in the media.
And since leaking to the press was one of the main “investigative,” public relations, and political tools used by FBI Director Louis Freeh and his yes-men, the Bureau, inspired by President Cleere, began its own whispering campaign. An FBI official told Atlanta Journal-Constitution police reporter, the late Kathy Scruggs (and, ultimately, other reporters) of the “profile” of a “hero bomber,” who finds a bomb, so that he can be a hero.
On July 31, 1996, , Journal-Constitution reporters Scruggs, Martz, Fernandez and Walker wrote,
Wag-the-Dog Policing
The problem with the “profile” is that it didn’t exist. Rather, it was invented to fit Richard Jewell. And even then, the “profile” was inept, for Richard Jewell was not a loner.
(Six years later, scientist and biological warfare expert Steven Hatfill would be targeted in the anthrax case, and a similarly non-existent “profile” fabricated to fit him. The main difference between the Jewell and Hatfill cases is that in the latter case, a Marxist “scientist” fabricated the “profile” of Hatfill, based on a brilliant but little-watched, canceled TV show. Note that one non-FBI source from the case disagreed with me at the time, believing that the “scientist” was herself a Bureau patsy. I’ve yet to resolve that matter, though I still lean to my theory, due to the “scientist’s” penchant for contradicting herself. However, the m.o. used in seeking to railroad Hatfill was virtually identical to that used, in seeking to railroad Jewell.)
As Marie Brenner reported, with some 30,000 law enforcement personnel on hand, the Atlanta Olympics was a police convention, where lawmen heard the phony “profile” fingering Jewell directly from friends at the FBI, from colleagues who had learned of the leak from other lawmen with friends at the Bureau, or from reporters who asked them about it.
When the whispers came from an FBI official, and went into the ears of journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AP, NBC, CNN, the New York Post and other major media organs, they were soon broadcast nationwide.
One of the ironies of the media’s handling of the Jewell case is that while some journalists initially held back from reporting the FBI rumor identifying Jewell as the bomber, due to a lack of sufficient “independent corroboration,” as they began to hear the same story about Jewell from every lawman in town, soon enough, they all believed themselves to have an abundance of “independent sources.” In fact, they still had only one source, the original FBI leaker, who had spread the lie so successfully, that it was being repeated by thousands of lawmen.
What I wouldn’t give, to know the name of that FBI official.
What I do know, courtesy of Marie Brenner, is that FBI Director Louis Freeh personally ran the investigation by telephone, out of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.
That is not how proper FBI investigations are run.
When law enforcement officials either screw up a big case or are too lazy or incompetent to investigate it properly, yet want to hang someone for the crime, they telegraph to the whole world that the guy they are “investigating” is guilty as hell, and manipulate the public into accepting and confirming that verdict, er, judgment. Their first weapon will be the media, but they will also get interview subjects in the “investigation” to confirm interviewers’ own prejudices, by telegraphing to the subjects what they want to hear, e.g., a sinister interpretation of the most innocuous actions on the part of the suspect.
Marie Brenner describes Louis Freeh as having no patience with the work of investigation, and announcing almost immediately, pre-Jewell, regarding some drunk who’d been making threats in a bar the night before the bombing, and whom one of Freeh’s top men, Barry Mawn, had already excluded from consideration as a suspect, “We have our man.”
According to Brenner, Freeh dismissed Mawn and his other best men who were in Atlanta for the Olympics, Tom Fuentes and Robin Montgomery, from the case, and instead gave it to “Division 5,” which was run by Bob Bryant, and which is
Someone in the FBI decided, without a scintilla of incriminating evidence, that Richard Jewell was guilty, and then, working backwards from the presumption of guilt, designed a phony “profile” and “investigation” to rationalize that decision.
Brenner writes of Colonel Robert Ressler’s experience watching CNN on July 30, 1996,
With John Douglas, the since-retired Robert Ressler had co-founded the discipline of criminal-personality profiling while at the FBI’s behavioral-science unit. (The reader will have to decide for himself whether Ressler’s association with the Bureau is a point for or against him.)
Time’s James Collins quotes Michigan Law School professor Samuel Gross on wag-the-dog policing:
By “prosecution,” Gross means that law enforcement officers are violating their duty to investigate and carefully gather evidence, and have instead usurped the role of prosecutors. The National Security Division engaged in intimidation and manipulation, in order to compensate for their laziness and incompetence as investigators.
And as Collins notes, the bigger the case, the lower the standards for professional conduct typically are for law enforcement agents.
In a crime investigation, it’s alright to have a hunch that someone is the culprit; it’s not alright to assume that that suspect is guilty, and tell the world that he is guilty, in spite of a lack of any incriminating evidence.
On the telephone in D.C., Freeh micromanaged matters down to the case agents, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario.
According to Brenner, FBI special agent Diader Rosario had made a name for himself as a siege negotiator; special agent Don Johnson had made a different kind of name for himself – through aggressive incompetence, which had reportedly caused him to be exiled, via a “loss-of-effectiveness transfer,” from Albany, NY, to Atlanta. Such transfers work similar to the way in which incompetent, tenured public school teachers are shuttled from one school to another, so long as they haven’t raped or murdered anyone.
(In Albany, Johnson had decided that Mayor Thomas Whalen was guilty of some form of corruption (bribery? influence-peddling ?) regarding “tax assessments [the Mayor had] recommended … for clients of his law firm,” and went on a fishing expedition to find something on which to nail Whalen. Brenner writes, “According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson’s assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge.”)
But are FBI special agents tenured? And as the 1992 Ruby Ridge fiasco showed, not even murder is necessarily cause for the termination of an FBI special agent. Indeed, it can lead to promotions.
On July 30, special agents Rosario and Johnson visited Jewell at home, using the ruse of asking Jewell to help them make a training film at Atlanta FBI headquarters. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Jewell, the FBI had already leaked to the media that he was the Bureau’s prime suspect in the bombing.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional for law enforcement officers to use deception, in order to cause suspects unassisted by counsel to make incriminating statements. But it is unconstitutional to lie to a suspect’s lawyer. And since the Bureau had already told the media that Jewell was its suspect, but had not told Jewell, anything that Jewell said would probably have been inadmissible in court, anyway.
According to Jewell’s attorney, Watson Bryant, FBI personnel had lied to Bryant on July 30, in denying that Jewell was in the building. Bryant said that later that evening, when he was able to determine, through dialing *69 on his home phone, that telephone messages Jewell had recently left had emanated from Atlanta FBI headquarters, Bryant called the Bureau and ordered the telephone operator to inform the agents that they must immediately stop the informal interrogation.
One of the methods of intimidation the Bureau used in the Jewell case, and would repeat in the Hatfill case, was to openly, closely – Steven Hatfill charged that Bureau drivers “tailgated” him — follow a suspect everywhere with a caravan of as many as four vehicles, one behind the other. (In the Hatfill case, at one point in May 2003, when Hatfill walked up to an FBI surveillance vehicle in our nation’s capital, in order to photograph the driver, the latter hit the gas, and ran over Hatfill’s foot. In a measure of the Bureau’s above-the-law status, District police ticketed the hapless victim, who was fined $5!)
The media camped out 24-7 in front of Jewell’s mother’s apartment, where the now unemployed “suspect” was a virtual prisoner. (Although Jewell wasn’t formally fired, his employer, Anthony Davis, had told him not to come to work, due to the media horde that followed him everywhere. The FBI searched the apartment, confiscating Mrs. Jewell’s Tupperware and family pictures.
Marie Brenner writes,
Bucknam’s reported attitude is incompatible with a free society.
Brenner writes that Jewell’s “reverence for authority” and idealizing of “the investigative skills of the F.B.I.” prevented him from “understand[ing] that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy.”
(See Ruby Ridge.)
You could replace the name “Richard Jewell” with that of “Timothy Wind,” the straight-arrow LAPD cop from Wichita, Kansas, who in 1991 served himself up to LAPD investigators on a silver platter, following the Rodney King incident, in which Wind was one of the four officers who had had so much difficulty arresting a highly intoxicated, violent “motorist Rodney G. King.”
Fortunately for Officer Wind, as Lou Cannon recounted in his classic study of the Rodney King case and the 1992 Los Angeles race riot, Official Negligence, the LAPD Internal Affairs detectives interviewing him were so taken with Wind’s hayseed sincerity (a relatively new officer, he idealized the LAPD in the way that Jewell idealized the FBI) that they advised him to seek legal counsel. Conversely, the FBI agents who conducted the stealth interview of Richard Jewell had no such compassion, assumed the worst of him – though they had no evidence implicating him – and (as would also occur in the Hatfill case) took Jewell’s sincere wish to help as a sign either of stupidity or insanity.
I’m Not a Lawman, I Just Play One
Unlike the overweight Richard Jewell, Louis Freeh looked like a lawman from central casting, with a chiseled jaw, ramrod posture, and athletic build. And he had a dream resumé: Born in 1950, he graduated from Rutgers Law School in 1974; served as an FBI special agent from 1975-1981; “joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney” in 1981; “was appointed a Special Prosecutor by the Attorney General” in 1990; President George H.W. Bush appointed him United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1991; President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as FBI director in 1993, a position he held until he was forced out two years early, in 2001.
Although every FBI director will have his media detractors, he will almost always make some fans in the media. And yet, I have never read anything positive about Freeh’s eight-year (1993-2001) tenure at the FBI.
In the aftermath of the Jewell fiasco, the FBI rank-and-file was reportedly unhappy with Freeh’s leadership. But to draw favorable conclusions about the rank-and-file based on the foregoing would be a mistake. Consider the response of Atlanta agents to the Bureau’s relatively mild discipline of Don Johnson for his misconduct in the Jewell case, as reported by CNN on May 29, 1997.
That higher-ups were also guilty in no way absolves Don Johnson of his misconduct in the Jewell case.
James Collins had written in November 1996 of how, even after Jewell was cleared in the case, some FBI agents still felt he was guilty, even though the Bureau had never had any reason to suspect Jewell, in the first place. While the person who finds a bomb is routinely investigated, no competent lawman would equate Ray Cleere’s little exercise in character assassination with Richard Jewell’s guilt.
From top to bottom, the Atlanta FBI office was full of people who had no more conception of the distinction between right and wrong, and even less of the distinction between legal and illegal, than the Mafiosi they routinely investigated.
Exoneration and Vindication
Immediately after the bombing, when someone told Richard Jewell that he might get a book deal out of his heroics, he called an old lawyer friend he’d met on a job ten years earlier, Watson Bryant. Jewell and Bryant hadn’t spoken in over eight years.
Bryant, who specialized in real estate closings, was unknown to the Atlanta legal establishment. Once Bryant saw – via CNN and the July 30 Atlanta Journal-Constitution — that the FBI was seeking to railroad Jewell, he was a pit bull in his defense. In a 1997 interview with visiting Japanese journalism professor Ken Asano and Asano’s students, Jewell called Bryant, “my lucky strike.”
Mind you, since Bryant had no political or media contacts, his bark was considerably worse that his bite. But before anyone could figure that out, Bryant took the precaution of bringing in Jack Martin, whom he had heard was the best criminal defense attorney in Georgia, and who had connections to local U.S. Attorney, R. Kent Alexander.
If Richard Jewell was most fortunate to have a friend in Watson Bryant, he was equally fortunate that R. Kent Alexander was the local federal prosecutor. Not only did Alexander refuse to railroad Jewell without any incriminating evidence, he took the extraordinary measure of formally clearing him, in the following letter.
At the same time, Alexander also released the following statement:
Of course, that was nonsense on stilts about the publicity having been “neither designed nor desired by the FBI,” but the two statements are as good as an ordinary citizen with the “wrong” demographics is going to get from the federal Leviathan.
Jewell responded, “After 88 days of hell, it’s hard to believe that it is really over.”
Eric Rudolph
The real Olympic Park bomber is named Eric Rudolph. In October 1998, the Justice Department indicted Rudolph in the bombing. Rudolph was also indicted in the bombing of a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and in two abortion clinic bombings in Georgia and Alabama, respectively, in which he had murdered off-duty policeman Robert “Sandy” Sanderson, 35, and cost 41-year-old head abortion nurse Emily Lyons an eye. In addition to Lyons and the 111 wounded at the Olympics, Rudolph wounded nine in the blasts. That includes four people he wounded with a secondary bomb, aimed at first-responders, that he set off one hour after the first bomb at one abortion clinic, and five who were wounded at the lesbian nightclub, where police also found an unexploded secondary bomb aimed at first-responders. (That Rudolph called in the Olympic Park bomb twenty minutes before it exploded, claiming that it would go off in 30 minutes, may have been in order to kill as many arriving policemen as possible. Rudolph failed to figure on the incompetence and cowardice of the Atlanta PD.)
Eric Rudolph was apprehended in May, 2003. In order to escape potentially facing the death penalty, in April 2005, he accepted a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to his crimes, in exchange for being sentenced to serve four consecutive life terms life in federal prison, with no possibility of parole. Rudolph confessed to having committed the bombings out of opposition to abortion and homosexuality.
Had the Bureau succeeded in railroading Richard Jewell, it would have had no incentive to find the real bomber, and a strong disincentive: Admitting that the bomber was still out there would have been an implicit admission that it had railroaded an innocent man.
* * *
There’s nothing psychologically or morally wrong with hating a bomber, or any other murderer. But to be hostile towards someone whom you have no reason to believe committed a heinous crime, to interpret everything he says or does (or that anyone else says about him) as proof of his guilt, and to continue with the same mentality even after he has been cleared, is to be guilty both of incompetence and of pure, irrational malice. Richard Jewell was the victim of a group hate by incompetent FBI agents and administrators who were no more than opportunistic sociopaths with badges.
Coming in Part III: Tom Brokaw and the Media.
Part II of a series.
Why bother with investigating and evidence-gathering, when you can just call reporters and railroad some poor sap?
(In Part I, “Remembering Richard Jewell,” I wrote of the terrorist bombing, which killed one person directly and wounded 111, at the Atlanta Olympics in the wee hours of July 27, 1996. Via excerpted 911 transcripts, I showed the criminal incompetence of the Atlanta Police Department. And via other writers’ work, I recounted the vindictive campaign by Richard Jewell’s former employer, Piedmont College president Ray Cleere, to rob a hero of his finest hour, and to insinuate that he was instead a terrorist.)
Whispers and Shouts: Louis Freeh, Don Johnson, & Co.
Ray Cleere would later say that he felt that the folks at the FBI hadn’t paid sufficient heed to what he was saying, when on July 27, 1996 he called the Bureau’s hotline. That’s an odd complaint from a man who insisted he hadn’t said anything dramatic. In fact, Cleere set off a wave of hysteria at the Bureau and in the media.
And since leaking to the press was one of the main “investigative,” public relations, and political tools used by FBI Director Louis Freeh and his yes-men, the Bureau, inspired by President Cleere, began its own whispering campaign. An FBI official told Atlanta Journal-Constitution police reporter, the late Kathy Scruggs (and, ultimately, other reporters) of the “profile” of a “hero bomber,” who finds a bomb, so that he can be a hero.
On July 31, 1996, , Journal-Constitution reporters Scruggs, Martz, Fernandez and Walker wrote,
Investigators now say Jewell fits the profile of a lone bomber, and they believe he placed the 911 call himself. This profile generally includes a frustrated white man who is a loner, a former police officer, member of the military or police “wannabe” who seeks to become a hero.
Wag-the-Dog Policing
The problem with the “profile” is that it didn’t exist. Rather, it was invented to fit Richard Jewell. And even then, the “profile” was inept, for Richard Jewell was not a loner.
(Six years later, scientist and biological warfare expert Steven Hatfill would be targeted in the anthrax case, and a similarly non-existent “profile” fabricated to fit him. The main difference between the Jewell and Hatfill cases is that in the latter case, a Marxist “scientist” fabricated the “profile” of Hatfill, based on a brilliant but little-watched, canceled TV show. Note that one non-FBI source from the case disagreed with me at the time, believing that the “scientist” was herself a Bureau patsy. I’ve yet to resolve that matter, though I still lean to my theory, due to the “scientist’s” penchant for contradicting herself. However, the m.o. used in seeking to railroad Hatfill was virtually identical to that used, in seeking to railroad Jewell.)
As Marie Brenner reported, with some 30,000 law enforcement personnel on hand, the Atlanta Olympics was a police convention, where lawmen heard the phony “profile” fingering Jewell directly from friends at the FBI, from colleagues who had learned of the leak from other lawmen with friends at the Bureau, or from reporters who asked them about it.
When the whispers came from an FBI official, and went into the ears of journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AP, NBC, CNN, the New York Post and other major media organs, they were soon broadcast nationwide.
One of the ironies of the media’s handling of the Jewell case is that while some journalists initially held back from reporting the FBI rumor identifying Jewell as the bomber, due to a lack of sufficient “independent corroboration,” as they began to hear the same story about Jewell from every lawman in town, soon enough, they all believed themselves to have an abundance of “independent sources.” In fact, they still had only one source, the original FBI leaker, who had spread the lie so successfully, that it was being repeated by thousands of lawmen.
What I wouldn’t give, to know the name of that FBI official.
What I do know, courtesy of Marie Brenner, is that FBI Director Louis Freeh personally ran the investigation by telephone, out of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.
That is not how proper FBI investigations are run.
When law enforcement officials either screw up a big case or are too lazy or incompetent to investigate it properly, yet want to hang someone for the crime, they telegraph to the whole world that the guy they are “investigating” is guilty as hell, and manipulate the public into accepting and confirming that verdict, er, judgment. Their first weapon will be the media, but they will also get interview subjects in the “investigation” to confirm interviewers’ own prejudices, by telegraphing to the subjects what they want to hear, e.g., a sinister interpretation of the most innocuous actions on the part of the suspect.
Marie Brenner describes Louis Freeh as having no patience with the work of investigation, and announcing almost immediately, pre-Jewell, regarding some drunk who’d been making threats in a bar the night before the bombing, and whom one of Freeh’s top men, Barry Mawn, had already excluded from consideration as a suspect, “We have our man.”
According to Brenner, Freeh dismissed Mawn and his other best men who were in Atlanta for the Olympics, Tom Fuentes and Robin Montgomery, from the case, and instead gave it to “Division 5,” which was run by Bob Bryant, and which is
[T]he National Security Division, a former counterintelligence unit that has been looking for a purpose since the Cold War ended. Trained in observation, division members rarely made a criminal case–their strength was intimidation and manipulation rather than the deliberate gathering of evidence to be presented in court.
Someone in the FBI decided, without a scintilla of incriminating evidence, that Richard Jewell was guilty, and then, working backwards from the presumption of guilt, designed a phony “profile” and “investigation” to rationalize that decision.
Brenner writes of Colonel Robert Ressler’s experience watching CNN on July 30, 1996,
“They were talking about an F.B.I. profile of a hero bomber, and I thought, What F.B.I. profile? It rather surprised me.” According to Ressler, the definition of “hero homicide”—a person looking for recognition without an intent to kill—perhaps emerged as “hero bomber.” “There is no such classification as the hero bomber,” he told me recently. “This was a myth.… It occurred to me that there was no database of any bomber who lived with his mother, was a security guard and unmarried. How many hero bombers had we ever encountered? Only one that I know of, in Los Angeles, and his bomb did not go off.” Ressler knew that something was off; profiles are developed from a complex set of evidence and facts derived only in part from a crime scene. The bomb had been deadly, which was not consistent with the “hero complex.” Furthermore, he wondered, where did they get the information to put the profile together that fast? He asked himself, What came first here, the chicken or the egg? Was the so-called profile actually developed from the circumstances, or was it invented for Richard Jewell?
With John Douglas, the since-retired Robert Ressler had co-founded the discipline of criminal-personality profiling while at the FBI’s behavioral-science unit. (The reader will have to decide for himself whether Ressler’s association with the Bureau is a point for or against him.)
Time’s James Collins quotes Michigan Law School professor Samuel Gross on wag-the-dog policing:
[T]here's a point at which an open investigation of who committed a crime becomes instead the prosecution of suspect X. If that happens early on in the case, the chances of making a mistake are very great.
By “prosecution,” Gross means that law enforcement officers are violating their duty to investigate and carefully gather evidence, and have instead usurped the role of prosecutors. The National Security Division engaged in intimidation and manipulation, in order to compensate for their laziness and incompetence as investigators.
And as Collins notes, the bigger the case, the lower the standards for professional conduct typically are for law enforcement agents.
In a crime investigation, it’s alright to have a hunch that someone is the culprit; it’s not alright to assume that that suspect is guilty, and tell the world that he is guilty, in spite of a lack of any incriminating evidence.
On the telephone in D.C., Freeh micromanaged matters down to the case agents, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario.
According to Brenner, FBI special agent Diader Rosario had made a name for himself as a siege negotiator; special agent Don Johnson had made a different kind of name for himself – through aggressive incompetence, which had reportedly caused him to be exiled, via a “loss-of-effectiveness transfer,” from Albany, NY, to Atlanta. Such transfers work similar to the way in which incompetent, tenured public school teachers are shuttled from one school to another, so long as they haven’t raped or murdered anyone.
(In Albany, Johnson had decided that Mayor Thomas Whalen was guilty of some form of corruption (bribery? influence-peddling ?) regarding “tax assessments [the Mayor had] recommended … for clients of his law firm,” and went on a fishing expedition to find something on which to nail Whalen. Brenner writes, “According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson’s assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge.”)
But are FBI special agents tenured? And as the 1992 Ruby Ridge fiasco showed, not even murder is necessarily cause for the termination of an FBI special agent. Indeed, it can lead to promotions.
On July 30, special agents Rosario and Johnson visited Jewell at home, using the ruse of asking Jewell to help them make a training film at Atlanta FBI headquarters. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Jewell, the FBI had already leaked to the media that he was the Bureau’s prime suspect in the bombing.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional for law enforcement officers to use deception, in order to cause suspects unassisted by counsel to make incriminating statements. But it is unconstitutional to lie to a suspect’s lawyer. And since the Bureau had already told the media that Jewell was its suspect, but had not told Jewell, anything that Jewell said would probably have been inadmissible in court, anyway.
According to Jewell’s attorney, Watson Bryant, FBI personnel had lied to Bryant on July 30, in denying that Jewell was in the building. Bryant said that later that evening, when he was able to determine, through dialing *69 on his home phone, that telephone messages Jewell had recently left had emanated from Atlanta FBI headquarters, Bryant called the Bureau and ordered the telephone operator to inform the agents that they must immediately stop the informal interrogation.
One of the methods of intimidation the Bureau used in the Jewell case, and would repeat in the Hatfill case, was to openly, closely – Steven Hatfill charged that Bureau drivers “tailgated” him — follow a suspect everywhere with a caravan of as many as four vehicles, one behind the other. (In the Hatfill case, at one point in May 2003, when Hatfill walked up to an FBI surveillance vehicle in our nation’s capital, in order to photograph the driver, the latter hit the gas, and ran over Hatfill’s foot. In a measure of the Bureau’s above-the-law status, District police ticketed the hapless victim, who was fined $5!)
The media camped out 24-7 in front of Jewell’s mother’s apartment, where the now unemployed “suspect” was a virtual prisoner. (Although Jewell wasn’t formally fired, his employer, Anthony Davis, had told him not to come to work, due to the media horde that followed him everywhere. The FBI searched the apartment, confiscating Mrs. Jewell’s Tupperware and family pictures.
Marie Brenner writes,
What happened to Richard Jewell raises an important question central to Freeh’s future tenure: in the midst of a media frenzy, does the F.B.I. have any responsibility to protect the privacy of an innocent man? Over the last year, this concept was broached with Bob Bucknam, Louis Freeh’s chief of staff. During the long Pizza Connection trial in the 1980s [when Bucknam and Freeh were both federal prosecutors], it was Bucknam who handed Freeh files at the prosecutor’s table. According to highly placed sources in the bureau, Bucknam’s answer was immediate: the F.B.I. has no responsibility to correct information in the public domain.
Bucknam’s reported attitude is incompatible with a free society.
Brenner writes that Jewell’s “reverence for authority” and idealizing of “the investigative skills of the F.B.I.” prevented him from “understand[ing] that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy.”
(See Ruby Ridge.)
You could replace the name “Richard Jewell” with that of “Timothy Wind,” the straight-arrow LAPD cop from Wichita, Kansas, who in 1991 served himself up to LAPD investigators on a silver platter, following the Rodney King incident, in which Wind was one of the four officers who had had so much difficulty arresting a highly intoxicated, violent “motorist Rodney G. King.”
