The towers fell. Fear of a tiny spore gripped the
great democracy.
Emergency measures in a jingoistic package, under
consideration in the House of Representatives, arrived
at the same time as the Ames strain, and the emergency
measures floated through Congress on a cloud of lethal
white powder.
Right-wing propagandists stepped up to point out the
obvious culprit. Laurie Mylroie, a "conservative"