Fortunately for Officer Wind, as Lou Cannon recounted in his classic study of the Rodney King case and the 1992 Los Angeles race riot, Official Negligence, the LAPD Internal Affairs detectives interviewing him were so taken with Wind’s hayseed sincerity (a relatively new officer, he idealized the LAPD in the way that Jewell idealized the FBI) that they advised him to seek legal counsel. Conversely, the FBI agents who conducted the stealth interview of Richard Jewell had no such compassion, assumed the worst of him – though they had no evidence implicating him – and (as would also occur in the Hatfill case) took Jewell’s sincere wish to help as a sign either of stupidity or insanity.
I’m Not a Lawman, I Just Play One
Unlike the overweight Richard Jewell, Louis Freeh looked like a lawman from central casting, with a chiseled jaw, ramrod posture, and athletic build. And he had a dream resumé: Born in 1950, he graduated from Rutgers Law School in 1974; served as an FBI special agent from 1975-1981; “joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney” in 1981; “was appointed a Special Prosecutor by the Attorney General” in 1990; President George H.W. Bush appointed him United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1991; President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as FBI director in 1993, a position he held until he was forced out two years early, in 2001.
Although every FBI director will have his media detractors, he will almost always make some fans in the media. And yet, I have never read anything positive about Freeh’s eight-year (1993-2001) tenure at the FBI.
In the aftermath of the Jewell fiasco, the FBI rank-and-file was reportedly unhappy with Freeh’s leadership. But to draw favorable conclusions about the rank-and-file based on the foregoing would be a mistake. Consider the response of Atlanta agents to the Bureau’s relatively mild discipline of Don Johnson for his misconduct in the Jewell case, as reported by CNN on May 29, 1997.
FBI agents in Atlanta rallied in support of a fellow colleague Thursday after he returned to work following a five-day suspension without pay for his role in interviewing Olympic bombing suspect Richard Jewell.
Several dozen people applauded as agent Don Johnson entered Atlanta FBI headquarters. Asked if Johnson was a political scapegoat, agent Harry Grogan said, “Yes, I do.”
The FBI suspended Johnson last week and censured Atlanta special-agent-in-charge Woody Johnson and Kansas City special-agent-in-charge David Tubbs for their roles in the Jewell investigation.
That higher-ups were also guilty in no way absolves Don Johnson of his misconduct in the Jewell case.
James Collins had written in November 1996 of how, even after Jewell was cleared in the case, some FBI agents still felt he was guilty, even though the Bureau had never had any reason to suspect Jewell, in the first place. While the person who finds a bomb is routinely investigated, no competent lawman would equate Ray Cleere’s little exercise in character assassination with Richard Jewell’s guilt.
From top to bottom, the Atlanta FBI office was full of people who had no more conception of the distinction between right and wrong, and even less of the distinction between legal and illegal, than the Mafiosi they routinely investigated.
Exoneration and Vindication
Immediately after the bombing, when someone told Richard Jewell that he might get a book deal out of his heroics, he called an old lawyer friend he’d met on a job ten years earlier, Watson Bryant. Jewell and Bryant hadn’t spoken in over eight years.
Bryant, who specialized in real estate closings, was unknown to the Atlanta legal establishment. Once Bryant saw – via CNN and the July 30 Atlanta Journal-Constitution — that the FBI was seeking to railroad Jewell, he was a pit bull in his defense. In a 1997 interview with visiting Japanese journalism professor Ken Asano and Asano’s students, Jewell called Bryant, “my lucky strike.”
Mind you, since Bryant had no political or media contacts, his bark was considerably worse that his bite. But before anyone could figure that out, Bryant took the precaution of bringing in Jack Martin, whom he had heard was the best criminal defense attorney in Georgia, and who had connections to local U.S. Attorney, R. Kent Alexander.
If Richard Jewell was most fortunate to have a friend in Watson Bryant, he was equally fortunate that R. Kent Alexander was the local federal prosecutor. Not only did Alexander refuse to railroad Jewell without any incriminating evidence, he took the extraordinary measure of formally clearing him, in the following letter.
U.S. Department of Justice
United States Attorney
Northern District of Georgia
October 25, 1996
Jack Martin, Esq.
Suite 500 Grant Building
44 Broad Street NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30303-2327
Dear Jack:
This is to advise you that based on the evidence developed to date,
your client, Richard Jewell, is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation into the bombing on July 27, 1996, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. I am hopeful that Mr. Jewell will provide further cooperation as a witness in the investigation.
Sincerely,
Kent B. Alexander
United States Attorney
At the same time, Alexander also released the following statement:
In this case, the Jewells have regrettably also endured highly unusual and intense publicity that was neither designed nor desired by the FBI, and in fact interfered with the investigation. The public should bear in mind that Richard Jewell has at no time been charged with any crime in connection with the bombing.
Of course, that was nonsense on stilts about the publicity having been “neither designed nor desired by the FBI,” but the two statements are as good as an ordinary citizen with the “wrong” demographics is going to get from the federal Leviathan.
Jewell responded, “After 88 days of hell, it’s hard to believe that it is really over.”
Eric Rudolph
The real Olympic Park bomber is named Eric Rudolph. In October 1998, the Justice Department indicted Rudolph in the bombing. Rudolph was also indicted in the bombing of a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and in two abortion clinic bombings in Georgia and Alabama, respectively, in which he had murdered off-duty policeman Robert “Sandy” Sanderson, 35, and cost 41-year-old head abortion nurse Emily Lyons an eye. In addition to Lyons and the 111 wounded at the Olympics, Rudolph wounded nine in the blasts. That includes four people he wounded with a secondary bomb, aimed at first-responders, that he set off one hour after the first bomb at one abortion clinic, and five who were wounded at the lesbian nightclub, where police also found an unexploded secondary bomb aimed at first-responders. (That Rudolph called in the Olympic Park bomb twenty minutes before it exploded, claiming that it would go off in 30 minutes, may have been in order to kill as many arriving policemen as possible. Rudolph failed to figure on the incompetence and cowardice of the Atlanta PD.)
Eric Rudolph was apprehended in May, 2003. In order to escape potentially facing the death penalty, in April 2005, he accepted a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to his crimes, in exchange for being sentenced to serve four consecutive life terms life in federal prison, with no possibility of parole. Rudolph confessed to having committed the bombings out of opposition to abortion and homosexuality.
Had the Bureau succeeded in railroading Richard Jewell, it would have had no incentive to find the real bomber, and a strong disincentive: Admitting that the bomber was still out there would have been an implicit admission that it had railroaded an innocent man.
There’s nothing psychologically or morally wrong with hating a bomber, or any other murderer. But to be hostile towards someone whom you have no reason to believe committed a heinous crime, to interpret everything he says or does (or that anyone else says about him) as proof of his guilt, and to continue with the same mentality even after he has been cleared, is to be guilty both of incompetence and of pure, irrational malice. Richard Jewell was the victim of a group hate by incompetent FBI agents and administrators who were no more than opportunistic sociopaths with badges.
Coming in Part III: Tom Brokaw and the Media.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Anthrax: No Progress in Battle on Bioterror – Why?
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
Insight on the News
October 21, 2002
Media presentations of the investigation into the anthrax-letter attacks that last fall killed five people and sickened over a dozen others have been driven by theories, speculation and intense political partisanship. That situation has arisen due to various political forces' desire to kidnap the case in order to cause the U.S. biodefense program to be shut down, and due to a paucity of reliable, hard knowledge. The human mind hates a vacuum and ignorance is a most hospitable host to rampant speculation. Thus do we find ourselves no better informed on the one-year anniversary of the attacks than we were at the time.
With the help of anonymous FBI profilers and activist academics such as Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the American media have been wed to the notion that a disgruntled, white male loner from within the U.S. biowarfare-defense program at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases) in Maryland stole the anthrax bacteria, secretly did the lab work all by himself and carried out the attacks, perhaps to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Shane has dubbed this the "bioevangelist" theory.
The anthrax found in the letters was of the Ames strain, which originated in an infected cow in Texas in 1981. Until a 1997 federal law mandated strict controls and record-keeping for the scientific use and sharing of toxic substances, the Ames strain was passed around the world by scientists via mutual cooperation, with virtually no controls or oversight.
While it is possible that a small sample of the anthrax used in the attack was stolen from a U.S. bioweapons lab and then subsequently grown into larger quantities, it is much more likely that the perpetrator obtained the anthrax from any of a multitude of foreign sources.
Dr. Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University professor of microbiology, performed an exhaustive genetic analysis on a sample of the attack anthrax, comparing it to the same analysis of Ames anthrax samples held at U.S. bioweapons-defense installations. In Dr. Keim's study, published in the May 9, 2002, edition of Science magazine, he concluded that his results were unable to shed any light on the source of the anthrax — other than to conclude that its original source was the same 1981 Texas cow that was the source of the Ames anthrax samples at U.S. biowarfare-defense installations.
The notion that a single, renegade scientist secretly could have created the weapon has been shot down by Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, the former head of the biology section of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. On Sept. 18, in London's Financial Times, Dr. Spertzel argued, "I've heard nothing that has changed my mind." Spertzel is persuaded the anthrax attack involved active state support: "You could not possibly make that quality of product in a clandestine fashion. It's not the sort of thing you can do in your garage or in your basement."
While some experts maintain that it would be possible for a determined individual — even a talented bench technician — to produce high-quality anthrax with one trillion spores per gram, it seems extremely unlikely that this could be done without attracting attention. A lone bioweaponeer with the requisite knowledge and skills still would have extreme difficulty transferring the process to the type of setup that could be made in a basement or remote location.
And the cost would run into the millions. The specific equipment used to produce weaponized anthrax — through the various steps of initial bioreaction through weaponization by chemical treatment, proper spore-size control and drying — likely would run to several hundred thousand dollars. Add to that sum the required ancillary equipment, including scanning electron microscopes, not to mention the multimillion dollar infrastructure.
Substituting cheaper equipment for the tools normally used by a skilled scientist would cause serious problems of "process transfer." The preceding term commonly is used in the chemical and engineering community to describe taking a manufacturing process from one site and starting it up at another site, sometimes using different equipment. It almost would be impossible to repeat the original lab process and produce the same high-quality product with a homemade set-up without hundreds of trial-and-error tests. And when the first reasonable-looking, pure anthrax powder was produced, it would be essential to test it. This only can be done by sacrificing hundreds of Rhesus monkeys — an activity that is unlikely to go unnoticed by the neighbors.
If Drs. Keim and Spertzel are correct, the authorities have wasted precious time and resources on a wild goose chase. Hopefully, the lost time has not ensured the escape from detection of the anthrax terrorists.
By Nicholas Stix
Insight on the News
October 21, 2002
Media presentations of the investigation into the anthrax-letter attacks that last fall killed five people and sickened over a dozen others have been driven by theories, speculation and intense political partisanship. That situation has arisen due to various political forces' desire to kidnap the case in order to cause the U.S. biodefense program to be shut down, and due to a paucity of reliable, hard knowledge. The human mind hates a vacuum and ignorance is a most hospitable host to rampant speculation. Thus do we find ourselves no better informed on the one-year anniversary of the attacks than we were at the time.
With the help of anonymous FBI profilers and activist academics such as Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the American media have been wed to the notion that a disgruntled, white male loner from within the U.S. biowarfare-defense program at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases) in Maryland stole the anthrax bacteria, secretly did the lab work all by himself and carried out the attacks, perhaps to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Shane has dubbed this the "bioevangelist" theory.
The anthrax found in the letters was of the Ames strain, which originated in an infected cow in Texas in 1981. Until a 1997 federal law mandated strict controls and record-keeping for the scientific use and sharing of toxic substances, the Ames strain was passed around the world by scientists via mutual cooperation, with virtually no controls or oversight.
While it is possible that a small sample of the anthrax used in the attack was stolen from a U.S. bioweapons lab and then subsequently grown into larger quantities, it is much more likely that the perpetrator obtained the anthrax from any of a multitude of foreign sources.
Dr. Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University professor of microbiology, performed an exhaustive genetic analysis on a sample of the attack anthrax, comparing it to the same analysis of Ames anthrax samples held at U.S. bioweapons-defense installations. In Dr. Keim's study, published in the May 9, 2002, edition of Science magazine, he concluded that his results were unable to shed any light on the source of the anthrax — other than to conclude that its original source was the same 1981 Texas cow that was the source of the Ames anthrax samples at U.S. biowarfare-defense installations.
The notion that a single, renegade scientist secretly could have created the weapon has been shot down by Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, the former head of the biology section of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. On Sept. 18, in London's Financial Times, Dr. Spertzel argued, "I've heard nothing that has changed my mind." Spertzel is persuaded the anthrax attack involved active state support: "You could not possibly make that quality of product in a clandestine fashion. It's not the sort of thing you can do in your garage or in your basement."
While some experts maintain that it would be possible for a determined individual — even a talented bench technician — to produce high-quality anthrax with one trillion spores per gram, it seems extremely unlikely that this could be done without attracting attention. A lone bioweaponeer with the requisite knowledge and skills still would have extreme difficulty transferring the process to the type of setup that could be made in a basement or remote location.
And the cost would run into the millions. The specific equipment used to produce weaponized anthrax — through the various steps of initial bioreaction through weaponization by chemical treatment, proper spore-size control and drying — likely would run to several hundred thousand dollars. Add to that sum the required ancillary equipment, including scanning electron microscopes, not to mention the multimillion dollar infrastructure.
Substituting cheaper equipment for the tools normally used by a skilled scientist would cause serious problems of "process transfer." The preceding term commonly is used in the chemical and engineering community to describe taking a manufacturing process from one site and starting it up at another site, sometimes using different equipment. It almost would be impossible to repeat the original lab process and produce the same high-quality product with a homemade set-up without hundreds of trial-and-error tests. And when the first reasonable-looking, pure anthrax powder was produced, it would be essential to test it. This only can be done by sacrificing hundreds of Rhesus monkeys — an activity that is unlikely to go unnoticed by the neighbors.
If Drs. Keim and Spertzel are correct, the authorities have wasted precious time and resources on a wild goose chase. Hopefully, the lost time has not ensured the escape from detection of the anthrax terrorists.
The Anthrax Case: Hatfill Tormentor Back In Business
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
October 2, 2002
Toogood Reports
She’s b-a-a-a-ck!
Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She’s the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media’s consent, manipulated coverage of last fall’s anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks.
On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense program at USAMRIID (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases), at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, and to take some more cheap shots at the man whose career and life she has sought to destroy, Steven Hatfill.
The motive for Rosenberg’s campaign is her desire to destroy America’s biodefense program, and thus leave America defenseless against biological attack. Rosenberg is a Marxist; as former Marxist Irving Louis Horowitz once observed, contemporary Marxists believe that anything that harms the United States helps the Third World.
Rosenberg targeted Hatfill because he opposes bioweapons protocols Rosenberg supports, and because while living in the former Rhodesia (since 1980, Zimbabwe), he had supported Rhodesia’s white apartheid regime, while she apparently supports the black apartheidists who eventually prevailed, and who have since 1980 been led by genocidal dictator Robert Mugabe.
Beginning in late December or early January, Rosenberg began spreading two main stories, the “American” and the “European” version, plus “soft” and “hard” variations, respectively.
She told American reporters that the anthrax killer was a biodefense program insider, who had sent the letters not to kill anyone, but to warn the public of the danger of biological warfare. The Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist” theory. Rosenberg told more gullible European reporters, that the anthrax killer was a scientist who worked for the CIA, and who carried out the attacks on Agency orders.
In her “soft” variant, Rosenberg claimed that she had come up with her own “profile” of the attacker, based on publicly available information; in the “hard” variation, she insisted that she had FBI sources.
Rosenberg has tended to pair the American and soft versions, and the European and hard versions, respectively. What the European journalists didn’t know was that the version Rosenberg was feeding them came not from “FBI sources,” but from the defunct Chris Carter TV series, Millennium.
On July 22, I advised Hatfill that if he wanted to stay out of jail, he’d better take the offensive.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg adopted a low profile beginning about August
11. That was the same day that Steven Hatfill held the first of two dramatic press conferences, in which he named Rosenberg as one of his tormentors:
And yet, according to an August 11 AP story, Rosenberg insisted to Associated Press reporter Laura Meckler, “I have never mentioned any names, not publicly, not to the FBI, not to the Senate committee or staff, not to anyone. I have never said or written anything that pointed only to one specific person. If anyone sees parallels, that’s their opinion.”
Rosenberg made a similar denial to the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt.
Rosenberg’s denials are nonsense on stilts. She had long claimed to have a “profile,” but she didn’t have a profile, she had a person, Hatfill, from whom she derived the profile. Her reference to Hatfill as “Mr. Z,” in a June report she’d posted at the web site of Red Flags Weekly, was a transparent dodge.
The motivation for Rosenberg’s denials is transparent: She fears a libel lawsuit from Hatfill. But in the June 26 Hartford Courant, reporters Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan wrote that “Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological weapons expert from the Federation of American Scientists, and staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., both of whom were sent anthrax-contaminated letters. FBI agents were present at the meeting, sources said.”
Altimari and Dolan added, “For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.” (Hatfill’s reference to the Frederick News-Post was to an article which repeated the Hartford Courant story.)
And in an August 8 story, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy wrote,
In June, Henry Kelly, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, refused to post Rosenberg’s newest report on the anthrax case, because it clearly pointed to one person. According to an August 19 web log entry written for the FAS web site by Stephen Aftergood,
Soon after Steven Hatfill’s first press conference (August 11), Red Flags, the socialist medical web site which had posted Rosenberg’s June
“Mr. Z” report, took it down. FAS and Red Flags both sought to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits by Hatfill.
In the August 3 Washington Times, reporter Guy Taylor quoted Rosenberg as telling him that on August 1, the same day as one of the FBI’s highly publicized searches of Hatfill’s home, she was visited by agents and,
The foregoing passage has a surreal quality; the main suspect of any such conspiracy would be none other than Barbara Hatch Rosenberg! And the FBI agents asking the questions knew full well of Rosenberg’s role in Hatfill’s misery – after all, she’d sought them out.
I think that the real reason for the agents’ questions, was to let Rosenberg know that the Bureau would be in charge of the spin machine that she had previously controlled.
In early September, Rosenberg announced that she had come up with a new anthrax report, but would be sharing it solely with the FBI. That was clearly another move to limit her liability.
For an indication of how little the mainstream media has changed its ways of covering the anthrax case, note that in Reuters reporter James Vicini’s September 5 article, “FBI Criticized for Failing to Solve Anthrax Case,” Vicini confounded those who criticized the Bureau for having wasted time dogging Hatfill, with Rosenberg, who was behind the anti-Hatfill campaign.
Which brings us back to Rosenberg’s September 22 L.A. Times op-ed.
While repeating her unsupported theory that a biodefense insider was the anthrax attacker, she could not resist taking swipes at Hatfill, albeit in a fashion designed to limit her liability:
The anthrax investigation has not raised any questions about “the nature and value of the work at Ft. Detrick” (read: USAMRIID), but that was a segue to an attack on Hatfill. Since Steven Hatfill did inflate his credentials, Rosenberg can get away with her weasely language. But she omitted noting that his access was to “dangerous biological agents” such as the Ebola virus, for which he is a recognized, world-class researcher.
As the saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie.
The ultimate irony is that Rosenberg is charging a leading scientist with being unqualified to do his speciality, in an article for which she has misrepresented her own professional status. Rosenberg identified herself to the Los Angeles Times as “a research professor of molecular biology at State University of New York at Purchase.” In fact, she is a “research professor” of environmental science, a much less prestigious title. And there is no “state university” in Purchase; Rosenberg’s employer, Purchase College, is a four-year, state performing arts school, for which she neither teaches nor conducts research.
A reader might be skeptical as to how much mischief Rosenberg could have created. Rosenberg got Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle – recipients of two anthrax-contaminated letters last fall – to apply pressure to the FBI. In turn, the FBI harassed Hatfill; invented a phony story about bloodhounds in order to fraudulently induce a federal judge to issue a criminal search warrant which was executed before a tipped-off media on August 1; and on August 1 sent an e-mail to Steven Hatfill’s employer, Louisiana State University, illegally ordering it to cease and desist employing Hatfill in any Justice Department-funded program, which amounted to a federal blacklisting of Hatfill, whose field is funded entirely by the Justice Department. Not only was Hatfill terminated, but his boss at LSU, Steven Guillot, was also fired for his failure to immediately violate Hatfill’s rights.
But surely scientists would know better, you ask. Consider the following e-mail I received from a scientist just the other day:
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg still holds the key to Steven Hatfill’s fate, and remains central to the media-political maelstrom that has engulfed Hatfill.
But who cares about Hatfill, anyway? According to an ABC News poll published on Tuesday, only 20 percent of Americans feel that the government is trampling their civil liberties. Everything’s fine, as long as somebody else is getting stomped on.
Hey, let’s party!
By Nicholas Stix
October 2, 2002
Toogood Reports
She’s b-a-a-a-ck!
Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She’s the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media’s consent, manipulated coverage of last fall’s anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks.
On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense program at USAMRIID (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases), at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, and to take some more cheap shots at the man whose career and life she has sought to destroy, Steven Hatfill.
The motive for Rosenberg’s campaign is her desire to destroy America’s biodefense program, and thus leave America defenseless against biological attack. Rosenberg is a Marxist; as former Marxist Irving Louis Horowitz once observed, contemporary Marxists believe that anything that harms the United States helps the Third World.
Rosenberg targeted Hatfill because he opposes bioweapons protocols Rosenberg supports, and because while living in the former Rhodesia (since 1980, Zimbabwe), he had supported Rhodesia’s white apartheid regime, while she apparently supports the black apartheidists who eventually prevailed, and who have since 1980 been led by genocidal dictator Robert Mugabe.
Beginning in late December or early January, Rosenberg began spreading two main stories, the “American” and the “European” version, plus “soft” and “hard” variations, respectively.
She told American reporters that the anthrax killer was a biodefense program insider, who had sent the letters not to kill anyone, but to warn the public of the danger of biological warfare. The Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist” theory. Rosenberg told more gullible European reporters, that the anthrax killer was a scientist who worked for the CIA, and who carried out the attacks on Agency orders.
In her “soft” variant, Rosenberg claimed that she had come up with her own “profile” of the attacker, based on publicly available information; in the “hard” variation, she insisted that she had FBI sources.
Rosenberg has tended to pair the American and soft versions, and the European and hard versions, respectively. What the European journalists didn’t know was that the version Rosenberg was feeding them came not from “FBI sources,” but from the defunct Chris Carter TV series, Millennium.
On July 22, I advised Hatfill that if he wanted to stay out of jail, he’d better take the offensive.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg adopted a low profile beginning about August
11. That was the same day that Steven Hatfill held the first of two dramatic press conferences, in which he named Rosenberg as one of his tormentors:
According to The Frederick (Md.) News-Post of June 27, 2002, in June 2002 a woman named Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who affiliates herself with the Federation of American Scientists, saw fit to discuss me as a suspect in the anthrax case in a meeting with FBI agents and Senate staffers. I don’t know Dr. Rosenberg. I have never met her, I have never spoken or corresponded with this woman. And to my knowledge, she is ignorant of my work and background except in the very broadest of terms.
The only thing I know about her views is that she and I apparently differ on whether the United States should sign onto a proposed modification of the international biological weapons convention. This was something I opposed to safeguard American industry, and I believe she favored.
I am at a complete loss to explain her reported hostility and accusations. I don’t know this woman at all.
In any event, within several days after Dr. Rosenberg’s reported comments in Congress, the FBI called me again at home. I was asked if these agents could look at my apartment and swab the walls for anthrax spores. I was surprised at the request. Anthrax is a deadly inhalational disease.
And yet, according to an August 11 AP story, Rosenberg insisted to Associated Press reporter Laura Meckler, “I have never mentioned any names, not publicly, not to the FBI, not to the Senate committee or staff, not to anyone. I have never said or written anything that pointed only to one specific person. If anyone sees parallels, that’s their opinion.”
Rosenberg made a similar denial to the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt.
Rosenberg’s denials are nonsense on stilts. She had long claimed to have a “profile,” but she didn’t have a profile, she had a person, Hatfill, from whom she derived the profile. Her reference to Hatfill as “Mr. Z,” in a June report she’d posted at the web site of Red Flags Weekly, was a transparent dodge.
The motivation for Rosenberg’s denials is transparent: She fears a libel lawsuit from Hatfill. But in the June 26 Hartford Courant, reporters Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan wrote that “Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological weapons expert from the Federation of American Scientists, and staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., both of whom were sent anthrax-contaminated letters. FBI agents were present at the meeting, sources said.”
Altimari and Dolan added, “For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.” (Hatfill’s reference to the Frederick News-Post was to an article which repeated the Hartford Courant story.)
And in an August 8 story, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy wrote,
Rosenberg does not name Hatfill in her writings, but she has told authorities that she is referring to him.
In June, Henry Kelly, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, refused to post Rosenberg’s newest report on the anthrax case, because it clearly pointed to one person. According to an August 19 web log entry written for the FAS web site by Stephen Aftergood,
Rosenberg, a scientist at the State University of New York who also chairs the FAS Working Group on Biological Weapons, has been an outspoken critic of the FBI investigation and has publicly and privately advanced her own theories concerning who might have been responsible for the anthrax attacks.
“Rosenberg’s remarks on this topic do not represent the views of the Federation of American Scientists,” wrote FAS President Henry C. Kelly in a letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant published on July 1.
“Accordingly, the Federation declined to post on its web site a June 2002 analysis by Rosenberg that purported to identify a ‘likely perpetrator.’
“The Federation obviously encourages its members to provide officials with information and analysis that might be pertinent to the solution of a crime like the anthrax attacks,” said Kelly.
But “FAS opposes any effort to publicly identify possible suspects or ‘persons of interest’ outside of a formal law enforcement proceeding and has not published such accusations,” said Kelly.
Soon after Steven Hatfill’s first press conference (August 11), Red Flags, the socialist medical web site which had posted Rosenberg’s June
“Mr. Z” report, took it down. FAS and Red Flags both sought to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits by Hatfill.
In the August 3 Washington Times, reporter Guy Taylor quoted Rosenberg as telling him that on August 1, the same day as one of the FBI’s highly publicized searches of Hatfill’s home, she was visited by agents and,
“They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill.... Maybe [Dr. Hatfill] was being set up. That’s my speculation of what [the agents] thought….
“I just cannot imagine that it was a bona fide conspiracy,” she said, adding that she told the FBI she had heard nothing to suggest a group was trying to frame Dr. Hatfill.
The foregoing passage has a surreal quality; the main suspect of any such conspiracy would be none other than Barbara Hatch Rosenberg! And the FBI agents asking the questions knew full well of Rosenberg’s role in Hatfill’s misery – after all, she’d sought them out.
I think that the real reason for the agents’ questions, was to let Rosenberg know that the Bureau would be in charge of the spin machine that she had previously controlled.
In early September, Rosenberg announced that she had come up with a new anthrax report, but would be sharing it solely with the FBI. That was clearly another move to limit her liability.
For an indication of how little the mainstream media has changed its ways of covering the anthrax case, note that in Reuters reporter James Vicini’s September 5 article, “FBI Criticized for Failing to Solve Anthrax Case,” Vicini confounded those who criticized the Bureau for having wasted time dogging Hatfill, with Rosenberg, who was behind the anti-Hatfill campaign.
Which brings us back to Rosenberg’s September 22 L.A. Times op-ed.
While repeating her unsupported theory that a biodefense insider was the anthrax attacker, she could not resist taking swipes at Hatfill, albeit in a fashion designed to limit her liability:
The anthrax investigation has raised questions about the nature and value of the work at Ft. Detrick and has brought to light the granting of security clearance and free access to highly dangerous biological agents to someone with falsified credentials – very disturbing whether or not he turns out to be the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks.
The anthrax investigation has not raised any questions about “the nature and value of the work at Ft. Detrick” (read: USAMRIID), but that was a segue to an attack on Hatfill. Since Steven Hatfill did inflate his credentials, Rosenberg can get away with her weasely language. But she omitted noting that his access was to “dangerous biological agents” such as the Ebola virus, for which he is a recognized, world-class researcher.
As the saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie.
The ultimate irony is that Rosenberg is charging a leading scientist with being unqualified to do his speciality, in an article for which she has misrepresented her own professional status. Rosenberg identified herself to the Los Angeles Times as “a research professor of molecular biology at State University of New York at Purchase.” In fact, she is a “research professor” of environmental science, a much less prestigious title. And there is no “state university” in Purchase; Rosenberg’s employer, Purchase College, is a four-year, state performing arts school, for which she neither teaches nor conducts research.
A reader might be skeptical as to how much mischief Rosenberg could have created. Rosenberg got Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle – recipients of two anthrax-contaminated letters last fall – to apply pressure to the FBI. In turn, the FBI harassed Hatfill; invented a phony story about bloodhounds in order to fraudulently induce a federal judge to issue a criminal search warrant which was executed before a tipped-off media on August 1; and on August 1 sent an e-mail to Steven Hatfill’s employer, Louisiana State University, illegally ordering it to cease and desist employing Hatfill in any Justice Department-funded program, which amounted to a federal blacklisting of Hatfill, whose field is funded entirely by the Justice Department. Not only was Hatfill terminated, but his boss at LSU, Steven Guillot, was also fired for his failure to immediately violate Hatfill’s rights.
But surely scientists would know better, you ask. Consider the following e-mail I received from a scientist just the other day:
I held my annual house party last night for all the people that work for me, along with their significant others. The subject of going to war with Iraq came up, as well as last year’s anthrax attacks. None of these people are news-junkies but they do follow the news. It was interesting to observe that every single one of them regarded the anthrax attacks as a closed case. I heard quotes like “Yeah, it was that guy who used to work at the bioweapons lab.”
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg still holds the key to Steven Hatfill’s fate, and remains central to the media-political maelstrom that has engulfed Hatfill.
But who cares about Hatfill, anyway? According to an ABC News poll published on Tuesday, only 20 percent of Americans feel that the government is trampling their civil liberties. Everything’s fine, as long as somebody else is getting stomped on.
Hey, let’s party!
Scientist with Rhodesian Past Still Center of Media Crosshairs
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
September 30, 2002
Insight on the News
Much of the media's "case" against scientist Steven Hatfill, dubbed a "person of interest" by the FBI in its investigation of the anthrax-contaminated letters that last fall killed five people and sickened more than a dozen others, rests on two myths set in Africa during Hatfill's stays in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia prior to 1980) and South Africa. Rather than check out the phony stories, partisan media in the United States, Europe and Africa have echoed and, in some cases, embellished them.
Steven Hatfill long has claimed on his resume to have served in the Rhodesian special forces Special Air Services (SAS) and Selous Scouts counterinsurgency unit. In stories that have circulated around the world, journalists at South Africa's Cape Times and the liberal, German weekly newspaper Die Zeit additionally have claimed that Hatfill was allied with and gave weapons training to South African "neo-Nazis" (the Afrikaner Resistance Movement); the New York Times has suggested that he was responsible for a deadly outbreak of anthrax that hit Rhodesia from 1979-1980; and ABC News and the Associated Press (AP) have reported that Hatfill attended medical school in Zimbabwe near a "Greendale School."
Some reporters--notably staffers at The Forward, a New York-based weekly--found former members of Rhodesian special forces and the South African Afrikaner Resistance Movement, none of whom had any recollection of Hatfill. However, none of the journalists hunting Hatfill retracted the earlier claims. Even if true, Hatfill's service with the Rhodesian army is irrelevant to the anthrax investigation.
Let's examine the myth of anthrax as a weapon used in the Zimbabwean civil war. True, from early 1979-1980, an outbreak of anthrax hit black farms in Rhodesia, killing livestock, afflicting 10,738 black farmers with cutaneous (skin) anthrax and killing 182 of the farmers. The cause of the outbreak never has been determined. Ever since, supporters of the black-independence movement have insisted, without any supporting evidence, that the outbreak was a biological-warfare attack by the white Rhodesian army.
In a 1992 article that was not published in an academic journal, Dr. Meryl Nass, a close associate of Hatfill-nemesis Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, cited "journalist Jeremy Brick hill" [sic], who has insisted that anonymous military contractors told him that the outbreak was a military attack by the multiracial Selous Scouts. The credibility of Brick-hill, a self-described "antiapartheid activist" who claims to have fought on the side of the black rebels, is questionable. This reporter has not been able to find any record of massive, biowarfare-induced, cutaneous anthrax infections anywhere.
Journalists such as the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, the Cape Times' Tony Weaver, Die Zeit's Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff and the Zimbabwe Mirror's Chofamba-Sithole and Mlambo all have suggested that Hatfill had a hand in the anthrax outbreak. Innocent Chofamba-Sithole and Norman Mlambo have insisted that the Zimbabwean government proved that its white apartheid predecessor was behind the anthrax outbreak, but this reporter has been unable to find reports supporting their claims. Do these reporters accept the claims of dictator Robert Mugabe and his ilk on their face?
The second myth exploits the "Greendale School," the phony New Jersey return address on the anthrax-contaminated letters sent to Sens. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The Greendale School myth first was reported by ABC News on June 25, the day of the first high-profile search of Hatfill's home and property: "ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross also reported that investigators are intrigued by the fact that Hatfill lived for years near a Greendale Elementary School while attending medical school in Zimbabwe."
Ross' claim was repeated by countless news organizations and in later ABC reports. On Aug. 8, the AP's Jeremiah Marquez came up with a new wrinkle in order to immunize the Greendale School myth from ever being disproved: "The anthrax letters had a return address of the `Greendale School.' A school in Harare known as the Greendale School was actually named for Courtney Selous, a famed white hunter and the namesake of the Selous Scouts." Marquez' fiction was echoed by his AP colleagues Laura Meckler and Ted Bridis, and by the New York Post's Niles Lathem.
An official of the Zimbabwean Ministry of Schools in Harare has assured this reporter that there is no Greendale School; Zimbabwean expatriates I contacted, who lived in the same area during the same period as Hatfill, concurred.
Although there is a school located in Greendale, it never has been known as "Greendale School." No other schools ever have been built in the area. The fact is, there are "Greendales" and "Greendale Schools" all over the English-speaking world. The current significance of the address is to the journalists--most notably ABC's Ross and the AP's Marquez--who have created an alternate-media universe within which the phrase "Greendale School" condemns Hatfill. This would embarrass a middle-school journalism student.
Not content to be a brilliantly accomplished scientist, Hatfill apparently fancied himself a cross between Dr. Christian Barnard and James Bond. To that end, he created a "usable" past. The media have used that past in ways Hatfill never could have countenanced. However, the media frenzy over Hatfill has taught us nothing about the anthrax killer. All that we have learned, ultimately, is that for much of the mainstream media, being politically conservative and on the "wrong" side of Zimbabwe's bloody civil war is a capital crime.
By Nicholas Stix
September 30, 2002
Insight on the News
Much of the media's "case" against scientist Steven Hatfill, dubbed a "person of interest" by the FBI in its investigation of the anthrax-contaminated letters that last fall killed five people and sickened more than a dozen others, rests on two myths set in Africa during Hatfill's stays in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia prior to 1980) and South Africa. Rather than check out the phony stories, partisan media in the United States, Europe and Africa have echoed and, in some cases, embellished them.
Steven Hatfill long has claimed on his resume to have served in the Rhodesian special forces Special Air Services (SAS) and Selous Scouts counterinsurgency unit. In stories that have circulated around the world, journalists at South Africa's Cape Times and the liberal, German weekly newspaper Die Zeit additionally have claimed that Hatfill was allied with and gave weapons training to South African "neo-Nazis" (the Afrikaner Resistance Movement); the New York Times has suggested that he was responsible for a deadly outbreak of anthrax that hit Rhodesia from 1979-1980; and ABC News and the Associated Press (AP) have reported that Hatfill attended medical school in Zimbabwe near a "Greendale School."
Some reporters--notably staffers at The Forward, a New York-based weekly--found former members of Rhodesian special forces and the South African Afrikaner Resistance Movement, none of whom had any recollection of Hatfill. However, none of the journalists hunting Hatfill retracted the earlier claims. Even if true, Hatfill's service with the Rhodesian army is irrelevant to the anthrax investigation.
Let's examine the myth of anthrax as a weapon used in the Zimbabwean civil war. True, from early 1979-1980, an outbreak of anthrax hit black farms in Rhodesia, killing livestock, afflicting 10,738 black farmers with cutaneous (skin) anthrax and killing 182 of the farmers. The cause of the outbreak never has been determined. Ever since, supporters of the black-independence movement have insisted, without any supporting evidence, that the outbreak was a biological-warfare attack by the white Rhodesian army.
In a 1992 article that was not published in an academic journal, Dr. Meryl Nass, a close associate of Hatfill-nemesis Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, cited "journalist Jeremy Brick hill" [sic], who has insisted that anonymous military contractors told him that the outbreak was a military attack by the multiracial Selous Scouts. The credibility of Brick-hill, a self-described "antiapartheid activist" who claims to have fought on the side of the black rebels, is questionable. This reporter has not been able to find any record of massive, biowarfare-induced, cutaneous anthrax infections anywhere.
Journalists such as the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, the Cape Times' Tony Weaver, Die Zeit's Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff and the Zimbabwe Mirror's Chofamba-Sithole and Mlambo all have suggested that Hatfill had a hand in the anthrax outbreak. Innocent Chofamba-Sithole and Norman Mlambo have insisted that the Zimbabwean government proved that its white apartheid predecessor was behind the anthrax outbreak, but this reporter has been unable to find reports supporting their claims. Do these reporters accept the claims of dictator Robert Mugabe and his ilk on their face?
The second myth exploits the "Greendale School," the phony New Jersey return address on the anthrax-contaminated letters sent to Sens. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The Greendale School myth first was reported by ABC News on June 25, the day of the first high-profile search of Hatfill's home and property: "ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross also reported that investigators are intrigued by the fact that Hatfill lived for years near a Greendale Elementary School while attending medical school in Zimbabwe."
Ross' claim was repeated by countless news organizations and in later ABC reports. On Aug. 8, the AP's Jeremiah Marquez came up with a new wrinkle in order to immunize the Greendale School myth from ever being disproved: "The anthrax letters had a return address of the `Greendale School.' A school in Harare known as the Greendale School was actually named for Courtney Selous, a famed white hunter and the namesake of the Selous Scouts." Marquez' fiction was echoed by his AP colleagues Laura Meckler and Ted Bridis, and by the New York Post's Niles Lathem.
An official of the Zimbabwean Ministry of Schools in Harare has assured this reporter that there is no Greendale School; Zimbabwean expatriates I contacted, who lived in the same area during the same period as Hatfill, concurred.
Although there is a school located in Greendale, it never has been known as "Greendale School." No other schools ever have been built in the area. The fact is, there are "Greendales" and "Greendale Schools" all over the English-speaking world. The current significance of the address is to the journalists--most notably ABC's Ross and the AP's Marquez--who have created an alternate-media universe within which the phrase "Greendale School" condemns Hatfill. This would embarrass a middle-school journalism student.
Not content to be a brilliantly accomplished scientist, Hatfill apparently fancied himself a cross between Dr. Christian Barnard and James Bond. To that end, he created a "usable" past. The media have used that past in ways Hatfill never could have countenanced. However, the media frenzy over Hatfill has taught us nothing about the anthrax killer. All that we have learned, ultimately, is that for much of the mainstream media, being politically conservative and on the "wrong" side of Zimbabwe's bloody civil war is a capital crime.
Monday, October 08, 2007
DOJ Ordered Hatfill Dismissed: Should AG John Ashcroft Be Next?
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
September 5, 2002
Toogood Reports
On September 3, Louisiana State University celebrated Labor Day by firing biowarfare scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, on the orders of the Justice Department. Hatfill is one of the world’s leading biowarfare experts.
Hatfill had been hired on July 1 as the associate director of LSU’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training. Citing the confidentiality of all personnel decisions, university officials refused to say why they had terminated Hatfill, one month and one day after they had put him on paid, administrative leave from his $150,000-per year position. However, the program Hatfill was hired to help run, is funded virtually in its entirety (97 percent) by the Justice Department.
According to Associated Press reporter Christopher Newton,
Hatfill was initially hired by the center on an adjunct basis in April. Among the students in his LSU course for first-responders to biological weapons attacks was an FBI agent who — apologetically, according to Hatfill — participated in the August 1 search of Hatfill’s home, then in Frederick, Maryland.
That August 1 search played out to saturation coverage in front of a tipped-off media. When LSU put Hatfill on leave the next day, civilians and journalists alike assumed there was a connection between the FBI search and LSU’s action. However, most observers believed that the search had had an indirect, intimidating effect on LSU, rather than that the Justice Department had ordered LSU to fire Hatfill. Then, when Hatfill held his second press conference on August 25, and attacked Attorney General John Ashcroft as the main source of his misery, many of us scribes asked each other, “Why Ashcroft, instead of FBI Director Bob Mueller?” No one outside of the Justice Department or LSU knew that the former had sent the latter the e-mail ordering Hatfill’s dismissal the same day as the FBI search. Now, we all know what Hatfill must have known by the time he held his August 25 press conference.
That day, Hatfill attacked AG Ashcroft for making him a “person of interest,” and using that extra-legal designation to violate his constitutional rights.
According to LSU Vice-Provost for Academic Affairs Gregory Vincent, no one at LSU outside of the Division of Continuing Education knew of the Justice Department e-mail, but that claim beggars belief. In any event, Vincent admitted that the dismissal followed immediately upon the discussion of the e-mail among LSU’s upper echelons on Tuesday.
Hatfill’s spokesman and friend, Pat Clawson, released a statement by Hatfill Tuesday evening, complaining
The FBI and Justice Department officials have admitted that they have no incriminating evidence tying Hatfill to the anthrax-contaminated letters which last fall killed five people, and sickened over a dozen others. Although they have not charged Hatfill, they have terrorized him since June. Prior to that, Hatfill was victimized by a media frenzy led by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists.
Because Hatfill is a conservative and a patriot, most socialist writers have either jumped on him with both feet, or ignored the ongoing violations of his rights. Meanwhile, based on apparent partisan loyalty to John Ashcroft and George W. Bush, most GOP writers have also given the attorney general a free pass to violate the U.S. Constitution. Even so-called civil libertarians, like the Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff, have left Hatfill to twist in the wind. In “Second Thoughts about Ashcroft: Policies Over the Top,” conservative thinker Jim Antle finds that he can no longer give the attorney general the ringing endorsement he’d given him when he assumed the Justice Department’s mantle:
As so frequently occurs, the Bill of Rights has become for government officials, the media, and many civilians, an inconvenience. Today, people speak in tones of shock about early 20th century photographs of people lustily watching lynchings. Well, a huge crowd is watching the lynching of Steven Hatfill, and I see lots of smiles.
The Department of Justice has no legal power to decide whom Louisiana State University — or any other employer — may hire, or for how long. Officials at Justice can only decide whom they will hire to the Department itself. Their invention of yet another pretext for terrorizing Steven Hatfill is an abuse of power, and illegal.
It is time for Mr. Ashcroft to go.
By Nicholas Stix
September 5, 2002
Toogood Reports
On September 3, Louisiana State University celebrated Labor Day by firing biowarfare scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, on the orders of the Justice Department. Hatfill is one of the world’s leading biowarfare experts.
Hatfill had been hired on July 1 as the associate director of LSU’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training. Citing the confidentiality of all personnel decisions, university officials refused to say why they had terminated Hatfill, one month and one day after they had put him on paid, administrative leave from his $150,000-per year position. However, the program Hatfill was hired to help run, is funded virtually in its entirety (97 percent) by the Justice Department.
According to Associated Press reporter Christopher Newton,
Dr. Steven J. Hatfill’s firing from Louisiana State University came after the Justice Department told the school it could not use him on projects funded by grants from the agency, which has called Hatfill a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks.
LSU spokesman Greg Sands said Hatfill’s supervisor, Steven Guillot, received an e-mail Aug. 1 directing him to “cease and desist” from using Hatfill on Justice Department-funded projects.
Hatfill was initially hired by the center on an adjunct basis in April. Among the students in his LSU course for first-responders to biological weapons attacks was an FBI agent who — apologetically, according to Hatfill — participated in the August 1 search of Hatfill’s home, then in Frederick, Maryland.
That August 1 search played out to saturation coverage in front of a tipped-off media. When LSU put Hatfill on leave the next day, civilians and journalists alike assumed there was a connection between the FBI search and LSU’s action. However, most observers believed that the search had had an indirect, intimidating effect on LSU, rather than that the Justice Department had ordered LSU to fire Hatfill. Then, when Hatfill held his second press conference on August 25, and attacked Attorney General John Ashcroft as the main source of his misery, many of us scribes asked each other, “Why Ashcroft, instead of FBI Director Bob Mueller?” No one outside of the Justice Department or LSU knew that the former had sent the latter the e-mail ordering Hatfill’s dismissal the same day as the FBI search. Now, we all know what Hatfill must have known by the time he held his August 25 press conference.
That day, Hatfill attacked AG Ashcroft for making him a “person of interest,” and using that extra-legal designation to violate his constitutional rights.
According to LSU Vice-Provost for Academic Affairs Gregory Vincent, no one at LSU outside of the Division of Continuing Education knew of the Justice Department e-mail, but that claim beggars belief. In any event, Vincent admitted that the dismissal followed immediately upon the discussion of the e-mail among LSU’s upper echelons on Tuesday.
Hatfill’s spokesman and friend, Pat Clawson, released a statement by Hatfill Tuesday evening, complaining
LSU did not even have the decency to phone me directly... They did not even tell my supervisor or co-workers ... This could have been decided a month ago. Why did they wait until I moved all of my furniture and all of my possessions to Baton Rouge?
The FBI and Justice Department officials have admitted that they have no incriminating evidence tying Hatfill to the anthrax-contaminated letters which last fall killed five people, and sickened over a dozen others. Although they have not charged Hatfill, they have terrorized him since June. Prior to that, Hatfill was victimized by a media frenzy led by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists.
Because Hatfill is a conservative and a patriot, most socialist writers have either jumped on him with both feet, or ignored the ongoing violations of his rights. Meanwhile, based on apparent partisan loyalty to John Ashcroft and George W. Bush, most GOP writers have also given the attorney general a free pass to violate the U.S. Constitution. Even so-called civil libertarians, like the Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff, have left Hatfill to twist in the wind. In “Second Thoughts about Ashcroft: Policies Over the Top,” conservative thinker Jim Antle finds that he can no longer give the attorney general the ringing endorsement he’d given him when he assumed the Justice Department’s mantle:
[A]s far as going about “the business of resuscitating constitutional law” as I had predicted when he was nominated, he has regrettably done nothing of the sort.
As so frequently occurs, the Bill of Rights has become for government officials, the media, and many civilians, an inconvenience. Today, people speak in tones of shock about early 20th century photographs of people lustily watching lynchings. Well, a huge crowd is watching the lynching of Steven Hatfill, and I see lots of smiles.
The Department of Justice has no legal power to decide whom Louisiana State University — or any other employer — may hire, or for how long. Officials at Justice can only decide whom they will hire to the Department itself. Their invention of yet another pretext for terrorizing Steven Hatfill is an abuse of power, and illegal.
It is time for Mr. Ashcroft to go.
FBI Terrorizes Hatfill
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
August 26, 2002
Toogood Reports
Is the Federal Bureau of Investigation suffering the institutional equivalent of a nervous breakdown? That is the just one of the questions raised by Steven J. Hatfill’s second dramatic press conference, on Sunday, in which Hatfill continued to take the offensive, publicizing the facts of the case as he knows them, providing evidence that he believes should exculpate him, daring the FBI to be as open as he has been, and indicting his tormentors by name.
Hatfill accused the Bureau, the media (particularly the New York Times and its columnist, Nicholas Kristof) and Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of using his status as a “person of interest” as a pretext for terrorizing him, his girlfriend, and his friends. But his most stinging criticism, by far, was of attorney General John Ashcroft, a man who considers himself a devout Christian, but whom Hatfill accused of being something less than that. Fighting back tears, Hatfill threw down the gauntlet at Ashcroft’s feet, saying of the attorney general, “In my view, he has broken the Ninth Commandment:
Hatfill indicted the Justice Department, the FBI, and specifically, Ashcroft, of being behind the perpetual motion machine whereby a Justice Department leak would lead to a media feeding frenzy, which would in turn be used by the FBI to justify renewed activity against Hatfill.
Hatfill charged the FBI with following him 24 hours a day, tailing his car at a distance of as little as two feet, tearing up his apartment and that of his girlfriend during searches, illegally searching his girlfriend’s purse, and of trying to get his friends to lure him into privately confessing to having committed the anthrax letter attacks last fall which killed five people and sickened over one dozen others. Hatfill specifically named FBI special agents Jennifer Grant and Pamela Lay for the mistreatment of his girlfriend, and showed photographs that he and the girlfriend and taken of her trashed apartment.
Hatfill and his civil attorney, Victor Glasberg, also charged the Bureau with illegally leaking information to the media. Hatfill charged New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof with fabricating the claims that Hatfill had spent time in a “cabin” that functioned as a CIA safehouse, and that he had taken and failed three polygraph examinations in which he was asked about the anthrax attacks. Hatfill said “I have not taken, let alone failed, three polygraphs on anthrax since January. I had one polygraph session which the FBI did administer to me in January, and I was told I passed, and the examiner was satisfied that I had told the truth. Mr. Kristof never called me about this allegation, nor did he call my attorney.”
Hatfill offered to help the FBI with writing and blood samples the Bureau had never requested of him. He reported that on the days that the anthrax letters were mailed, he had been working 11-14 hour days in a team for SAIC, and offered the FBI work records, which he showed the audience. Observing that Iraq was in the possession of anthrax, and that several of the 911 terrorists were in the South Florida vicinity of American Media, Inc., the recipient of the first anthrax deadly anthrax letter, which killed photography editor Bob Stevens, Hatfill mocked the FBI’s dogged insistence on following only the “homegrown terrorist” theory.
On a personal note, I measure the effectiveness of the smear campaign against Hatfill, based on a conversation I had with an editor of another publication in mid-July. Although the editor was more familiar with Hatfill than I was, had always thought highly of him, and is one of the best-informed people in America, even he was beginning to have his doubts about the man.
Meanwhile, information released by the National Whistleblower Center and the Justice Department concluded that Van Harp, the director of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office, and the agent in charge of the anthrax investigation, was guilty of misconduct, in botching an internal investigation into the Bureau’s handling of the 1992 incident at Ruby Ridge.
In 1992, Rudy Ridge, Idaho, was the site of two of the darkest days in Bureau history. On August 21, U.S. Marshal William Degan and Sammy Weaver, the 14-year-old son of white separatist Randy Weaver, died in a gunfight. The following day, an FBI sharpshooter shot and killed Randy Weaver’s wife, 42-year-old Vicki Weaver, while she was holding the Weavers’ baby. The sharpshooter had been ordered to shoot to kill. The shoot-to-kill order, issued by FBI officials Richard Rogers and Larry Potts, violated FBI rules of engagement, and was later ruled illegal by a federal judge.
Rather than being prosecuted, dismissed, or suspended, most of the FBI supervisors responsible for Ruby Ridge were promoted.
A secret, 1999 report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, cited Harp for having “committed misconduct” by “helping to prepare an incomplete report on the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege that had the effect of protecting high-level FBI officials,” according to reporter Dan Eggen, writing in the August 24 Washington Post. Eggen reported that, “The report by Justice Department attorney Richard M. Rogers recommended a letter of censure or suspension for Harp, but Stephen R. Colgate, then the assistant attorney general, rejected that recommendation in January 2001, sources said.” Colgate protected all higher-level FBI officials who were responsible for the Ruby Ridge fiasco from being brought to justice.
Eggen noted that groups such as the National Whistleblower Center have complained -- as have FBI agents -- that the FBI has a corrupt organizational culture, in which bad agents and officials rise to the top, through covering up each other’s mistakes, while blaming underlings.
Dan Eggen reported that, “In a written statement, Harp said that leaks about his role in the Ruby Ridge inquiries violate ‘all sense of propriety’ and ignore reviews that exonerated him.”
At Steven Hatfill’s Sunday news conference, Harp was hoist on his own petard. Hatfill’s civil attorney, Victor Glasberg, observed that “Mr. Harp was soundly criticized in a report for ... by the Justice Dept’s Office of Professional Responsibility, claiming that he had engaged in substantial misconduct, relative to the Ruby Ridge matter. Well, it turned out that this report ended up getting leaked, and here’s Mr. Harp. In a written statement, Harp said that leaks about his role in the Ruby Ridge inquiries violate all sense of propriety. Well, I don’t know if that’s true. It may, but I’ll tell you this: The investigation that Mr. Harp is conducting of Steve Hatfill has as many leaks as the Titanic going down. So, he should take his own instructions....”
Glasberg announced that he was making a formal complaint on behalf of Hatfill about John Ashcroft, to the Justice Department and other agencies concerned with corruption of government power. The complaint has three particulars: The utilization of the terminology “person of interest,” which “has no sanction in law”; the violation of Hatfill’s privacy; and FBI/Justice Department leaks to the media.
Former FBI deputy director, Skip Brandon, appeared on Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN before and after the Hatfill conference. Brandon attempted to defend the Bureau, but inadvertently underscored Hatfill and Glasberg’s criticisms:
So, now Hatfill is not only a serial murderer, but his defense of himself proves his guilt, as well as that he is a publicity hound!
It appears that the FBI is undergoing some sort of institutional psychosis, due to the pressure it is under to catch someone by the anniversary of 911. Officials are cracking up, as they try to make Hatfill crack up. The hope is apparently that terrorizing Hatfill will drive him to do something that will retroactively justify the Bureau’s terror tactics. We are in the land of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Appearing on the same show with Skip Brandon was Patrick Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. Lang remarked that the FBI’s “domestic terrorist story ... doesn’t make any sense.” Regarding the anthrax letters, which were written in the style of Islamic terrorists, but which the FBI insists were written by homegrown terrorists to seem like Islamists, Lang observed wryly, “Sometimes a cigar really is a cigar.” As for the FBI’s behavior in persecuting Hatfill, Lang noted, “I never served in the FBI, but it is characteristic of large bureaucracies to behave in ways they’re not used to behaving, when they’re under pressure.”
Unfortunately, in the age of Leviathan’s war against terrorism, the FBI is under constant pressure. And its officials have increasingly responded to that pressure, by adopting the habit of behaving like either madmen or outlaws.
By Nicholas Stix
August 26, 2002
Toogood Reports
Is the Federal Bureau of Investigation suffering the institutional equivalent of a nervous breakdown? That is the just one of the questions raised by Steven J. Hatfill’s second dramatic press conference, on Sunday, in which Hatfill continued to take the offensive, publicizing the facts of the case as he knows them, providing evidence that he believes should exculpate him, daring the FBI to be as open as he has been, and indicting his tormentors by name.
Hatfill accused the Bureau, the media (particularly the New York Times and its columnist, Nicholas Kristof) and Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of using his status as a “person of interest” as a pretext for terrorizing him, his girlfriend, and his friends. But his most stinging criticism, by far, was of attorney General John Ashcroft, a man who considers himself a devout Christian, but whom Hatfill accused of being something less than that. Fighting back tears, Hatfill threw down the gauntlet at Ashcroft’s feet, saying of the attorney general, “In my view, he has broken the Ninth Commandment:
‘Thou shall not bear false witness’!”
Hatfill indicted the Justice Department, the FBI, and specifically, Ashcroft, of being behind the perpetual motion machine whereby a Justice Department leak would lead to a media feeding frenzy, which would in turn be used by the FBI to justify renewed activity against Hatfill.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman. Two weeks ago, I reluctantly appeared before the TV cameras to defend myself against the bizarre allegations that were appearing about me in the news media dealing with last year’s anthrax attacks. These allegations were [inaudible] by ongoing leaks from the Justice Department, and those leaks continue to this day. Several days ago, the Justice Department representatives confirmed to the Associated Press, that there was no evidence linking me to the anthrax attacks. Despite this lack of evidence, I am still hounded by the FBI, victimized in a never-ending torrent of leaks and general innuendoes from the United States Attorney General John Ashcroft and unnamed others, all of which has been amplified and embellished by the media. This fascination with my character appears to be part of a government-run effort to show the American people that it is proceeding vigorously and successfully with the anthrax investigation....
I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the eye, and declare to them, I am not the anthrax killer! I know nothing about the anthrax attacks. I had absolutely nothing to do with this terrible crime. My life is being destroyed by arrogant government bureaucrats, who have [inaudible] groundless innuendo and half information about me to gullible reporters who in turn repeat them, in the guise of news. I want to give you, the American people, an idea of what it is like to be named a ‘person of interest’ by the attorney general of the United States.
John Ashcroft has now publicly told the American people that I am a “person of interest” in last year’s anthrax attacks, just recently, several days ago, at a news conference in Newark, New Jersey. The FBI says that I am not a suspect, and that it does not use the term, “person of interest.” Mr. Ashcroft, however, continues to do this publicly, and I am here to complain about this, and its consequences.
My attorneys have filed an ethics complaint on Mr. Ashcroft’s conduct, as well that of as others involved in this matter, and I will be very interested to learn how well the Justice Department will police itself.
Mr. Ashcroft has repeatedly testified to his strong Christian values, and I highly respect him for this. Unlike many others, I was delighted when he was selected for his appointment to this high public office. In practice, however, by openly, repeatedly naming me as a “person of interest,” Mr. Ashcroft has not only violated Justice Department regulations and guidelines which bind him as the nation’s top law enforcement official, but in my view, he has broken the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shall not bear false witness”!
I have never met Mr. Ashcroft. I don’t know him, I’ve never spoken with him, and I do not understand his personalized focus on me. My lawyers can find no legal definition for a “person of interest.” I, however, have a working definition: A “person of interest” is someone who comes into being, when the government is under intense political pressure to solve a crime, but can’t do so.
Is it because the crime is too difficult to solve, or because the authorities are proceeding in what could mildly be called, a wrongheaded manner?...
It then becomes necessary for the FBI and other authorities to produce a [inaudible] body. Because there’s no suspect, and the authorities have nothing on which to base a prosecution, they pick a serviceable target. This should preferentially be a person about whom mysterious questions can be raised, someone with an interesting or colorful background. Then they give him a prejudicial label: “Person of interest.”...
What is useful, is that the FBI can be seen to be on the job. The press is hot on the trail, and the public is satisfied as Mr. Ashcroft continues to say, without any explanation, that progress in the anthrax letter attacks is being made.
God help us all, if the FBI’s pursuit of Mr. Ashcroft’s person of interest, me, represents that progress....
Almost a quarter century ago, I lived in a city that had a suburb named “Greendale.” The FBI and some in the media linked this with a non-existent Greendale School that appeared in the return address on four [sic] anthrax letters. ABC News even reported, as a fact, that I lived next door to that non-existent school for four years, citing unidentified government gumshoes.
My entire life history has been laid out on the Internet by reporters and conspiracy nuts....
It is one thing to have your alleged faults and misdeeds publicly aired, because you are seeking, as a candidate, for higher office. But I am a private citizen, and one who has not sought the limelight.
Remember your own travails, Mr. Ashcroft, when elements of your past were dug up by persons opposed to your selection as attorney general? I could dwell on this at length, but my principles bar me from doing so here.
In any event, Mr. Ashcroft, you asked for that; I did not. And I wonder how you would have coped, being on the end of the media frenzy that I have been enduring this entire summer.
Hatfill charged the FBI with following him 24 hours a day, tailing his car at a distance of as little as two feet, tearing up his apartment and that of his girlfriend during searches, illegally searching his girlfriend’s purse, and of trying to get his friends to lure him into privately confessing to having committed the anthrax letter attacks last fall which killed five people and sickened over one dozen others. Hatfill specifically named FBI special agents Jennifer Grant and Pamela Lay for the mistreatment of his girlfriend, and showed photographs that he and the girlfriend and taken of her trashed apartment.
Hatfill and his civil attorney, Victor Glasberg, also charged the Bureau with illegally leaking information to the media. Hatfill charged New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof with fabricating the claims that Hatfill had spent time in a “cabin” that functioned as a CIA safehouse, and that he had taken and failed three polygraph examinations in which he was asked about the anthrax attacks. Hatfill said “I have not taken, let alone failed, three polygraphs on anthrax since January. I had one polygraph session which the FBI did administer to me in January, and I was told I passed, and the examiner was satisfied that I had told the truth. Mr. Kristof never called me about this allegation, nor did he call my attorney.”
Hatfill offered to help the FBI with writing and blood samples the Bureau had never requested of him. He reported that on the days that the anthrax letters were mailed, he had been working 11-14 hour days in a team for SAIC, and offered the FBI work records, which he showed the audience. Observing that Iraq was in the possession of anthrax, and that several of the 911 terrorists were in the South Florida vicinity of American Media, Inc., the recipient of the first anthrax deadly anthrax letter, which killed photography editor Bob Stevens, Hatfill mocked the FBI’s dogged insistence on following only the “homegrown terrorist” theory.
On a personal note, I measure the effectiveness of the smear campaign against Hatfill, based on a conversation I had with an editor of another publication in mid-July. Although the editor was more familiar with Hatfill than I was, had always thought highly of him, and is one of the best-informed people in America, even he was beginning to have his doubts about the man.
Meanwhile, information released by the National Whistleblower Center and the Justice Department concluded that Van Harp, the director of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office, and the agent in charge of the anthrax investigation, was guilty of misconduct, in botching an internal investigation into the Bureau’s handling of the 1992 incident at Ruby Ridge.
In 1992, Rudy Ridge, Idaho, was the site of two of the darkest days in Bureau history. On August 21, U.S. Marshal William Degan and Sammy Weaver, the 14-year-old son of white separatist Randy Weaver, died in a gunfight. The following day, an FBI sharpshooter shot and killed Randy Weaver’s wife, 42-year-old Vicki Weaver, while she was holding the Weavers’ baby. The sharpshooter had been ordered to shoot to kill. The shoot-to-kill order, issued by FBI officials Richard Rogers and Larry Potts, violated FBI rules of engagement, and was later ruled illegal by a federal judge.
Rather than being prosecuted, dismissed, or suspended, most of the FBI supervisors responsible for Ruby Ridge were promoted.
A secret, 1999 report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, cited Harp for having “committed misconduct” by “helping to prepare an incomplete report on the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege that had the effect of protecting high-level FBI officials,” according to reporter Dan Eggen, writing in the August 24 Washington Post. Eggen reported that, “The report by Justice Department attorney Richard M. Rogers recommended a letter of censure or suspension for Harp, but Stephen R. Colgate, then the assistant attorney general, rejected that recommendation in January 2001, sources said.” Colgate protected all higher-level FBI officials who were responsible for the Ruby Ridge fiasco from being brought to justice.
Eggen noted that groups such as the National Whistleblower Center have complained -- as have FBI agents -- that the FBI has a corrupt organizational culture, in which bad agents and officials rise to the top, through covering up each other’s mistakes, while blaming underlings.
Dan Eggen reported that, “In a written statement, Harp said that leaks about his role in the Ruby Ridge inquiries violate ‘all sense of propriety’ and ignore reviews that exonerated him.”
At Steven Hatfill’s Sunday news conference, Harp was hoist on his own petard. Hatfill’s civil attorney, Victor Glasberg, observed that “Mr. Harp was soundly criticized in a report for ... by the Justice Dept’s Office of Professional Responsibility, claiming that he had engaged in substantial misconduct, relative to the Ruby Ridge matter. Well, it turned out that this report ended up getting leaked, and here’s Mr. Harp. In a written statement, Harp said that leaks about his role in the Ruby Ridge inquiries violate all sense of propriety. Well, I don’t know if that’s true. It may, but I’ll tell you this: The investigation that Mr. Harp is conducting of Steve Hatfill has as many leaks as the Titanic going down. So, he should take his own instructions....”
Glasberg announced that he was making a formal complaint on behalf of Hatfill about John Ashcroft, to the Justice Department and other agencies concerned with corruption of government power. The complaint has three particulars: The utilization of the terminology “person of interest,” which “has no sanction in law”; the violation of Hatfill’s privacy; and FBI/Justice Department leaks to the media.
Former FBI deputy director, Skip Brandon, appeared on Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN before and after the Hatfill conference. Brandon attempted to defend the Bureau, but inadvertently underscored Hatfill and Glasberg’s criticisms:
“It does not sound credible. That is not how the FBI I know acts. I hope it’s not, at any event.
“It doesn’t make any sense for the FBI or the Justice Department to have leaked ...
“We’re hearing only one side of this.
“He says he wants his privacy, but he keeps calling press conferences, trying to stretch his 15 minutes of fame.”
So, now Hatfill is not only a serial murderer, but his defense of himself proves his guilt, as well as that he is a publicity hound!
It appears that the FBI is undergoing some sort of institutional psychosis, due to the pressure it is under to catch someone by the anniversary of 911. Officials are cracking up, as they try to make Hatfill crack up. The hope is apparently that terrorizing Hatfill will drive him to do something that will retroactively justify the Bureau’s terror tactics. We are in the land of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Appearing on the same show with Skip Brandon was Patrick Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. Lang remarked that the FBI’s “domestic terrorist story ... doesn’t make any sense.” Regarding the anthrax letters, which were written in the style of Islamic terrorists, but which the FBI insists were written by homegrown terrorists to seem like Islamists, Lang observed wryly, “Sometimes a cigar really is a cigar.” As for the FBI’s behavior in persecuting Hatfill, Lang noted, “I never served in the FBI, but it is characteristic of large bureaucracies to behave in ways they’re not used to behaving, when they’re under pressure.”
Unfortunately, in the age of Leviathan’s war against terrorism, the FBI is under constant pressure. And its officials have increasingly responded to that pressure, by adopting the habit of behaving like either madmen or outlaws.
FBI Anthrax “Person of Interest” Positively ID’d In Princeton, NJ
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
August 18, 2002
Toogood Reports
People shown pictures of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill in Princeton, have positively ID’d the bioweapons scientist. The FBI has thoroughly canvassed the vicinity of a mail box on a street opposite Princeton University, that was found to be contaminated with anthrax spores. The Bureau does not believe that the mail box was cross-contaminated, say by a mail basket that had been contaminated elsewhere, but rather that at least one anthrax-contaminated letter had been dropped directly into the box.
As the person most frequently interviewed by print and TV reporters, Leticia Fraga, observed to NBC News reporters, she told the FBI agents that “He looked familiar, but only because I’d seen his face on TV.”
We’re now way past the border of Police Investigative Procedure 101, and deep in Keystone Kops Kountry. In a missing persons investigation, it would be perfectly acceptable, for canvassers to show a photograph of a single person in a neighborhood where the photographed subject was believed to have been, just before he disappeared. However, in a criminal investigation, where law enforcement officers seek to get a positive identification of a suspect, the photograph of the purported suspect must be mixed in a batch of photographs of non-suspects.* To show people only one person’s photograph is unprofessional, under normal circumstances. But these aren’t normal circumstances. The canvassing is being done eleven months after the letters were mailed, and after a series of targeted FBI leaks and countless media reports so biased as to fail to rise to the level of “yellow journalism,” ensured that everyone in the world with a TV set, can identify a picture of Steven Hatfill. Any identifications of his photograph should be inadmissible in court, on a par with showing a witness a lineup with only one man.
I say, “should be inadmissible,” because while I believe it would be inadmissible, as a matter of law, judges often dismiss the law, and in the current atmosphere of FBI and media-generated hysteria, even normally rigorous jurists might be tempted to take legal shortcuts.
Meanwhile, the FBI has put a full court press on Hatfill. As Susan Schmidt — with Rob Thomason and Tom Jackman — wrote in the August 15 Washington Post,
However, Schmidt reports on the contradiction between the FBI’s denials that they have “zeroed in on Hatfill,” and the Bureau’s use of techniques solely in the case of Hatfill, such as the bloodhound or bloodhounds who allegedly barked at Hatfill and his girlfriend.
Appearing on Aaron Brown’s CNN show on August 14, Hatfill’s friend and spokesman, Pat Clawson, derided the FBI for its lack of professionalism, and denied that Hatfill had ever been in Princeton.
Troublesome, indeed. The Founding Fathers would have been deeply troubled by the mere existence of a national police organization, as opposed to police departments maintained by the individual states. Such a concentration of power invites arrogance, which is the father of abuse of power. In the pre-911 Leviathan, the FBI was already dangerously out of control, as a series of tragically botched cases — most notoriously, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the pre-911 investigation of the Moussaoui connection to the 911 terrorists — attest to. But with emboldening of the federal authorities as part of President Bush’s “Homeland Security” strategy, the Bureau, under the misguided leadership of Director Robert Mueller, has utterly lost its bearings. It is persecuting a man who it is not clear had the motive, means, or opportunity to carry out the attacks, and on whom the Bureau — by FBI officials’ own admission — has not a shred of incriminating evidence.
What’s that you, say? “Of course, Hatfill had motive, means, and opportunity.” Once upon a time, I believed that too, but as the saying goes, you have to consider the source. The claims that Hatfill was a “disgruntled” scientist, who had constant access to USAMRIID’s bacteriological section, and who had received an up-to-date anthrax vaccine, all came from Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s rumor mill, Defamation, Inc. None of those “facts” have withstood scrutiny. And so, I am led to conclude, that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is a person deserving of heightened scrutiny.
Rosenberg knows her way around Princeton, she’s a member of a circle of scientists who seek to dismantle America’s biowarfare defenses, and she has admitted that the group has wished aloud for a biowarfare attack on the U.S.
On January 6, the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane quoted her as saying,
I’m not suggesting that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg did in fact, carry out the anthrax attacks, if for no other reason, than that she is not scientifically competent to do such advanced work. But through her media manipulations and defamatory campaign against Steven Hatfill, she has certainly proved herself if not a terrorist, then a dangerous person.
Some observers have suggested that the FBI’s campaign terrorizing Steven Hatfill might be a tactic to “divert” attention from its real interest. If that is the case, the Bureau has fooled not only the public, but its own personnel. And it’s looking more than a little “funny.”
*The italicized sentence is a correction; in the original, I had incorrectly stated how photo lineups properly work:
However, in a criminal investigation, where law enforcement officers seek to get a positive identification of a suspect, the photograph of the purported suspect must be mixed in a batch of photographs of other people (ideally, other possible suspects).
By Nicholas Stix
August 18, 2002
Toogood Reports
People shown pictures of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill in Princeton, have positively ID’d the bioweapons scientist. The FBI has thoroughly canvassed the vicinity of a mail box on a street opposite Princeton University, that was found to be contaminated with anthrax spores. The Bureau does not believe that the mail box was cross-contaminated, say by a mail basket that had been contaminated elsewhere, but rather that at least one anthrax-contaminated letter had been dropped directly into the box.
As the person most frequently interviewed by print and TV reporters, Leticia Fraga, observed to NBC News reporters, she told the FBI agents that “He looked familiar, but only because I’d seen his face on TV.”
We’re now way past the border of Police Investigative Procedure 101, and deep in Keystone Kops Kountry. In a missing persons investigation, it would be perfectly acceptable, for canvassers to show a photograph of a single person in a neighborhood where the photographed subject was believed to have been, just before he disappeared. However, in a criminal investigation, where law enforcement officers seek to get a positive identification of a suspect, the photograph of the purported suspect must be mixed in a batch of photographs of non-suspects.* To show people only one person’s photograph is unprofessional, under normal circumstances. But these aren’t normal circumstances. The canvassing is being done eleven months after the letters were mailed, and after a series of targeted FBI leaks and countless media reports so biased as to fail to rise to the level of “yellow journalism,” ensured that everyone in the world with a TV set, can identify a picture of Steven Hatfill. Any identifications of his photograph should be inadmissible in court, on a par with showing a witness a lineup with only one man.
I say, “should be inadmissible,” because while I believe it would be inadmissible, as a matter of law, judges often dismiss the law, and in the current atmosphere of FBI and media-generated hysteria, even normally rigorous jurists might be tempted to take legal shortcuts.
Meanwhile, the FBI has put a full court press on Hatfill. As Susan Schmidt — with Rob Thomason and Tom Jackman — wrote in the August 15 Washington Post,
“More than a dozen FBI agents have been diverted from white-collar criminal cases in the past two weeks to work on the intensifying investigation of whether bioterror expert Steven Hatfill had any role in last fall’s anthrax attacks, according to law enforcement sources.
“The former government scientist is under frequent surveillance, according to his spokesman.”
However, Schmidt reports on the contradiction between the FBI’s denials that they have “zeroed in on Hatfill,” and the Bureau’s use of techniques solely in the case of Hatfill, such as the bloodhound or bloodhounds who allegedly barked at Hatfill and his girlfriend.
Appearing on Aaron Brown’s CNN show on August 14, Hatfill’s friend and spokesman, Pat Clawson, derided the FBI for its lack of professionalism, and denied that Hatfill had ever been in Princeton.
I’ve got to tell you, Aaron, the showing of the Hatfill photograph in New Jersey is very troublesome. Because that’s not the way that investigators normally do a photo canvas. Normally when they’re doing such a canvas, they have several pictures with them so that they can weed out false positives, erroneous witnesses, that sort of thing. That’s not happening here at all. This is actually setting him up for a fall. It’s a very unfair investigative tactic. I’m a private investigator and a long-time private investigative reporter for news organizations, including CNN, and I’ve done these spreads myself, and this is simply not how you do it....
Aaron, we have a very troublesome situation developing here. And it basically boils down to this: Steve Hatfill told me as recently as this afternoon that he has never been in Princeton, New Jersey, to the best of his knowledge. Never been there. But we have the United States government coming out now and saying basically, “You know, fellow, you look a little funny. We don’t have anything on you. We don’t have any evidence that you committed a crime, but you look a little funny.”
Troublesome, indeed. The Founding Fathers would have been deeply troubled by the mere existence of a national police organization, as opposed to police departments maintained by the individual states. Such a concentration of power invites arrogance, which is the father of abuse of power. In the pre-911 Leviathan, the FBI was already dangerously out of control, as a series of tragically botched cases — most notoriously, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the pre-911 investigation of the Moussaoui connection to the 911 terrorists — attest to. But with emboldening of the federal authorities as part of President Bush’s “Homeland Security” strategy, the Bureau, under the misguided leadership of Director Robert Mueller, has utterly lost its bearings. It is persecuting a man who it is not clear had the motive, means, or opportunity to carry out the attacks, and on whom the Bureau — by FBI officials’ own admission — has not a shred of incriminating evidence.
What’s that you, say? “Of course, Hatfill had motive, means, and opportunity.” Once upon a time, I believed that too, but as the saying goes, you have to consider the source. The claims that Hatfill was a “disgruntled” scientist, who had constant access to USAMRIID’s bacteriological section, and who had received an up-to-date anthrax vaccine, all came from Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s rumor mill, Defamation, Inc. None of those “facts” have withstood scrutiny. And so, I am led to conclude, that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is a person deserving of heightened scrutiny.
Rosenberg knows her way around Princeton, she’s a member of a circle of scientists who seek to dismantle America’s biowarfare defenses, and she has admitted that the group has wished aloud for a biowarfare attack on the U.S.
On January 6, the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane quoted her as saying,
There have been a number of occasions when we’ve said in frustration, “What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.”
I’m not suggesting that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg did in fact, carry out the anthrax attacks, if for no other reason, than that she is not scientifically competent to do such advanced work. But through her media manipulations and defamatory campaign against Steven Hatfill, she has certainly proved herself if not a terrorist, then a dangerous person.
Some observers have suggested that the FBI’s campaign terrorizing Steven Hatfill might be a tactic to “divert” attention from its real interest. If that is the case, the Bureau has fooled not only the public, but its own personnel. And it’s looking more than a little “funny.”
*The italicized sentence is a correction; in the original, I had incorrectly stated how photo lineups properly work:
However, in a criminal investigation, where law enforcement officers seek to get a positive identification of a suspect, the photograph of the purported suspect must be mixed in a batch of photographs of other people (ideally, other possible suspects).
A High-Tech Lynching: ABC News, the FBI, and the “Greendale School” Myth
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
August 14, 2002
Toogood Reports
Are the FBI and the elite media interested in catching the right guy, or the right-wing white guy? In the case of the terrorist who last fall murdered five people and made 13 others ill via anthrax-contaminated letters, the feds and Big Media have decided that it would be expedient to railroad scientist Steven J. Hatfill, and have engaged in collusion towards achieving that end. The only problem is, that no one has produced one iota of evidence tying Hatfill to the crime. And so, the media and law enforcement have subjected Hatfill to the death of a thousand cuts, via incredible leaks, innuendoes, irrelevancies, and even outright fabrications. Apparently, Hatfill’s tormentors seek to make an eventual trial a mere formality, or perhaps even drive their victim to an act of such desperation, as to make a trial unnecessary.
The first two passages quoted above, are from e-mails sent to me during the past week, by two of the dozens of Zimbabwean expatriates I’d contacted, in seeking to determine if a “Greendale School” had ever existed in or near Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare. An official at the Zimbabwean Ministry of Schools, in Harare, assured me on August 2, that there is presently no “Greendale School.”
The third quoted passage is a statement by biowarfare scientist, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, from his August 11 press conference.
Since June 25, in hit pieces on Hatfill, countless American and foreign TV and print reporters have repeatedly emphasized that during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hatfill lived near a “Greendale Elementary School” or a “Greendale School” in a suburb of Harare.
The anthrax letters sent last fall to senators Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), both carried the same return address:
American journalists reported triumphantly, that Hatfill had lived near a Greendale School, as if this were the ultimate nail in his coffin, proving that he was guilty of having murdered five people and sickened thirteen others last fall, through anthrax-contaminated letters. And yet, not one of the articles published a single incriminating piece of evidence against Hatfill.
Readers have learned such “damning” facts as that Hatfill likes girls (the grown-up kind), carried a 9-millimeter pistol while living in a civil war zone, has studied and warned of the dangers of biowarfare attack, is “working on” a bioterrorism novel (actually he and his friend Roger Akers had completed and copyrighted it in 1998), and perhaps most pathetic of all, that federal bloodhounds had barked at Hatfill and his girlfriend.
The last two charges were made in a Newsweek article that appeared on the Web on August 4, and were echoed, with a straight face, on the NBC Nightly News (guest-hosted by Storm Phillips) the following day.
(Note that the FBI leaked the “bio-terror novel” red herring to reporter Rebecca Cooper, at ABC’s Washington affiliate, WJLA. Cooper, the former lover of then-Rep. Gary Condit, had provided Condit’s initial alibi for the time when Chandra Levy disappeared. Later, it turned out that Cooper had gotten her days wrong.)
Cooper reported, “This novel written by Steven Hatfill envisions a biological attack on Congress. It’s an attack so deadly that not only do members of Congress and congressional aides become ill, but hundreds of Washington residents become ill and many die as a result.”
In the context of Hatfill’s warnings since 1997 of the dangers of biowarfare attack, and his formal, 1999 study of such dangers, that he would co-write a novel on the topic would not alarm anyone who had done her homework.)
The “Greendale School” Myth was initially perpetrated by ABC News’ “Chief Investigative Correspondent,” Brian Ross, in a June 25 report. On June 26, the Hartford Courant’s Dave Altimari, Jack Dolan, and David Lightman repeated the claim, but without attributing it to Ross. From then on, countless reporters repeated the myth, attributing it to Ross’ ABC report. Even the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane, a major player in the anthrax business, cited ABC.
In an August 8 story, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy claimed that, “In Rhodesia, Hatfill lived near a school named Greendale,” without attributing the claim to ABC News.
A sage observer recently noted, “If there is a Greendale School, it is insignificant. But if there is no Greendale School, it is very significant.”
What the observer meant, was that the existence of a Greendale School in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe would hardly be incriminating. There are Greendales and Greendale Schools scattered about the English-speaking world. There are sixteen Greendales in the U.S. alone. Canada has active Greendale schools in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia (and a defunct one in Saskatchewan); Worcester, MA has one, as does Philadelphia; there are Greendale schools in Dublin, the Republic of Ireland, and even as far off as Christchurch, New Zealand.
And as correspondents and acquaintances have pointed out to me, even without counting reporters’ fictions, “Greendale” has enjoyed a rich fictional life. In the Andy Griffith Show, Don Knott’s character, “Deputy Barney Fife,” was offered a job as sheriff in the town of Greendale. And “Greendale” is the site of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and the role-playing kids’ game, Teenagers from Outer Space.
Perhaps the most famous “Greendale” is the fictional village on the British children’s TV show, Postman Pat, which has run for over twenty years, and which is even watched, for campy fun, by some adults. According to its web site, “[T]he animated television programme [is] now being shown in more than 40 countries from Australia to Japan.”
The notion that the existence of a Greendale School during the time of Steven Hatfill’s stay in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, would “prove” that he was the anthrax terrorist, would only impress someone who either had convinced himself that Hatfill was guilty, or who wanted him to be guilty so badly that he was indifferent or hostile to the truth. The Greendale Myth has been the story not of Steven J. Hatfill, but of reporters who were scientifically illiterate, lazy, and politically compromised.
After Brian Ross started the myth on its way, he was cited by hundreds of other reporters, none of whom bothered to check out the story. Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun, who cited Ross, deserves special mention, because he has been one of the most influential reporters covering the anthrax investigation, and because he has given prominent coverage to the hoaxer who created the campaign persecuting Hatfill, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg. Shane coined the term for one of Rosenberg’s hoaxes: The “bioevangelist” theory.
On rare occasion, a reporter writing on Hatfill would correctly state that there was a “Greendale neighborhood” or “district” near where Hatfill had lived or studied in Zimbabwe, but even those reporters failed to correct the false claims that he had lived near a “Greendale School.”
One AP reporter, Jeremiah Marquez, went beyond the call of corruption, in fabricating the story that “A school in Harare known as the Greendale School was actually named for Courtney Selous, a famed white hunter and the namesake of the Selous Scouts.”
Thus has Marquez sought to immunize from scrutiny all those who have perpetuated the Greendale School hoax.
Marquez’ failure to turn up a single incriminating fact against Hatfill, combined with his relentless repetition of politically incorrect irrelevancies from Hatfill’s past, imply that he is intent on keeping hoax alive.
On August 10, long after any diligent reporter would have determined that there was no “Greendale School,” ABC News’ “Chief Investigative Correspondent” Brian Ross was at it again: “ABC NEWS has also reported that investigators are intrigued by the fact that Hatfill lived for years near a Greendale Elementary School while attending medical school in Zimbabwe.”
On August 12, ABC News’ Brian Ross, co-authoring a story with his colleagues Barry Serafin and Pierre Thomas, was at it again, albeit permitting Hatfill’s lawyer to contradict him and his colleagues:
Like the other irrelevancies that have filled reports on Hatfill, the point of constantly reaffirming the existence of a “Greendale School” in Zimbabwe, is to predispose potential jurors to see everything about Hatfill in a sinister light, and railroad him, should he be arrested and tried. ‘Remember, this guy supported apartheid. Send him a message, with a vote to convict!’
The Greendale School Hoax’ current incarnation is the AP version.
Amazingly, other reporters have echoed Jeremiah Marquez – his colleagues, Laura Meckler and Ted Bridis did so on August 12 and 13, respectively, and the New York Post’s Niles Lathem, did so on August 13.
Lathem writes,
The media campaign against Hatfill was initially orchestrated by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chairwoman of the far-left, Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons. Although FBI officials initially discredited Rosenberg’s theories, instead of discouraging the campaign, the FBI and federal prosecutors have more recently exploited it to the fullest extent, with their own campaign of steady leaks. Thus, “discreet” searches of Hatfill’s home were always accompanied by a full complement of reporters, and even media helicopters, and the FBI leaked to the press that agents had found a bioterror novel on Hatfill’s computer hard drive. The newest leak is the claim that Hatfill was in London last November, at the same time that an anthrax hoax letter was sent to Sen. Tom Daschle.
I suppose, given the FBI’s current standards, that being in the city from which a hoax letter was sent, is enough to convict a man on five counts of capital murder. But why bother with the formality of a trial?
One of the more notorious FBI leaks followed the August 1 search of Hatfill and his girlfriend’s respective homes. FBI sources told Newsweek reporters Mark Miller and Daniel Klaidman, that bloodhounds that had been given “scent packs” from decontaminated anthrax letters to sniff, barked wildly at the sight of Hatfill. And yet, “On Sunday, a law enforcement official close to the case said the scientist has not ‘received any more attention than any other person of interest in the investigation,’” according to the AP’s Laura Meckler.
Such statements do not help the FBI with its credibility problem – or Laura Meckler with hers.
The NBC News reporter who repeated the bloodhound story said that the dogs’ reaction was the basis for the criminal warrants the FBI procured on August 1, to search Hatfill’s home and that of his girlfriend. On June 25, the feds had already searched, with Hatfill’s consent, his Frederick, MD home and car, and a refrigerated storage locker he rents in Ocala, FL. At the time, they found nothing, which is all they ever had on Hatfill. So why keep harassing the man?
Each explanation raises more questions than the one that preceded it. Even the NBC News reporter admitted that the anthrax attacker had left no fingerprints (he also did not lick the envelopes), and had surely handled the letters with rubber gloves. Getting some bloodhounds excited – perhaps with an item FBI agents had previously removed from Hatfill’s apartment – to cast suspicion on someone on whom the Bureau has no evidence, is bush league (under current circumstances, I don’t know whether I want you to pardon the pun). But then, we don’t know if the bloodhound story even happened.
The Bureau coined the phrase, “person of interest,” which is clearly a euphemism for “suspect,” but which does not carry the same legal niceties, like Miranda rights and the presumption of innocence. Unlike Hatfill, who has voluntarily sat down with FBI agents for several interviews, a suspect would have no reason to cooperate with authorities, because he would have been alerted that anything he said, could and would be used against him, in a court of law. And while the FBI still claims that Hatfill is only one of “20 or 30 persons of interest,” that ruse isn’t fooling anyone, especially when Bureau officials claim – or at least ABC News’ Brian Ross, Barry Serafin, and Pierre Thomas on August 12 asserted the officials claimed – that the Bureau isn’t ready to “clear” Hatfill.
The “bloodhound,” again. Apparently, since August 4, the other “bloodhounds” had died off. It is a sad day for American law enforcement, when the people running the Federal Bureau of Investigation think that they can presume the guilt of a man on whom they have no incriminating evidence, until which time they are ready to “clear” him. This is the stuff of communist show trials. Where have you gone, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.?
As Hatfill’s friend and spokesman, Pat Clawson, a former CNN reporter, told Wolf Blitzer on the latter’s CNN show, on August 12,
In 1996, the FBI colluded with media organizations in the attempted crucifixion of hero Richard Jewell, the security guard who had saved untold lives by discovering a bomb, and evacuating a busy area at the Atlanta Olympics. The Bureau and the media cast Jewell as the bomber.
Against all odds, Jewell saved himself, when he turned the tables on his persecutors. Eventually, Jewell got a public apology from the Bureau, and a couple of million dollars in settlements from media outlets.
As Hatfill said in his August 11 public statement,
Previously, FBI agents had told the media that while staking out Hatfill’s apartment building, they grew suspicious when they saw him throwing duffel bags of material in the dumpster in the back. Hatfill was merely preparing to move to his new job, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Or so he thought; Hatfill’s enemies have already succeeded in getting him suspended from his new job. The constant news glare and searches have given his new employer the willies, which was the point.)
And what were FBI agents doing staking out a man, on whom the Bureau had, and has, nothing?
The temptation to politicize the administration of criminal justice is ever present in law enforcement. The FBI suffered great embarrassment over its politically correct mishandling of investigations that properly handled, might have broken up the 911 terrorists’ cells. Under intense pressure to make an arrest in the anthrax attacks by the first anniversary of 911, the Bureau is apparently willing to go PC again, and pin the anthrax attacks on the white guy. The FBI is acting increasingly like the political police in a dictatorship. Meanwhile, the media, which are supposed to be a brake on arbitrary power, have instead acted more like a state-run Ministry of Propaganda, manufacturing lies and helping the FBI terrorize Steven Hatfill.
In previous articles, I advised Hatfill that if he did not soon go on the offensive, he might find himself sharing a cell with the likes of Jose Padilla, and might not be able to speak to his attorney, let alone the world. With his August 11 press conference, Hatfill and his new civil attorney, Victor Glasberg, have signaled that they are prepared to turn the heat on Hatfill’s tormentors.
As the saying goes, turnabout is fair play.
By Nicholas Stix
August 14, 2002
Toogood Reports
Are the FBI and the elite media interested in catching the right guy, or the right-wing white guy? In the case of the terrorist who last fall murdered five people and made 13 others ill via anthrax-contaminated letters, the feds and Big Media have decided that it would be expedient to railroad scientist Steven J. Hatfill, and have engaged in collusion towards achieving that end. The only problem is, that no one has produced one iota of evidence tying Hatfill to the crime. And so, the media and law enforcement have subjected Hatfill to the death of a thousand cuts, via incredible leaks, innuendoes, irrelevancies, and even outright fabrications. Apparently, Hatfill’s tormentors seek to make an eventual trial a mere formality, or perhaps even drive their victim to an act of such desperation, as to make a trial unnecessary.
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.
I will not be railroaded.
The first two passages quoted above, are from e-mails sent to me during the past week, by two of the dozens of Zimbabwean expatriates I’d contacted, in seeking to determine if a “Greendale School” had ever existed in or near Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare. An official at the Zimbabwean Ministry of Schools, in Harare, assured me on August 2, that there is presently no “Greendale School.”
The third quoted passage is a statement by biowarfare scientist, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, from his August 11 press conference.
Since June 25, in hit pieces on Hatfill, countless American and foreign TV and print reporters have repeatedly emphasized that during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hatfill lived near a “Greendale Elementary School” or a “Greendale School” in a suburb of Harare.
The anthrax letters sent last fall to senators Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), both carried the same return address:
“4th Grade
Greendale School
Franklin Park, N.J. 08852.”
American journalists reported triumphantly, that Hatfill had lived near a Greendale School, as if this were the ultimate nail in his coffin, proving that he was guilty of having murdered five people and sickened thirteen others last fall, through anthrax-contaminated letters. And yet, not one of the articles published a single incriminating piece of evidence against Hatfill.
Readers have learned such “damning” facts as that Hatfill likes girls (the grown-up kind), carried a 9-millimeter pistol while living in a civil war zone, has studied and warned of the dangers of biowarfare attack, is “working on” a bioterrorism novel (actually he and his friend Roger Akers had completed and copyrighted it in 1998), and perhaps most pathetic of all, that federal bloodhounds had barked at Hatfill and his girlfriend.
The last two charges were made in a Newsweek article that appeared on the Web on August 4, and were echoed, with a straight face, on the NBC Nightly News (guest-hosted by Storm Phillips) the following day.
(Note that the FBI leaked the “bio-terror novel” red herring to reporter Rebecca Cooper, at ABC’s Washington affiliate, WJLA. Cooper, the former lover of then-Rep. Gary Condit, had provided Condit’s initial alibi for the time when Chandra Levy disappeared. Later, it turned out that Cooper had gotten her days wrong.)
Cooper reported, “This novel written by Steven Hatfill envisions a biological attack on Congress. It’s an attack so deadly that not only do members of Congress and congressional aides become ill, but hundreds of Washington residents become ill and many die as a result.”
In the context of Hatfill’s warnings since 1997 of the dangers of biowarfare attack, and his formal, 1999 study of such dangers, that he would co-write a novel on the topic would not alarm anyone who had done her homework.)
The “Greendale School” Myth was initially perpetrated by ABC News’ “Chief Investigative Correspondent,” Brian Ross, in a June 25 report. On June 26, the Hartford Courant’s Dave Altimari, Jack Dolan, and David Lightman repeated the claim, but without attributing it to Ross. From then on, countless reporters repeated the myth, attributing it to Ross’ ABC report. Even the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane, a major player in the anthrax business, cited ABC.
In an August 8 story, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy claimed that, “In Rhodesia, Hatfill lived near a school named Greendale,” without attributing the claim to ABC News.
A sage observer recently noted, “If there is a Greendale School, it is insignificant. But if there is no Greendale School, it is very significant.”
What the observer meant, was that the existence of a Greendale School in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe would hardly be incriminating. There are Greendales and Greendale Schools scattered about the English-speaking world. There are sixteen Greendales in the U.S. alone. Canada has active Greendale schools in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia (and a defunct one in Saskatchewan); Worcester, MA has one, as does Philadelphia; there are Greendale schools in Dublin, the Republic of Ireland, and even as far off as Christchurch, New Zealand.
And as correspondents and acquaintances have pointed out to me, even without counting reporters’ fictions, “Greendale” has enjoyed a rich fictional life. In the Andy Griffith Show, Don Knott’s character, “Deputy Barney Fife,” was offered a job as sheriff in the town of Greendale. And “Greendale” is the site of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and the role-playing kids’ game, Teenagers from Outer Space.
Perhaps the most famous “Greendale” is the fictional village on the British children’s TV show, Postman Pat, which has run for over twenty years, and which is even watched, for campy fun, by some adults. According to its web site, “[T]he animated television programme [is] now being shown in more than 40 countries from Australia to Japan.”
The notion that the existence of a Greendale School during the time of Steven Hatfill’s stay in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, would “prove” that he was the anthrax terrorist, would only impress someone who either had convinced himself that Hatfill was guilty, or who wanted him to be guilty so badly that he was indifferent or hostile to the truth. The Greendale Myth has been the story not of Steven J. Hatfill, but of reporters who were scientifically illiterate, lazy, and politically compromised.
After Brian Ross started the myth on its way, he was cited by hundreds of other reporters, none of whom bothered to check out the story. Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun, who cited Ross, deserves special mention, because he has been one of the most influential reporters covering the anthrax investigation, and because he has given prominent coverage to the hoaxer who created the campaign persecuting Hatfill, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg. Shane coined the term for one of Rosenberg’s hoaxes: The “bioevangelist” theory.
On rare occasion, a reporter writing on Hatfill would correctly state that there was a “Greendale neighborhood” or “district” near where Hatfill had lived or studied in Zimbabwe, but even those reporters failed to correct the false claims that he had lived near a “Greendale School.”
One AP reporter, Jeremiah Marquez, went beyond the call of corruption, in fabricating the story that “A school in Harare known as the Greendale School was actually named for Courtney Selous, a famed white hunter and the namesake of the Selous Scouts.”
Thus has Marquez sought to immunize from scrutiny all those who have perpetuated the Greendale School hoax.
Marquez’ failure to turn up a single incriminating fact against Hatfill, combined with his relentless repetition of politically incorrect irrelevancies from Hatfill’s past, imply that he is intent on keeping hoax alive.
On August 10, long after any diligent reporter would have determined that there was no “Greendale School,” ABC News’ “Chief Investigative Correspondent” Brian Ross was at it again: “ABC NEWS has also reported that investigators are intrigued by the fact that Hatfill lived for years near a Greendale Elementary School while attending medical school in Zimbabwe.”
On August 12, ABC News’ Brian Ross, co-authoring a story with his colleagues Barry Serafin and Pierre Thomas, was at it again, albeit permitting Hatfill’s lawyer to contradict him and his colleagues:
Greendale School
Investigators are intrigued by the fact that Hatfill lived for years near a Greendale Elementary School while attending medical school in Zimbabwe, ABCNEWS has reported. Greendale School was the phony return address used in the anthrax letters.
However, Glasberg denied Hatfill knew of such a school in Harare, Zimbabwe.
“There is a subdivision in Harare called Greendale, [but Hatfill] did not live there,” Glasberg said. “The information we have is that there is no such Greendale School.”
Like the other irrelevancies that have filled reports on Hatfill, the point of constantly reaffirming the existence of a “Greendale School” in Zimbabwe, is to predispose potential jurors to see everything about Hatfill in a sinister light, and railroad him, should he be arrested and tried. ‘Remember, this guy supported apartheid. Send him a message, with a vote to convict!’
The Greendale School Hoax’ current incarnation is the AP version.
Amazingly, other reporters have echoed Jeremiah Marquez – his colleagues, Laura Meckler and Ted Bridis did so on August 12 and 13, respectively, and the New York Post’s Niles Lathem, did so on August 13.
Lathem writes,
While no Greendale School exists in New Jersey, a school in the Greendale suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe, is informally known as the Greendale school.
It’s actually named for a white Rhodesian fighter Courtney Selous – and the Rhodesian commando unit Hatfill joined was called the Selous Scouts.
The media campaign against Hatfill was initially orchestrated by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chairwoman of the far-left, Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons. Although FBI officials initially discredited Rosenberg’s theories, instead of discouraging the campaign, the FBI and federal prosecutors have more recently exploited it to the fullest extent, with their own campaign of steady leaks. Thus, “discreet” searches of Hatfill’s home were always accompanied by a full complement of reporters, and even media helicopters, and the FBI leaked to the press that agents had found a bioterror novel on Hatfill’s computer hard drive. The newest leak is the claim that Hatfill was in London last November, at the same time that an anthrax hoax letter was sent to Sen. Tom Daschle.
I suppose, given the FBI’s current standards, that being in the city from which a hoax letter was sent, is enough to convict a man on five counts of capital murder. But why bother with the formality of a trial?
One of the more notorious FBI leaks followed the August 1 search of Hatfill and his girlfriend’s respective homes. FBI sources told Newsweek reporters Mark Miller and Daniel Klaidman, that bloodhounds that had been given “scent packs” from decontaminated anthrax letters to sniff, barked wildly at the sight of Hatfill. And yet, “On Sunday, a law enforcement official close to the case said the scientist has not ‘received any more attention than any other person of interest in the investigation,’” according to the AP’s Laura Meckler.
Such statements do not help the FBI with its credibility problem – or Laura Meckler with hers.
The NBC News reporter who repeated the bloodhound story said that the dogs’ reaction was the basis for the criminal warrants the FBI procured on August 1, to search Hatfill’s home and that of his girlfriend. On June 25, the feds had already searched, with Hatfill’s consent, his Frederick, MD home and car, and a refrigerated storage locker he rents in Ocala, FL. At the time, they found nothing, which is all they ever had on Hatfill. So why keep harassing the man?
Each explanation raises more questions than the one that preceded it. Even the NBC News reporter admitted that the anthrax attacker had left no fingerprints (he also did not lick the envelopes), and had surely handled the letters with rubber gloves. Getting some bloodhounds excited – perhaps with an item FBI agents had previously removed from Hatfill’s apartment – to cast suspicion on someone on whom the Bureau has no evidence, is bush league (under current circumstances, I don’t know whether I want you to pardon the pun). But then, we don’t know if the bloodhound story even happened.
The Bureau coined the phrase, “person of interest,” which is clearly a euphemism for “suspect,” but which does not carry the same legal niceties, like Miranda rights and the presumption of innocence. Unlike Hatfill, who has voluntarily sat down with FBI agents for several interviews, a suspect would have no reason to cooperate with authorities, because he would have been alerted that anything he said, could and would be used against him, in a court of law. And while the FBI still claims that Hatfill is only one of “20 or 30 persons of interest,” that ruse isn’t fooling anyone, especially when Bureau officials claim – or at least ABC News’ Brian Ross, Barry Serafin, and Pierre Thomas on August 12 asserted the officials claimed – that the Bureau isn’t ready to “clear” Hatfill.
Despite Steven Hatfill’s strong denials this weekend of any involvement in last year’s fatal anthrax attacks, FBI officials told ABCNEWS today there are new questions about the former government scientist.
The FBI has not officially labeled Hatfill, 48, a suspect in the anthrax killings. But officials point to continued questions about the scientist and say they are also unable to clear him.
Perhaps most significant to the FBI, authorities say a police bloodhound reacted strongly to Hatfill and his apartment after being exposed to the scent retrieved from the anthrax letters under a new technology, reports ABCNEWS’ chief investigative reporter Brian Ross.”
The “bloodhound,” again. Apparently, since August 4, the other “bloodhounds” had died off. It is a sad day for American law enforcement, when the people running the Federal Bureau of Investigation think that they can presume the guilt of a man on whom they have no incriminating evidence, until which time they are ready to “clear” him. This is the stuff of communist show trials. Where have you gone, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.?
As Hatfill’s friend and spokesman, Pat Clawson, a former CNN reporter, told Wolf Blitzer on the latter’s CNN show, on August 12,
In all the years I covered the Justice Department for this network, I don’t have a clue what a ‘person of interest’ is. It’s not an official term. When in this country do we start casting a finger of accusation at people on national media, when does our government start doing this when it has no evidence to back up any kind of criminal charges? It’s just outrageous as an American that he is being subjected to this.”
In 1996, the FBI colluded with media organizations in the attempted crucifixion of hero Richard Jewell, the security guard who had saved untold lives by discovering a bomb, and evacuating a busy area at the Atlanta Olympics. The Bureau and the media cast Jewell as the bomber.
Against all odds, Jewell saved himself, when he turned the tables on his persecutors. Eventually, Jewell got a public apology from the Bureau, and a couple of million dollars in settlements from media outlets.
As Hatfill said in his August 11 public statement,
My girlfriend’s home was also searched. She was manhandled by the FBI upon their entry, not immediately shown the search warrant. Her apartment was wrecked while FBI agents screamed at her that I have killed five people and that her life would never be the same again.
Previously, FBI agents had told the media that while staking out Hatfill’s apartment building, they grew suspicious when they saw him throwing duffel bags of material in the dumpster in the back. Hatfill was merely preparing to move to his new job, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Or so he thought; Hatfill’s enemies have already succeeded in getting him suspended from his new job. The constant news glare and searches have given his new employer the willies, which was the point.)
And what were FBI agents doing staking out a man, on whom the Bureau had, and has, nothing?
The temptation to politicize the administration of criminal justice is ever present in law enforcement. The FBI suffered great embarrassment over its politically correct mishandling of investigations that properly handled, might have broken up the 911 terrorists’ cells. Under intense pressure to make an arrest in the anthrax attacks by the first anniversary of 911, the Bureau is apparently willing to go PC again, and pin the anthrax attacks on the white guy. The FBI is acting increasingly like the political police in a dictatorship. Meanwhile, the media, which are supposed to be a brake on arbitrary power, have instead acted more like a state-run Ministry of Propaganda, manufacturing lies and helping the FBI terrorize Steven Hatfill.
In previous articles, I advised Hatfill that if he did not soon go on the offensive, he might find himself sharing a cell with the likes of Jose Padilla, and might not be able to speak to his attorney, let alone the world. With his August 11 press conference, Hatfill and his new civil attorney, Victor Glasberg, have signaled that they are prepared to turn the heat on Hatfill’s tormentors.
As the saying goes, turnabout is fair play.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Dr. Strangelove Disarms America
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
Middle American News
August, 2002
Where some see a crisis, others see an opportunity.
Last fall, five victims were murdered by anthrax-laced letters, but according to recent reports in such diverse sources as the socialist New York Times and neo-conservative weekly standard, the feds now have dozens, even hundreds of potential suspects. But not according to Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, whom I have dubbed the Dr. Strangelove of the American Left, far and away the most quoted “scientist” in anthrax stories. Rosenberg, who neither teaches nor conducts research, is a tenured, activist professor of environmental science at New York State’s performing arts college at Purchase, and the chairwoman of the Marxist Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons. Since last fall, Rosenberg has insisted that the FBI knows exactly who the anthrax terrorist is, and that he is a “home-grown” (read: right-wing, Christian, white male) terrorist, not an Al Qaeda operative. Immediately following the anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began using them to try and force the federal government to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would undermine American sovereignty, and make America more vulnerable than ever to terrorist attacks.
In spite of (or because of) her extremist politics and lack of biowarfare expertise, Rosenberg has been quoted and cited by CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, Hartford Courant, Baltimore Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and American Prospect. Abroad, she has enjoyed fawning treatment by the BBC, Britain’s The Guardian and Scotsman newspapers, the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor, and on web sites as far away as the South African-based Dispatch (which several news reports have erroneously placed in Zimbabwe).
In the December 14, 2001 New York Times, reporter William J. Broad misrepresented Rosenberg as an “expert,” and led with her in his anthrax story:
In the February 27-March 5, New York-based Village Voice, columnist James Ridgeway reported that Rosenberg “says the FBI has likely known the identity of the anthrax perp since October...., and quoted her as saying, “Clearly they don’t want to name anyone until they have sufficient evidence to make a conviction. On the other hand, considering the small number of people they have to interview and that they’ve had five months to do it in – this is purely conjecture – they may be reluctant to pursue this guy because he may know too much.”
In the course of speaking with countless journalists, Rosenberg has frequently changed her story. To one audience she insists the “fact” that the anthrax terrorist was just seeking to spread fear, rather than kill anyone (what about the five people he murdered?!), “proves” that he is an American; to another audience, the “fact” that he tried to kill as many people as possible, “proves” that he is ... an American! Rosenberg has only been consistent, in ignoring evidence pointing to foreign terrorists, such as the skin inflammations that 911 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta suffered on his hands – possibly from handling anthrax spores – and for which he had sought treatment, and several secret meetings Atta had in Europe with Iraqi intelligence officers.
On January 6, the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane quoted Rosenberg as saying that the terrorist may have initiated an attack, in order to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist theory.” Rosenberg “says such a notion was occasionally aired jokingly in the small circle of those who worried about biological terror prior to Sept. 11. ‘There have been a number of occasions when we’ve said in frustration, “What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.’”
So, Rosenberg and her comrades were hoping for an anthrax attack, in order to alert the public to the danger of otherwise non-existent attacks, for which they would then blame the American government.
One moment Rosenberg claims that she has put together a “profile” of the killer entirely on her own, and the next, she insists that she has worked closely with the FBI, and knows that the anthrax killer was a specific scientist working on a germ warfare program, and acting with federal authorization.
As David Tell wrote on April 29 for the New York Post and the weekly standard, “Rosenberg claims the FBI has known the anthrax killer’s precise identity for months already ... [A]ccording to an account ... [she] 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.”
David Tell noted that Rosenberg’s academic title notwithstanding, she doesn’t understand anthrax, genetic research, biological warfare or the evidence at hand, and “[her] sensational pronouncements betray ... a surprisingly unscientific, even Oliver Stone-scale, incaution about the ‘facts’ at her disposal.”
And yet, the media here and abroad treat Rosenberg’s pronouncements as authoritative. In January, she was interviewed on the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor (my translation):
The Monitor’s producers embellished on Rosenberg’s embellishments. Immediately after discussing her charges, The Monitor “reported” that,
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.
Indeed, far from getting her “mad CIA scientist” story from FBI sources, Rosenberg stole the idea from Chris Carter’s brilliant but little-watched TV show, Millennium (1996-1999).
Rosenberg assumes the terrorist got his hands on the Ames strain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. But since 1997, when a new federal law mandated that all such transactions be recorded with the Centers for Disease Control, Fort Detrick, following scientific protocol, has shared Ames strain anthrax spores with researchers at seven institutions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Canadian and British scientists have since shared the Ames strain with colleagues at other, unreported locations, and it’s anyone’s guess how many institutions received Ames spores from USAMRIID prior to 1997. And the Iraqis have long had weaponized anthrax.
The best analysis I have seen of the method behind Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s particular brand of madness, came from Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival, on March 20:
And that’s exactly what Rosenberg wants.
In the June 26 Hartford Courant, Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan reported that “[Dr. Steven J.] Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg ... staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle ...” and FBI agents.
“For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.”
Immediately following the June 18 meeting, a slew of articles appeared in the American and even African media strongly suggesting that Dr. Steven J. Hatfill was the anthrax terrorist.
Steven J. Hatfill, a brilliant, flamboyant, American scientist who has for years warned of the dangers of bioterrorism, is a protege of William C. Patrick III, the scientist who ran the U.S. offensive biowarfare program that President Richard Nixon shut down over 30 years ago. Hatfill has consented to four FBI searches of his home and property, and most recently invited the Bureau – amid FBI press leaks to the media – to search his premises on June 25. None of the searches turned up anything. Using journalistic and political proxies, Rosenberg has cost Hatfill his security clearance, and hunted him from job to job, seeking to make it impossible for him to work.
Rosenberg, who has no evidence to support her accusations, has persecuted Hatfill, and sought his arrest because he is a patriotic defender of America’s biowarfare defense program, which she seeks to destroy; to distract the public and authorities’ attention from hunting down the real, presumably foreign terrorists; and last, but not least, as political revenge. Hatfill earned his medical degree in then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Having also trained and served in Rhodesian and American special forces, Hatfill fought against the guerillas who eventually toppled Rhodesia’s white, apartheid regime. Communist dictator Robert Mugabe, in power since 1980, has destroyed the nation, and is now deliberately starving up to half of its 12 million citizens. Rosenberg supports Mugabe.
In 1992, Dr. Meryl Nass, a longtime Rosenberg associate, published an article on the anthrax outbreak on black-owned farms in late 1970s’ Rhodesia. The outbreak initially affected livestock, and eventually over 10,000 blacks, predominantly with skin anthrax; 182 people died. Despite lacking any evidence to support her charge of a military anthrax attack, Nass claimed that the outbreak was a case of germ warfare carried out by the white, Rhodesian Army’s elite Selous Scouts unit. (Reportedly, Hatfill served in the Selous Scouts.) The article was not published in a scientific journal. More recently, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has gotten New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to suggest, in his July 2 and July 12 columns, that Hatfill (whom Kristof refers to as “Mr. Z”) worked on the “anthrax outbreak” in Rhodesia, and to call on the F.B.I. to arrest Hatfill:
On July 3, Hatfill’s attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me that his client, who is in a state of shock, does not want to talk to the press:
If Steven J. Hatfill does not recover from the shock of the ambush he is enduring, he may soon find himself unable to speak even with his attorney.
By Nicholas Stix
Middle American News
August, 2002
Where some see a crisis, others see an opportunity.
Last fall, five victims were murdered by anthrax-laced letters, but according to recent reports in such diverse sources as the socialist New York Times and neo-conservative weekly standard, the feds now have dozens, even hundreds of potential suspects. But not according to Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, whom I have dubbed the Dr. Strangelove of the American Left, far and away the most quoted “scientist” in anthrax stories. Rosenberg, who neither teaches nor conducts research, is a tenured, activist professor of environmental science at New York State’s performing arts college at Purchase, and the chairwoman of the Marxist Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons. Since last fall, Rosenberg has insisted that the FBI knows exactly who the anthrax terrorist is, and that he is a “home-grown” (read: right-wing, Christian, white male) terrorist, not an Al Qaeda operative. Immediately following the anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began using them to try and force the federal government to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would undermine American sovereignty, and make America more vulnerable than ever to terrorist attacks.
In spite of (or because of) her extremist politics and lack of biowarfare expertise, Rosenberg has been quoted and cited by CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, Hartford Courant, Baltimore Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and American Prospect. Abroad, she has enjoyed fawning treatment by the BBC, Britain’s The Guardian and Scotsman newspapers, the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor, and on web sites as far away as the South African-based Dispatch (which several news reports have erroneously placed in Zimbabwe).
In the December 14, 2001 New York Times, reporter William J. Broad misrepresented Rosenberg as an “expert,” and led with her in his anthrax story:
F.B.I. agents yesterday questioned a leading proponent of the theory that the anthrax attacks were the work of someone linked to a federal laboratory or contractor, asking her about possible clues to the culprit’s identity.
“They wanted to know whether I had ideas about who did it,” said the expert, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York at Purchase and chairwoman of a biological weapons panel at the Federation of American Scientists.
In the February 27-March 5, New York-based Village Voice, columnist James Ridgeway reported that Rosenberg “says the FBI has likely known the identity of the anthrax perp since October...., and quoted her as saying, “Clearly they don’t want to name anyone until they have sufficient evidence to make a conviction. On the other hand, considering the small number of people they have to interview and that they’ve had five months to do it in – this is purely conjecture – they may be reluctant to pursue this guy because he may know too much.”
In the course of speaking with countless journalists, Rosenberg has frequently changed her story. To one audience she insists the “fact” that the anthrax terrorist was just seeking to spread fear, rather than kill anyone (what about the five people he murdered?!), “proves” that he is an American; to another audience, the “fact” that he tried to kill as many people as possible, “proves” that he is ... an American! Rosenberg has only been consistent, in ignoring evidence pointing to foreign terrorists, such as the skin inflammations that 911 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta suffered on his hands – possibly from handling anthrax spores – and for which he had sought treatment, and several secret meetings Atta had in Europe with Iraqi intelligence officers.
On January 6, the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane quoted Rosenberg as saying that the terrorist may have initiated an attack, in order to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist theory.” Rosenberg “says such a notion was occasionally aired jokingly in the small circle of those who worried about biological terror prior to Sept. 11. ‘There have been a number of occasions when we’ve said in frustration, “What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.’”
So, Rosenberg and her comrades were hoping for an anthrax attack, in order to alert the public to the danger of otherwise non-existent attacks, for which they would then blame the American government.
One moment Rosenberg claims that she has put together a “profile” of the killer entirely on her own, and the next, she insists that she has worked closely with the FBI, and knows that the anthrax killer was a specific scientist working on a germ warfare program, and acting with federal authorization.
As David Tell wrote on April 29 for the New York Post and the weekly standard, “Rosenberg claims the FBI has known the anthrax killer’s precise identity for months already ... [A]ccording to an account ... [she] 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.”
David Tell noted that Rosenberg’s academic title notwithstanding, she doesn’t understand anthrax, genetic research, biological warfare or the evidence at hand, and “[her] sensational pronouncements betray ... a surprisingly unscientific, even Oliver Stone-scale, incaution about the ‘facts’ at her disposal.”
And yet, the media here and abroad treat Rosenberg’s pronouncements as authoritative. In January, she was interviewed on the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor (my translation):
Microbiologist [sic] 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.
The Monitor’s producers embellished on Rosenberg’s embellishments. Immediately after discussing her charges, The Monitor “reported” 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, 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.
Indeed, far from getting her “mad CIA scientist” story from FBI sources, Rosenberg stole the idea from Chris Carter’s brilliant but little-watched TV show, Millennium (1996-1999).
Rosenberg assumes the terrorist got his hands on the Ames strain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. But since 1997, when a new federal law mandated that all such transactions be recorded with the Centers for Disease Control, Fort Detrick, following scientific protocol, has shared Ames strain anthrax spores with researchers at seven institutions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Canadian and British scientists have since shared the Ames strain with colleagues at other, unreported locations, and it’s anyone’s guess how many institutions received Ames spores from USAMRIID prior to 1997. And the Iraqis have long had weaponized anthrax.
The best analysis I have seen of the method behind Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s particular brand of madness, came from Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival, on March 20:
The [February 25] Washington Times story by Jerry Seper about the FBI supposedly having a prime suspect in the anthrax attacks generated attention nationally. He claimed his sources were “law enforcement authorities” and “leading biochemical experts.” But you had to read deep into the article to discover his main source for this charge - Barbara Hatch Rosenberg ...
Interestingly, the Federation of American Scientists now promotes Rosenberg’s report on its own Web site by saying, “This report by Dr. Barbara Rosenberg prompted media reports that the FBI has a prime suspect in the anthrax attacks....”
The Times neglected to mention that [the Federation of American Scientists] is a group with a left-wing orientation that believes in the sanctity of international arms control agreements....
Near the end of Rosenberg’s own report, she tips her hand, saying, “The recent anthrax attack was a minor one but nonetheless we now see that it was made possible by a sophisticated government program…
That’s her way of attacking the Bush Administration for resisting a protocol to an international agreement supposedly banning biological weapons. She believes that if it is proven that a former U.S. government scientist is behind the anthrax attacks, then that makes the case for having an international treaty mandating inspections of government facilities. The U.S. fears that rogue nations would circumvent the treaty and our secrets would be exposed to the world.
And that’s exactly what Rosenberg wants.
In the June 26 Hartford Courant, Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan reported that “[Dr. Steven J.] Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg ... staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle ...” and FBI agents.
“For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.”
Immediately following the June 18 meeting, a slew of articles appeared in the American and even African media strongly suggesting that Dr. Steven J. Hatfill was the anthrax terrorist.
Steven J. Hatfill, a brilliant, flamboyant, American scientist who has for years warned of the dangers of bioterrorism, is a protege of William C. Patrick III, the scientist who ran the U.S. offensive biowarfare program that President Richard Nixon shut down over 30 years ago. Hatfill has consented to four FBI searches of his home and property, and most recently invited the Bureau – amid FBI press leaks to the media – to search his premises on June 25. None of the searches turned up anything. Using journalistic and political proxies, Rosenberg has cost Hatfill his security clearance, and hunted him from job to job, seeking to make it impossible for him to work.
Rosenberg, who has no evidence to support her accusations, has persecuted Hatfill, and sought his arrest because he is a patriotic defender of America’s biowarfare defense program, which she seeks to destroy; to distract the public and authorities’ attention from hunting down the real, presumably foreign terrorists; and last, but not least, as political revenge. Hatfill earned his medical degree in then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Having also trained and served in Rhodesian and American special forces, Hatfill fought against the guerillas who eventually toppled Rhodesia’s white, apartheid regime. Communist dictator Robert Mugabe, in power since 1980, has destroyed the nation, and is now deliberately starving up to half of its 12 million citizens. Rosenberg supports Mugabe.
In 1992, Dr. Meryl Nass, a longtime Rosenberg associate, published an article on the anthrax outbreak on black-owned farms in late 1970s’ Rhodesia. The outbreak initially affected livestock, and eventually over 10,000 blacks, predominantly with skin anthrax; 182 people died. Despite lacking any evidence to support her charge of a military anthrax attack, Nass claimed that the outbreak was a case of germ warfare carried out by the white, Rhodesian Army’s elite Selous Scouts unit. (Reportedly, Hatfill served in the Selous Scouts.) The article was not published in a scientific journal. More recently, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has gotten New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to suggest, in his July 2 and July 12 columns, that Hatfill (whom Kristof refers to as “Mr. Z”) worked on the “anthrax outbreak” in Rhodesia, and to call on the F.B.I. to arrest Hatfill:
Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts.
On July 3, Hatfill’s attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me that his client, who is in a state of shock, does not want to talk to the press:
My client doesn’t want to do anything, right now.... He’s really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he’s decided that the best approach is to ignore everything, and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something, but right now, he doesn’t [want to].
If Steven J. Hatfill does not recover from the shock of the ambush he is enduring, he may soon find himself unable to speak even with his attorney.
Media Manufacture Cloud of Suspicion over Hatfill
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
Posted July 22, 2002
Insight on the News
Just point and click. Those two steps, and a long e-mail "cc" list, apparently are all that it takes to spread a hoax around the world today. It works like a computer virus, and with consequences no less dangerous.
Just ask Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
Readers of Insight and her sister daily, the Washington Times, know Hatfill through his attempts over the years to warn the public of America's lack of readiness against biowarfare attacks. However, the mainstream liberal press ignored Hatfill — until late June, that is.
Since then Hatfill has gained international notoriety with a slew of stories in Time magazine, the American Prospect, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the Washington Post, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel and on Websites as far away as Zambia. The stories played up FBI searches of Hatfill's home and a refrigerated storage locker he rents — implying that he is the anthrax terrorist who killed five people last fall with contaminated mail. On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist.
"If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. … It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion."
Why would the FBI need to "exculpate" someone on whom it has nothing? The only cloud of "suspicion" hanging over Hatfill's head is the one manufactured by the media, who have let Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg lead them around by the nose.
Rosenberg blames the U.S. government for last fall's anthrax attacks. She long has called on the United States to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would permit international inspectors to visit our biodefense installations.
In a sympathetic portrait in the March 18 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that "Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the [1972 Biological Weapons] convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored."
Rosenberg has provided no evidence to support her charges. Meanwhile, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton has argued, her prescription would allow rogue nations such as Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to learn through protocol inspections about U.S. defensive programs and develop their own offensive programs.
Journalists usually refer to Rosenberg as a "microbiologist" and "State University of New York professor." Officially, she is a professor of environmental science at a performing-arts college, but she neither has conducted scientific research nor taught in years. And she has little biowarfare expertise. Working with the far-left Federation of American Scientists, Rosenberg is a taxpayer-supported, full-time activist.
Immediately after last fall's anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began claiming that the terrorist was an American scientist from within the biodefense establishment. However, her stories diverged wildly depending on her audience. In the European version, the terrorist was a CIA agent/contract scientist who acted on agency orders as part of a deadly germ-warfare experiment. Unbeknownst to European reporters, they were getting a plotline from the brilliant but little-watched TV show Millennium (1996-99).
In the American version, the terrorist was a "bioevangelist" (The Sun's Scott Shane) who sought not to harm anyone, but to warn the public of the dangers of biowarfare.
In setting up an American scientist to take the fall for the killings, Rosenberg may have seen an opportunity to discredit the U.S. biowarfare-defense program, get the Bush administration to sign on to international biowarfare protocols that would give our enemies access to our biodefense secrets and exact political revenge on Hatfill.
In seeking to convince readers of Hatfill's guilt in last fall's attacks, Kristof and the other journalists claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these "attacks."
No one ever has provided any evidence showing that the Rhodesian army carried out anthrax attacks, much less that Hatfill participated in them. Kristof and company merely are regurgitating a tainted 1992 article by longtime Rosenberg associate Meryl Nass. The Nass report purported to explain the 1978-80 anthrax outbreak that affected 10,000 black farmers, predominantly with cutaneous anthrax, killing 182. In her "explanation," Nass leaped from one politically loaded speculation to another without any evidence.
The flamboyant, brilliant Hatfill earned his medical degree in Rhodesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s while serving in U.S. and Rhodesian special forces. In Rhodesia, he fought against communist guerrillas. One must recall that in Rhodesia — now named Zimbabwe, and ruled since 1980 by genocidal communist Robert Mugabe — the choice was never between apartheid and freedom, but rather between white or black apartheid.
Hatfill's attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me, "My client doesn't want to do anything, right now. … He's really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he's decided that the best approach is to ignore everything and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something but, right now, he doesn't."
If Hatfill doesn't engage the campaign against him in a hurry, he soon may find himself sharing a cell with the likes of José Padilla.
By Nicholas Stix
Posted July 22, 2002
Insight on the News
Just point and click. Those two steps, and a long e-mail "cc" list, apparently are all that it takes to spread a hoax around the world today. It works like a computer virus, and with consequences no less dangerous.
Just ask Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
Readers of Insight and her sister daily, the Washington Times, know Hatfill through his attempts over the years to warn the public of America's lack of readiness against biowarfare attacks. However, the mainstream liberal press ignored Hatfill — until late June, that is.
Since then Hatfill has gained international notoriety with a slew of stories in Time magazine, the American Prospect, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the Washington Post, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel and on Websites as far away as Zambia. The stories played up FBI searches of Hatfill's home and a refrigerated storage locker he rents — implying that he is the anthrax terrorist who killed five people last fall with contaminated mail. On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist.
"If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. … It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion."
Why would the FBI need to "exculpate" someone on whom it has nothing? The only cloud of "suspicion" hanging over Hatfill's head is the one manufactured by the media, who have let Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg lead them around by the nose.
Rosenberg blames the U.S. government for last fall's anthrax attacks. She long has called on the United States to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would permit international inspectors to visit our biodefense installations.
In a sympathetic portrait in the March 18 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that "Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the [1972 Biological Weapons] convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored."
Rosenberg has provided no evidence to support her charges. Meanwhile, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton has argued, her prescription would allow rogue nations such as Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to learn through protocol inspections about U.S. defensive programs and develop their own offensive programs.
Journalists usually refer to Rosenberg as a "microbiologist" and "State University of New York professor." Officially, she is a professor of environmental science at a performing-arts college, but she neither has conducted scientific research nor taught in years. And she has little biowarfare expertise. Working with the far-left Federation of American Scientists, Rosenberg is a taxpayer-supported, full-time activist.
Immediately after last fall's anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began claiming that the terrorist was an American scientist from within the biodefense establishment. However, her stories diverged wildly depending on her audience. In the European version, the terrorist was a CIA agent/contract scientist who acted on agency orders as part of a deadly germ-warfare experiment. Unbeknownst to European reporters, they were getting a plotline from the brilliant but little-watched TV show Millennium (1996-99).
In the American version, the terrorist was a "bioevangelist" (The Sun's Scott Shane) who sought not to harm anyone, but to warn the public of the dangers of biowarfare.
In setting up an American scientist to take the fall for the killings, Rosenberg may have seen an opportunity to discredit the U.S. biowarfare-defense program, get the Bush administration to sign on to international biowarfare protocols that would give our enemies access to our biodefense secrets and exact political revenge on Hatfill.
In seeking to convince readers of Hatfill's guilt in last fall's attacks, Kristof and the other journalists claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these "attacks."
No one ever has provided any evidence showing that the Rhodesian army carried out anthrax attacks, much less that Hatfill participated in them. Kristof and company merely are regurgitating a tainted 1992 article by longtime Rosenberg associate Meryl Nass. The Nass report purported to explain the 1978-80 anthrax outbreak that affected 10,000 black farmers, predominantly with cutaneous anthrax, killing 182. In her "explanation," Nass leaped from one politically loaded speculation to another without any evidence.
The flamboyant, brilliant Hatfill earned his medical degree in Rhodesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s while serving in U.S. and Rhodesian special forces. In Rhodesia, he fought against communist guerrillas. One must recall that in Rhodesia — now named Zimbabwe, and ruled since 1980 by genocidal communist Robert Mugabe — the choice was never between apartheid and freedom, but rather between white or black apartheid.
Hatfill's attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me, "My client doesn't want to do anything, right now. … He's really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he's decided that the best approach is to ignore everything and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something but, right now, he doesn't."
If Hatfill doesn't engage the campaign against him in a hurry, he soon may find himself sharing a cell with the likes of José Padilla.
Hunting America’s Leading Anthrax Hoaxer: Dr. Strangelove Strikes Again – in Scotland!
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
June 20, 2002
Toogood Reports
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,
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:
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, whom 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 ever 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 exposés 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):
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 reporters 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.
By Nicholas Stix
June 20, 2002
Toogood Reports
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, whom 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 ever 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 exposés 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 reporters 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.
Calling Agent Frank Black: Anthrax, the Left’s Dr. Strangelove, and TV’s Millennium
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
June 9, 2002
Toogood Reports
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 State University of New York’s 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. FAS has 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? [Correction: As the next article states, Rosenberg was a professor of “environmental science,” not microbiology. “Environmental science” is often a cover for tenured Marxist activists, in whose hands it is barely more scientific than astrology.]
As David Tell wrote in the April 29 weekly standard,
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 America’s Survival, 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 at 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. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg 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 mainstream 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 a lifetime, craggy-faced Lance Henriksen gave a heroic series of performances, 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 Book of Revelations-style apocalyptic visions, Frank Black was a cross between a Jewish "tzaddik" (righteous man), a Christian saint, and perhaps, 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, cause him to suffer a series of nervous breakdowns, his face showing ever deepening, multiplying lines.
Some observers have argued that Frank is really on the hunt for the Devil, in whatever "deliberate disguises" Lucifer wears.
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, but rather by the existence of the Millennium Group itself, he returns to the FBI, in order to secretly fight the Group.
My portrayal of Millennium may sound loony. 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 shares 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" were 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, in order 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. With its superior cast and story line, and its writer-producers’ theological sophistication, Millennium 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.
By Nicholas Stix
June 9, 2002
Toogood Reports
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 State University of New York’s 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. FAS has 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? [Correction: As the next article states, Rosenberg was a professor of “environmental science,” not microbiology. “Environmental science” is often a cover for tenured Marxist activists, in whose hands it is barely more scientific than astrology.]
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 America’s Survival, 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 at 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. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg 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 mainstream 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 a lifetime, craggy-faced Lance Henriksen gave a heroic series of performances, 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 Book of Revelations-style apocalyptic visions, Frank Black was a cross between a Jewish "tzaddik" (righteous man), a Christian saint, and perhaps, 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, cause him to suffer a series of nervous breakdowns, his face showing ever deepening, multiplying lines.
Some observers have argued that Frank is really on the hunt for the Devil, in whatever "deliberate disguises" Lucifer wears.
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, but rather by the existence of the Millennium Group itself, he returns to the FBI, in order to secretly fight the Group.
My portrayal of Millennium may sound loony. 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 shares 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" were 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, in order 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. With its superior cast and story line, and its writer-producers’ theological sophistication, Millennium 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.
The Great Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax
By Nicholas Stix
February, 2001
Middle American News
Led by Jesse Jackson, beginning on November 8, black leaders, organizations, and civilians, have claimed that George W. Bush’s electoral victory in Florida, and thus, his presidential victory, was had only through the massive, systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.
Jackson & Co. have insisted that Republicans re-invigorated the heritages of slavery and Jim Crow, through, among other tactics, stationing police roadblocks in black neighborhoods, and officers in and around polling places, to intimidate blacks out of voting; saddling black “electors” [sic] with dilapidated, malfunctioning voting equipment, confusing “butterfly ballots,” and misleading instructions at polling places; denying voting rights to registered voters; making new, outrageous demands for photo ID; using Jim Crow-type legislation to deprive blacks of their rights; and lastly, siccing vicious dogs, and even drawing guns on black voters, to keep them from the polls.
No hard evidence was provided on behalf of any of the charges, each of which proved to be a lie or a distortion. But the facts didn’t matter. The Rev. Jesse Jackson knew that he could bank on obsequious mainstream news coverage, and on black voters’ echoing of his charges, no matter how outrageous they were. Due to the sheer quantity of the claims, I will limit myself to the most frequently made, and most outrageous charges.
“Racist police roadblocks”
Media coverage suggested that in black neighborhoods all over Florida, racist white police officers had set up roadblocks to intimidate black voters out of going to polling places. In fact, we kept hearing about THE SAME CHECKPOINT in southern Leon County. Again and again and again.
(Jackson & Co. emphasized that that checkpoint was two miles away from the nearest polling place, as if this fact were significant. In much of Florida on Election Day, it would have been impossible to travel two miles in any direction, without coming across a polling place. Had police wanted to stop black voters from reaching a polling place, they would have had to set up a roadblock nearby, not two miles away. And the roadblock in question was not responsible for a single black voter failing to cast his vote.)
One month after the election, the Rev. Jesse Jackson still insisted, that “Only African Americans were stopped by police as they sought to vote.” In fact, every fifth driver was stopped, as per Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) guidelines. One hundred and fifty cars were stopped for routine checks, and 18 motorists were ticketed. Twelve of the motorists were white; only six were black.
Major Ken Howes of FHP reported, “This particular checkpoint was one of 31 similar checkpoints conducted during the thirty days prior to November 7.” Major Howes also determined, contrary to “accusations, coming from high-ranking political officials, [and] publicized in various media reports,” that “troopers did not visit any polling places, and no parking tickets were written in the parking lots of voting precincts while owners/drivers of the vehicles were inside the precinct voting.”
In another much publicized incident, police were active near a polling place, due to an ongoing robbery investigation.
“Dilapidated voting machinery in black neighborhoods”
The Rev. Jackson insisted that black neighborhoods were much more likely to be saddled with ballot-punch voting machines, which had the highest percentage of error. In fact, as Nancy Cook Lauer showed in the December 3 Tallahassee Democrat, the poorest neighborhoods tended not to have punch-card ballots, but rather state-of-the-art, optical-scanner balloting. The average income of districts with optical-scanner ballots was $21,464, whereas the average income of districts with punch-card ballots, including predominantly white Palm Beach County, was $24,849: “This explodes the prevailing theory that poorer counties had fewer votes counted because they use antiquated punch-card systems, instead of the more state-of-the-art optical-balloting systems ...” Some black voters complained that they were ordered to produce photo identification, which had not been required in earlier elections. An irate black voter asserted, “It can’t suddenly be the law now.” But it suddenly was the law. In response to massive vote-fraud in the 1997 Miami mayoral election, Florida passed a law in 1998 that required that voters provide election officials with photo identification.
“Voters were misinformed about how to vote.”
Black voters complained that they had been told to “vote on every page.” Since the presidential candidates covered two pages, voting on both pages resulted in their votes being thrown out. However, the same voters reported that the misinformation came exclusively from Democratic Party poll workers, many of whom were black. Speaking in the passive voice, the Rev. Jackson was careful to omit this fact.
“Black college students were disenfranchised.”
Black students at white-free campuses Florida A & M University, and Bethune-Cookman and Edward Waters colleges, insisted that they had registered to vote, yet had been denied the franchise. In fact, the students had not properly completed their registration by the October 10 deadline. Or they lied. As Timothy Carney reported in the December 22 online edition of Human Events, not one single student complained to the local election boards of being disenfranchised. (Postscript: It turned out that far from students at the aforementioned segregated campuses being disenfranchised, many students engaged in vote fraud, through voting twice – once using their home address, and once using their college address. The students in question sent in absentee ballots and voted at polling places on Election Day. Unfortunately, cowardly Florida election authorities, surely fearing another “blacklash,” refrained from prosecuting any of the malefactors.)
“Black registered voters were targeted for disenfranchisement.”
Various media outlets, including the Village Voice and Salon.com, claimed that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had, through ChoicePoint, a company commissioned to eliminate convicted felons from the voting rolls, targeted black non-felons for disenfranchisement. In lieu of any evidence to support their charges, the writers quickly segued to claims that such laws were a vestige of the Jim Crow era.
The writers’ real complaint was that black felons, a potential Democratic constituency, were not being permitted to vote. Since the Florida felon law was passed in 1868, it was irrelevant to claims of a conspiracy to disenfranchise black Floridians 132 years later.
Laws denying convicted felons the franchise are pervasive in the U.S. Socialists never complained about such laws during previous elections, or in northern states.
Reporters playing the Jim Crow card were silent on the real Florida felon story, whereby according to the Miami Herald, some 5,000 convicted felons, 75 percent of whom were registered Democrats, illegally voted in Florida. (Postscript: To my knowledge, none of the felons who committed vote fraud was prosecuted, yet another case of Florida officials backing off, in the face of black racial demagoguery.)
The most outrageous charge alleged that black Floridians were barred from voting by authorities using “dogs and guns.” That charge, evoking Bull Connor’s Birmingham in 1963, was fabricated out of thin air, by Gore campaign manager, Donna Brazille. Brazille’s penchant for lying had already gotten her fired from the Dukakis for President campaign in 1988.
In the December 7 New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert claimed that, “Blacks turned out to vote in record numbers in Florida this year, but huge numbers were systematically turned away for one specious reason after another.”
Let’s see. In the 2000 election, blacks made up 16 percent of Florida’s voters, over 50 percent more than in the 1996 election, and MORE than their percentage (15 percent) of the population. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, to see that it’s well nigh impossible for a group to increase its portion of voters by over fifty percent, in spite of “huge numbers [being] systematically turned away.”
In a December 5 Village Voice story ostensibly on disenfranchisement, Jill Conaway and James Ridgeway approvingly quoted Jamaican-born black supremacist, Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), on the need for black power. Conaway and Ridgeway neglected to mention that Garvey, who anticipated a worldwide racial Armageddon, called himself the father of fascism, and derided Mussolini and Hitler as mere imitators.
As the writers had to know, the Supreme Court had struck down racial redistricting.
Conaway and Ridgeway were apparently using Florida as a pretext for supporting the building of a black counter-nation within America, in which blacks, who number only 12 percent of the population, would be guaranteed victory and control. That control would have more in common with Marcus Garvey’s fascism, than with anything contained in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, or The Federalist Papers.
Conaway and Ridgeway were fronting for Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier, the “quota queen” whom Bill Clinton nominated in 1993 to run the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. A bitter Guinier withdrew her candidacy in the face of a firestorm of criticism, when it came out that in a law journal article, she had called for proportional representation based on race, and for blacks as a group to enjoy a political veto right.
Last December 18, Lani Guinier published an op-ed essay on Florida in the New York Times, again calling for an unconstitutional, proportional voting system.
On Christmas Eve, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry told of a conversation with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in which the latter referred to Florida in terms of “reparations,” and the need for whites to live in shame, in their dealings with blacks:
Listening as black leaders and civilians, and their white allies, continue to spread the lies of the Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax, it becomes clear that Florida WAS about disenfranchisement – the attempted disenfranchisement of white voters.
February, 2001
Middle American News
Led by Jesse Jackson, beginning on November 8, black leaders, organizations, and civilians, have claimed that George W. Bush’s electoral victory in Florida, and thus, his presidential victory, was had only through the massive, systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.
Jackson & Co. have insisted that Republicans re-invigorated the heritages of slavery and Jim Crow, through, among other tactics, stationing police roadblocks in black neighborhoods, and officers in and around polling places, to intimidate blacks out of voting; saddling black “electors” [sic] with dilapidated, malfunctioning voting equipment, confusing “butterfly ballots,” and misleading instructions at polling places; denying voting rights to registered voters; making new, outrageous demands for photo ID; using Jim Crow-type legislation to deprive blacks of their rights; and lastly, siccing vicious dogs, and even drawing guns on black voters, to keep them from the polls.
No hard evidence was provided on behalf of any of the charges, each of which proved to be a lie or a distortion. But the facts didn’t matter. The Rev. Jesse Jackson knew that he could bank on obsequious mainstream news coverage, and on black voters’ echoing of his charges, no matter how outrageous they were. Due to the sheer quantity of the claims, I will limit myself to the most frequently made, and most outrageous charges.
“Racist police roadblocks”
Media coverage suggested that in black neighborhoods all over Florida, racist white police officers had set up roadblocks to intimidate black voters out of going to polling places. In fact, we kept hearing about THE SAME CHECKPOINT in southern Leon County. Again and again and again.
(Jackson & Co. emphasized that that checkpoint was two miles away from the nearest polling place, as if this fact were significant. In much of Florida on Election Day, it would have been impossible to travel two miles in any direction, without coming across a polling place. Had police wanted to stop black voters from reaching a polling place, they would have had to set up a roadblock nearby, not two miles away. And the roadblock in question was not responsible for a single black voter failing to cast his vote.)
One month after the election, the Rev. Jesse Jackson still insisted, that “Only African Americans were stopped by police as they sought to vote.” In fact, every fifth driver was stopped, as per Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) guidelines. One hundred and fifty cars were stopped for routine checks, and 18 motorists were ticketed. Twelve of the motorists were white; only six were black.
Major Ken Howes of FHP reported, “This particular checkpoint was one of 31 similar checkpoints conducted during the thirty days prior to November 7.” Major Howes also determined, contrary to “accusations, coming from high-ranking political officials, [and] publicized in various media reports,” that “troopers did not visit any polling places, and no parking tickets were written in the parking lots of voting precincts while owners/drivers of the vehicles were inside the precinct voting.”
In another much publicized incident, police were active near a polling place, due to an ongoing robbery investigation.
“Dilapidated voting machinery in black neighborhoods”
The Rev. Jackson insisted that black neighborhoods were much more likely to be saddled with ballot-punch voting machines, which had the highest percentage of error. In fact, as Nancy Cook Lauer showed in the December 3 Tallahassee Democrat, the poorest neighborhoods tended not to have punch-card ballots, but rather state-of-the-art, optical-scanner balloting. The average income of districts with optical-scanner ballots was $21,464, whereas the average income of districts with punch-card ballots, including predominantly white Palm Beach County, was $24,849: “This explodes the prevailing theory that poorer counties had fewer votes counted because they use antiquated punch-card systems, instead of the more state-of-the-art optical-balloting systems ...” Some black voters complained that they were ordered to produce photo identification, which had not been required in earlier elections. An irate black voter asserted, “It can’t suddenly be the law now.” But it suddenly was the law. In response to massive vote-fraud in the 1997 Miami mayoral election, Florida passed a law in 1998 that required that voters provide election officials with photo identification.
“Voters were misinformed about how to vote.”
Black voters complained that they had been told to “vote on every page.” Since the presidential candidates covered two pages, voting on both pages resulted in their votes being thrown out. However, the same voters reported that the misinformation came exclusively from Democratic Party poll workers, many of whom were black. Speaking in the passive voice, the Rev. Jackson was careful to omit this fact.
“Black college students were disenfranchised.”
Black students at white-free campuses Florida A & M University, and Bethune-Cookman and Edward Waters colleges, insisted that they had registered to vote, yet had been denied the franchise. In fact, the students had not properly completed their registration by the October 10 deadline. Or they lied. As Timothy Carney reported in the December 22 online edition of Human Events, not one single student complained to the local election boards of being disenfranchised. (Postscript: It turned out that far from students at the aforementioned segregated campuses being disenfranchised, many students engaged in vote fraud, through voting twice – once using their home address, and once using their college address. The students in question sent in absentee ballots and voted at polling places on Election Day. Unfortunately, cowardly Florida election authorities, surely fearing another “blacklash,” refrained from prosecuting any of the malefactors.)
“Black registered voters were targeted for disenfranchisement.”
Various media outlets, including the Village Voice and Salon.com, claimed that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had, through ChoicePoint, a company commissioned to eliminate convicted felons from the voting rolls, targeted black non-felons for disenfranchisement. In lieu of any evidence to support their charges, the writers quickly segued to claims that such laws were a vestige of the Jim Crow era.
The writers’ real complaint was that black felons, a potential Democratic constituency, were not being permitted to vote. Since the Florida felon law was passed in 1868, it was irrelevant to claims of a conspiracy to disenfranchise black Floridians 132 years later.
Laws denying convicted felons the franchise are pervasive in the U.S. Socialists never complained about such laws during previous elections, or in northern states.
Reporters playing the Jim Crow card were silent on the real Florida felon story, whereby according to the Miami Herald, some 5,000 convicted felons, 75 percent of whom were registered Democrats, illegally voted in Florida. (Postscript: To my knowledge, none of the felons who committed vote fraud was prosecuted, yet another case of Florida officials backing off, in the face of black racial demagoguery.)
The most outrageous charge alleged that black Floridians were barred from voting by authorities using “dogs and guns.” That charge, evoking Bull Connor’s Birmingham in 1963, was fabricated out of thin air, by Gore campaign manager, Donna Brazille. Brazille’s penchant for lying had already gotten her fired from the Dukakis for President campaign in 1988.
In the December 7 New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert claimed that, “Blacks turned out to vote in record numbers in Florida this year, but huge numbers were systematically turned away for one specious reason after another.”
Let’s see. In the 2000 election, blacks made up 16 percent of Florida’s voters, over 50 percent more than in the 1996 election, and MORE than their percentage (15 percent) of the population. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, to see that it’s well nigh impossible for a group to increase its portion of voters by over fifty percent, in spite of “huge numbers [being] systematically turned away.”
In a December 5 Village Voice story ostensibly on disenfranchisement, Jill Conaway and James Ridgeway approvingly quoted Jamaican-born black supremacist, Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), on the need for black power. Conaway and Ridgeway neglected to mention that Garvey, who anticipated a worldwide racial Armageddon, called himself the father of fascism, and derided Mussolini and Hitler as mere imitators.
The creation of majority-black districts for local and state races has given African Americans a steady, if small, presence on town councils, in state assemblies, and on Capitol Hill. By gaining these measures of self-determination, African Americans have in part fulfilled the prediction of Marcus Garvey, who argued the only way for black people truly to be free was to found a nation-state of their own.
Though black people in the South were nearly unanimous in support for Gore, their votes were scattered across state lines and thus submerged through the electoral college as completely as if they’d never been cast.
Garvey’s ideas may sound revolutionary, but the courts have consistently ruled that without predominantly black districts, African Americans lack a fair chance at representation.
As the writers had to know, the Supreme Court had struck down racial redistricting.
Conaway and Ridgeway were apparently using Florida as a pretext for supporting the building of a black counter-nation within America, in which blacks, who number only 12 percent of the population, would be guaranteed victory and control. That control would have more in common with Marcus Garvey’s fascism, than with anything contained in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, or The Federalist Papers.
Conaway and Ridgeway were fronting for Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier, the “quota queen” whom Bill Clinton nominated in 1993 to run the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. A bitter Guinier withdrew her candidacy in the face of a firestorm of criticism, when it came out that in a law journal article, she had called for proportional representation based on race, and for blacks as a group to enjoy a political veto right.
Last December 18, Lani Guinier published an op-ed essay on Florida in the New York Times, again calling for an unconstitutional, proportional voting system.
On Christmas Eve, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry told of a conversation with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in which the latter referred to Florida in terms of “reparations,” and the need for whites to live in shame, in their dealings with blacks:
Some people make the point that even if none of us ever collects a dime, establishing the legitimacy of reparations says: We owe you. Psychologically, that’s important. If I know I owe you $200,000, even if we both know there’s no way I can ever come up with the money, I walk past you with my head down. But suppose I can prove that you owe me $250,000. Maybe you don’t have the money, either, but at least I can hold my head up. Bush will know that he owes us for an election that was stolen from us.
Listening as black leaders and civilians, and their white allies, continue to spread the lies of the Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax, it becomes clear that Florida WAS about disenfranchisement – the attempted disenfranchisement of white voters.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Remembering Richard Jewell
By Nicholas Stix
Part I: Ray Cleere Seizes an Opportunity
This is the story of Richard Jewell, the hero who saved countless lives, and of Ray Cleere, the first of many heels who sought to railroad him for another man’s crime.
When people think of heroes, they typically think of big men, and laugh at little guys. And while in seeking to subdue a violent character without recourse to a deadly weapon, bigger, as a rule, is better, there is no correlation between physical strength and physical courage.
For instance, I’m fond of the late John Wayne, who was the most popular actor in screen history. And yet, when World War II came, the 6’4 ½” Wayne got himself a deferment from the draft, and stayed home. Meanwhile, America’s most decorated soldier was 5’5,” 110 lb. Audie Murphy, who was initially rejected by the Marines and elite airborne (paratrooper) units as too short and scrawny.
Forty-four-year-old Richard Jewell, whose wife of six years, Dana, found him dead of a heart attack in their Georgia home on Wednesday, August 29, was barely taller than Murphy. Unlike Murphy, however, Jewell was fat. Aside perhaps from his mother, Bobi (Barbara) – when the public first heard of him, he had no wife or girlfriend – no one thought of heroes when they looked at Richard Jewell. And yet, being a hero was his dream ... and his legacy.
July 26, 1996
On the evening of July 26, 1996, Richard Jewell was in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the Olympics – the worst place in the world for an unsuspecting victim; the best place for a hero. Stationed at the AT&T pavilion as a security guard working for the security firm Anthony Davis Associates (like so many firms, AT&T subcontracted out security), at some point after 12:30 a.m., Jewell spotted a large, military-style green knapsack, an “Alice pack” someone had left under a bench near the main stage.
Thousands of people from all over the world were milling about in the park, which functioned as the Olympics’ village square. Hundreds were in the immediate vicinity of the pack, which was placed near the stage where, at 12:45 a.m., the band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack would begin its performance.
Jewell immediately called in his discovery to Tom Davis of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), and to his immediate supervisor, Bob Ahring. Davis arrived and asked everyone nearby whether the pack was theirs. When no one claimed it, the matter became suspicious, and Davis and Jewell immediately cleared a 25-foot-square parameter around the pack, in spite of a crowd, more than a few of whom were drunk, and feeling less than cooperative.
The Atlanta Police Department:
The Following Section is Not a Parody
At 12:58:45 a.m., a man called in to an Atlanta Police Department (APD) 911 operator, “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes,” and hung up, without identifying himself.
Police were then delayed for ten critical minutes, because none of the operators at the 911 center or the police dispatchers they contacted at the APD’s Zone 5 knew the address, the operators and dispatchers assumed that their supervisors did not know and did not want to ask them, yet were concerned with passing the buck on the responsibility for determining the location of a bomb threat. The operator who answered at the APD’s Agency Command Center (ACC) also had no idea where Centennial Olympic Park is, and thought it ridiculous that anyone should expect her to know it. None of the operators and dispatchers even considered the matter of a bomb threat urgent. (I have previously written on incompetence in Atlanta law enforcement here and here.)
Mind you, at the time, all Atlanta revolved around the Olympics, whose social center the park was.
At 1:19 a.m., 20 minutes after the initial 911 call, but only 10 minutes after the APD figured out where Centennial Olympic Park is, and eight minutes after an APD dispatcher finally told a squad car the 911 message and the park’s address – i.e., an inexcusable 12 minute delay – the pipe bomb inside the knapsack exploded. But since the one officer whose response is reprinted in the “excerpted” transcript (which CNN, while retaining many other articles from the time, has inexplicably since deleted from its Web site), found an excuse to avoid going to the park altogether, the APD proved utterly useless.
The Casualties
The bomb turned the bench above it into a deadly weapon, and the metal shrapnel – nails and screws – that the bomber had filled the pack with flew out. The attack directly killed one person and wounded 111, some permanently. Forty-four year-old Alice Hawthorne, of Albany, Ga., who was in Atlanta with her stepdaughter for the Olympics, was killed directly by the explosion. Melih Uzunyol, the chief cameraman for Turkish Television, ran to cover the scene, and suffered a fatal heart attack. Uzunyol, a mere 38 or 40, depending on the source, had survived wars as a photographer, but fell to his own heart condition.
Had Richard Jewell not already begun clearing the area, the death toll might have been anywhere from dozens to hundreds, with a thousand or more wounded. Thanks to him, we’ll never know.
The bombing was an act of domestic terrorism, but who was the terrorist? And coming only nine days after the TWA Flight 800 was blown out of the air in the waters off Long Island, killing all 230 souls aboard, people had to wonder if the attacks were connected.
For two days, Jewell enjoyed some well-deserved fame. Then his world would be turned upside down.
Whispers and Shouts: Ray Cleere
The Habersham County Sheriff’s Office had hired Richard Jewell as a jailer in 1990, and promoted him to deputy the following year. Marie Brenner reports that “he finished in the upper 25 percent of his class” at the Northeast Georgia Police Academy. (Brenner’s 19,000-word tour de force, “American Nightmare: the Ballad of Richard Jewell,” appeared in the February 1997 Vanity Fair.)
While he was still a jailer, Jewell once arrested two neighbors for making too much noise in a hot tub, and was charged with impersonating a police officer. The charges were reduced, and he was sentenced to probation and counseling.
Jewell was wound a little tight. And yet, he was known for having a playful sense of humor, and he was also extremely polite. In other words, he was a man, not a profile.
In 1995, Jewell wrecked his department vehicle, and was demoted back to jailer; he resigned, rather than take the demotion. Then he worked a year as a campus policeman at little Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, a predominantly Baptist private school that specialized in serving spoiled, often rebellious “‘P.K.’s’–preachers’ kids.” Jewell’s year at Piedmont had some highlights – catching a suspected burglar, helping effect a number of other arrests, and “For his work on a volunteer rescue squad, he was named a citizen of the year.” (Marie Brenner) But following frequent complaints by students outraged that he was interfering with their on-campus illegal drinking (which interference was one of his main job responsibilities, as the school strictly forbade drinking on campus), on May 21, 1996, Jewell resigned.
The 33-year-old went to Atlanta to get a fresh start, bunking at his mother’s place until he got a solid position. He hoped the security job at the Olympics would serve as a resume builder.
According to Marie Brenner, on June 27, when Piedmont College President Ray Cleere learned from the TV news that Richard Jewell had heroically saved untold lives and achieved renown, Cleere immediately phoned in a “tip” to the FBI Hot Line, thereby ruining Jewell’s life. Three months later, after the smoke had cleared, Time’s James Collins wrote about Cleere’s role.
We don’t know all of what Cleere told the FBI about Jewell, but from what we do know, the signals he sent were unmistakable: ‘If you want to catch the bomber, look no further than your “hero.”’ After all, why else would one call the FBI, full of “concern” that a presumed hero was into overly “energetic police work”?
According to Marie Brenner, Cleere, formerly the Mississippi commissioner of higher education, felt that Piedmont College, a small, relatively obscure, rural school was a come-down.
Cleere is also image-obsessed, and apparently wanted to have a campus police force, but didn’t want it to do anything much, and said as much to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a story by the late Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz, Maria Elena Fernandez, and Kent E. Walker, that appeared in the July 31, 1996 edition.
Jewell was certainly action and duty-oriented, and interested in serious police work. Cleere was right about those aspects, but those are virtues in police work, not red flags. What the hell do they have to do with being a terrorist? And why, if Jewell left an environment where he did not fit in for one in which he did, would he need to be “checked out further”? Cleere couldn’t even keep his rationalizations straight.
In Ray Cleere, we have a titled man who could not stand for a man without title, over whom he had once held power, to enjoy even a moment in the sun. Cleere felt he could hound Jewell, even after the latter had left the former’s orbit.
Marie Brenner’s account provides much of the backstory on Cleere and Piedmont. It seems that Piedmont students constantly complained to the administration about Jewell, as well as his colleagues, and when Jewell busted a student for smoking pot, Jewell wanted the boy arrested, but Cleere overruled him. Campus police chief Dick Martin “was fond of Jewell,” yet Jewell was “admonished” a number of times for controversial arrests, and the pot bust was a real sore point between Cleere and Jewell, and a major reason or the reason Jewell resigned.
Brenner reports that Jewell’s attorney, Lin Wood, claimed that Dick Martin got Cleere to agree to a “compromise,” whereby Martin would call a friend in the GBI, but that Cleere welshed, and went ahead and called the FBI. Perhaps Cleere was bitter that he had not had the opportunity to fire and thus harm Jewell, and saw in calling the FBI another chance to make things wrong.
Brenner suggests that Cleere was jealous of Jewell’s sudden fame, writing, “According to [Brad] Mattear, ‘Cleere loved the limelight. He wanted public attention’–the very trait he reportedly ascribed to Richard Jewell.” (Brad Mattear was a former resident director at Piedmont.)
According to one report, Cleere “provided a sworn statement saying he had been misquoted.” The aforementioned report stated, “If this were the case, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would be at fault.”
But what about Marie Brenner? She didn’t just echo what the Journal-Constitution printed. She talked to people at Piedmont College, as well as to former employees, and her story – by the far the most thoroughly researched, most insightful, and best written on the Jewell case that I’ve so far seen – has never been discredited. And if Cleere didn’t want the FBI to hang the bombing rap on Jewell, what was he doing calling the Bureau in the first place – to get a weather report?
Ray Cleere’s vindictiveness had a half-life beyond even his wild insinuations. When the FBI went to Piedmont, they came away with a new theory: That Richard Jewell was a homicidal homosexual who hated police, sought to murder them, and whose lover had made the 911 call. Brenner speculates that this nonsense was started as revenge by the Piedmont student whom Jewell had busted for smoking pot, and a couple of the pot-smoker’s friends. FBI agents wasted weeks trying to make the “homicidal homosexual” theory work, but the task proved too much even for their lurid imaginations.
For Richard Jewell, the year spent at Piedmont College proved to be the gift that kept on giving.
In Part II: The FBI vs. Richard Jewell.
Part I: Ray Cleere Seizes an Opportunity
This is the story of Richard Jewell, the hero who saved countless lives, and of Ray Cleere, the first of many heels who sought to railroad him for another man’s crime.
Richard Jewell, 33, a former law enforcement officer, fits the profile of the lone bomber.
Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 30, 1996.
I hope and pray that no one else is ever subjected to the pain and the ordeal that I have gone through. The authorities should keep in mind the rights of the citizens. I thank God it is ended and that you now know what I have known all along: I am an innocent man.
Richard Jewell, at his press conference after being exonerated, October 28, 1996.
When people think of heroes, they typically think of big men, and laugh at little guys. And while in seeking to subdue a violent character without recourse to a deadly weapon, bigger, as a rule, is better, there is no correlation between physical strength and physical courage.
For instance, I’m fond of the late John Wayne, who was the most popular actor in screen history. And yet, when World War II came, the 6’4 ½” Wayne got himself a deferment from the draft, and stayed home. Meanwhile, America’s most decorated soldier was 5’5,” 110 lb. Audie Murphy, who was initially rejected by the Marines and elite airborne (paratrooper) units as too short and scrawny.
Forty-four-year-old Richard Jewell, whose wife of six years, Dana, found him dead of a heart attack in their Georgia home on Wednesday, August 29, was barely taller than Murphy. Unlike Murphy, however, Jewell was fat. Aside perhaps from his mother, Bobi (Barbara) – when the public first heard of him, he had no wife or girlfriend – no one thought of heroes when they looked at Richard Jewell. And yet, being a hero was his dream ... and his legacy.
July 26, 1996
On the evening of July 26, 1996, Richard Jewell was in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the Olympics – the worst place in the world for an unsuspecting victim; the best place for a hero. Stationed at the AT&T pavilion as a security guard working for the security firm Anthony Davis Associates (like so many firms, AT&T subcontracted out security), at some point after 12:30 a.m., Jewell spotted a large, military-style green knapsack, an “Alice pack” someone had left under a bench near the main stage.
Thousands of people from all over the world were milling about in the park, which functioned as the Olympics’ village square. Hundreds were in the immediate vicinity of the pack, which was placed near the stage where, at 12:45 a.m., the band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack would begin its performance.
Jewell immediately called in his discovery to Tom Davis of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), and to his immediate supervisor, Bob Ahring. Davis arrived and asked everyone nearby whether the pack was theirs. When no one claimed it, the matter became suspicious, and Davis and Jewell immediately cleared a 25-foot-square parameter around the pack, in spite of a crowd, more than a few of whom were drunk, and feeling less than cooperative.
The Atlanta Police Department:
The Following Section is Not a Parody
At 12:58:45 a.m., a man called in to an Atlanta Police Department (APD) 911 operator, “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes,” and hung up, without identifying himself.
Police were then delayed for ten critical minutes, because none of the operators at the 911 center or the police dispatchers they contacted at the APD’s Zone 5 knew the address, the operators and dispatchers assumed that their supervisors did not know and did not want to ask them, yet were concerned with passing the buck on the responsibility for determining the location of a bomb threat. The operator who answered at the APD’s Agency Command Center (ACC) also had no idea where Centennial Olympic Park is, and thought it ridiculous that anyone should expect her to know it. None of the operators and dispatchers even considered the matter of a bomb threat urgent. (I have previously written on incompetence in Atlanta law enforcement here and here.)
Dispatcher: "Zone 5."
911 Operator: "You know the address to Centennial Olympic Park?"
Dispatcher: "Girl, don't ask me to lie to you."
911 Operator: "I tried to call ACC but ain't nobody answering the phone ... but I just got this man called talking about there's a bomb set to go off in 30 minutes in Centennial Park."
Dispatcher: "Oh Lord, child. One minute, one minute. I copy Code 17. OK, all DUI units are Code 8 and will not be able to assist on the freeway. Oh Lord, child. Uh, OK, wait a minute, Centennial Park, you put it in and it won't go in?"
911 Operator: "No, unless I'm spelling Centennial wrong. How are we spelling Centennial?"
Dispatcher: "C-E-N-T-E-N-N-I -- how do you spell Centennial?"
911 Operator: "I'm spelling it right, it ain't taking."
Dispatcher: "Yeah."
911 Operator: "Centennial Park is not going. Maybe if I take 'park' out, maybe that will take. Let me try that."
Dispatcher: "Wait a minute, that's the regular Olympic Stadium right?"
911 Operator: "Olympic Stadium is like Zone 3, though. Centennial Park."
Dispatcher: "That's the Centennial Park?"
911 Operator: "It's near the Coca Cola Plaza, I think."
Dispatcher: "In 5?"
911 Operator: "Uh huh."
Dispatcher: "Uh, hold on. Sonya, you don't know the address to the Centennial Park?"
2nd Dispatcher (in background): "Downtown."
911 Operator: "Male, about 30."
Dispatcher: "1546, Code 17, 23."
911 Operator: "White."
Dispatcher: "Uh, you know what? Ask one of the supervisors."
911 Operator: "No, Lord help me, you know they don't know."
Dispatcher: "I know, but it gets it off you."
911 Operator: "Alrighty then, bye."
Dispatcher: "Bye."
1:02:40 a.m.:
911 operator calls APD ACC for address (telephone line problem; operators cannot hear each other.) ...
1:02:50 a.m.:
911 operator calls APD ACC again and requests address for Centennial Park and is given the telephone number.
ACC: "Atlanta Police, Agency Command Center."
911 Operator: "Hey, can you hear me now?"
ACC: "Uh huh."
911 Operator: "OK, can you give me the address of the Centennial Park?"
ACC: "I ain't got no address to Centennial Park, what y'all think I am?"
911 Operator: "Can you help me find the address to Centennial Park?"
ACC: "I can give you the telephone number of Centennial Park."
911 Operator: "I need to get this bomb threat over there to y'all."
ACC: "Well."
911 Operator: "But I need the address of Centennial Park. It's not taking, the system is not taking Centennial Park, that's not where it came from, but you know the system is not taking Centennial Park, that's where he said the bomb was."
ACC: "No particular street or what?"
911 Operator: "He just said there's a bomb set to go off in 30 minutes in Centennial Park."
ACC: "Ooh, it's going to be gone off by the time we find the address."
911 Operator: "Are you kiddin'? Give me that, give me that."
ACC: "I mean I don't have an address, I just have phone numbers."
911 Operator: "Give me the phone number." ...
1:05:10 a.m.:
911 operator calls Centennial Park for street address and is placed on hold. Receives address at 1:07:10 a.m.
Centennial Park: "Centennial Park, this is Operator Morgan."
911 Operator: "Hi, can you give me the address to Centennial Park?"
Cen Park: "The address?"
911 Operator: "Uh huh."
Cen Park: "Uh, hold on a second."
1:06:30 a.m.:
911 operator notifies Communications Supervisor, Sgt. Montgomery.
911 Operator: "Does anybody -- Sgt. Montgomery, do you know the address of Centennial Park? Do you know the address to Centennial Park. Well, I need to get the address of Centennial Park 'cause, I mean I don't mean to upset nobody, but we got a bomb threat over there."
(Editor's note: The transcript does not further indicate whether this comment about a bomb threat was directed only to Sgt. Montgomery in the 911 center or to Centennial Park's Operator Morgan, who is shown to come back on the line just after the comment.)
Cen Park: "Ma'am."
911 Operator: "Yes."
Cen Park: "OK, it's 145 International Boulevard."
911 Operator: "145 International Boulevard."
Cen Park: "Uh huh."
911 Operator: "OK."
Cen Park: "All right, uh huh."
911 Operator: "Thank you. Bye bye."
1:08:35 a.m.:
911 operator sent call to dispatch.
1:11:10 a.m.:
Dispatcher: "1591. Radio raising 1594."
Unit 1594: "1594. You call?"
1:11:20 a.m.:
Dispatcher: "1594, that's affirmative, got a Signal 73 at 145 International Boulevard. It came from the pay phone at the Days Inn. The caller is advising that he has one set to go off in 30 minutes at Centennial Park. Sounded like a white male."
(Editor's note: The same information is then given to Unit 1593 and the Dispatcher calls Unit1546.)
1:12:30 a.m.:
Dispatcher: "Did you copy?"
1:12:40 a.m.:
Unit 1546: "1546. I copy. Advise the state police, they police that park. I'll go the Days Inn and see if I can locate the caller."
Dispatcher: "OK, that's affirmative."
(Editor's note: There are sporadic entries over the next seven minutes. Another officer, designated Unit 1593, also instructs the Dispatcher at 1:18:50 a.m. to "contact the state police supervisor." The transcript contains no indication, however, that state police were notified.)
1:20:00 a.m.:
Unit 2924: "2924 to Radio, be advised that something just blew up at Olympic Park." ------------------------------
Mind you, at the time, all Atlanta revolved around the Olympics, whose social center the park was.
At 1:19 a.m., 20 minutes after the initial 911 call, but only 10 minutes after the APD figured out where Centennial Olympic Park is, and eight minutes after an APD dispatcher finally told a squad car the 911 message and the park’s address – i.e., an inexcusable 12 minute delay – the pipe bomb inside the knapsack exploded. But since the one officer whose response is reprinted in the “excerpted” transcript (which CNN, while retaining many other articles from the time, has inexplicably since deleted from its Web site), found an excuse to avoid going to the park altogether, the APD proved utterly useless.
The Casualties
The bomb turned the bench above it into a deadly weapon, and the metal shrapnel – nails and screws – that the bomber had filled the pack with flew out. The attack directly killed one person and wounded 111, some permanently. Forty-four year-old Alice Hawthorne, of Albany, Ga., who was in Atlanta with her stepdaughter for the Olympics, was killed directly by the explosion. Melih Uzunyol, the chief cameraman for Turkish Television, ran to cover the scene, and suffered a fatal heart attack. Uzunyol, a mere 38 or 40, depending on the source, had survived wars as a photographer, but fell to his own heart condition.
Had Richard Jewell not already begun clearing the area, the death toll might have been anywhere from dozens to hundreds, with a thousand or more wounded. Thanks to him, we’ll never know.
The bombing was an act of domestic terrorism, but who was the terrorist? And coming only nine days after the TWA Flight 800 was blown out of the air in the waters off Long Island, killing all 230 souls aboard, people had to wonder if the attacks were connected.
For two days, Jewell enjoyed some well-deserved fame. Then his world would be turned upside down.
Whispers and Shouts: Ray Cleere
The Habersham County Sheriff’s Office had hired Richard Jewell as a jailer in 1990, and promoted him to deputy the following year. Marie Brenner reports that “he finished in the upper 25 percent of his class” at the Northeast Georgia Police Academy. (Brenner’s 19,000-word tour de force, “American Nightmare: the Ballad of Richard Jewell,” appeared in the February 1997 Vanity Fair.)
While he was still a jailer, Jewell once arrested two neighbors for making too much noise in a hot tub, and was charged with impersonating a police officer. The charges were reduced, and he was sentenced to probation and counseling.
Jewell was wound a little tight. And yet, he was known for having a playful sense of humor, and he was also extremely polite. In other words, he was a man, not a profile.
In 1995, Jewell wrecked his department vehicle, and was demoted back to jailer; he resigned, rather than take the demotion. Then he worked a year as a campus policeman at little Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, a predominantly Baptist private school that specialized in serving spoiled, often rebellious “‘P.K.’s’–preachers’ kids.” Jewell’s year at Piedmont had some highlights – catching a suspected burglar, helping effect a number of other arrests, and “For his work on a volunteer rescue squad, he was named a citizen of the year.” (Marie Brenner) But following frequent complaints by students outraged that he was interfering with their on-campus illegal drinking (which interference was one of his main job responsibilities, as the school strictly forbade drinking on campus), on May 21, 1996, Jewell resigned.
The 33-year-old went to Atlanta to get a fresh start, bunking at his mother’s place until he got a solid position. He hoped the security job at the Olympics would serve as a resume builder.
According to Marie Brenner, on June 27, when Piedmont College President Ray Cleere learned from the TV news that Richard Jewell had heroically saved untold lives and achieved renown, Cleere immediately phoned in a “tip” to the FBI Hot Line, thereby ruining Jewell’s life. Three months later, after the smoke had cleared, Time’s James Collins wrote about Cleere’s role.
The first specific tip about Jewell came on July 27, the day of the bombing, in a phone call from Ray Cleere, the president of Piedmont College in Georgia, where Jewell had worked as a security guard until last May. Cleere said he had seen Jewell on television being acclaimed as a hero. Cleere wanted to tell the FBI that Jewell had been “a little erratic,” “almost too excitable” and too gung-ho about “energetic police work.”
We don’t know all of what Cleere told the FBI about Jewell, but from what we do know, the signals he sent were unmistakable: ‘If you want to catch the bomber, look no further than your “hero.”’ After all, why else would one call the FBI, full of “concern” that a presumed hero was into overly “energetic police work”?
According to Marie Brenner, Cleere, formerly the Mississippi commissioner of higher education, felt that Piedmont College, a small, relatively obscure, rural school was a come-down.
Cleere is also image-obsessed, and apparently wanted to have a campus police force, but didn’t want it to do anything much, and said as much to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a story by the late Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz, Maria Elena Fernandez, and Kent E. Walker, that appeared in the July 31, 1996 edition.
Piedmont College President Ray Cleere said when he saw Jewell on CNN he contacted the GBI “because we felt he should be checked.”
“His behavior here had been a little erratic,” Cleere said. “He had been very sporadic and we felt he needed to be checked out further.”
Describing Jewell as “almost too excitable,” Cleere said they were worried that he would not fit in on a small college campus. “We’re not really a police department. We're more of a public safety department, and Mr. Jewell is definitely interested in police work and investigative work.”
Jewell was certainly action and duty-oriented, and interested in serious police work. Cleere was right about those aspects, but those are virtues in police work, not red flags. What the hell do they have to do with being a terrorist? And why, if Jewell left an environment where he did not fit in for one in which he did, would he need to be “checked out further”? Cleere couldn’t even keep his rationalizations straight.
In Ray Cleere, we have a titled man who could not stand for a man without title, over whom he had once held power, to enjoy even a moment in the sun. Cleere felt he could hound Jewell, even after the latter had left the former’s orbit.
Marie Brenner’s account provides much of the backstory on Cleere and Piedmont. It seems that Piedmont students constantly complained to the administration about Jewell, as well as his colleagues, and when Jewell busted a student for smoking pot, Jewell wanted the boy arrested, but Cleere overruled him. Campus police chief Dick Martin “was fond of Jewell,” yet Jewell was “admonished” a number of times for controversial arrests, and the pot bust was a real sore point between Cleere and Jewell, and a major reason or the reason Jewell resigned.
Brenner reports that Jewell’s attorney, Lin Wood, claimed that Dick Martin got Cleere to agree to a “compromise,” whereby Martin would call a friend in the GBI, but that Cleere welshed, and went ahead and called the FBI. Perhaps Cleere was bitter that he had not had the opportunity to fire and thus harm Jewell, and saw in calling the FBI another chance to make things wrong.
Brenner suggests that Cleere was jealous of Jewell’s sudden fame, writing, “According to [Brad] Mattear, ‘Cleere loved the limelight. He wanted public attention’–the very trait he reportedly ascribed to Richard Jewell.” (Brad Mattear was a former resident director at Piedmont.)
According to one report, Cleere “provided a sworn statement saying he had been misquoted.” The aforementioned report stated, “If this were the case, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would be at fault.”
But what about Marie Brenner? She didn’t just echo what the Journal-Constitution printed. She talked to people at Piedmont College, as well as to former employees, and her story – by the far the most thoroughly researched, most insightful, and best written on the Jewell case that I’ve so far seen – has never been discredited. And if Cleere didn’t want the FBI to hang the bombing rap on Jewell, what was he doing calling the Bureau in the first place – to get a weather report?
Ray Cleere’s vindictiveness had a half-life beyond even his wild insinuations. When the FBI went to Piedmont, they came away with a new theory: That Richard Jewell was a homicidal homosexual who hated police, sought to murder them, and whose lover had made the 911 call. Brenner speculates that this nonsense was started as revenge by the Piedmont student whom Jewell had busted for smoking pot, and a couple of the pot-smoker’s friends. FBI agents wasted weeks trying to make the “homicidal homosexual” theory work, but the task proved too much even for their lurid imaginations.
For Richard Jewell, the year spent at Piedmont College proved to be the gift that kept on giving.
In Part II: The FBI vs. Richard Jewell.
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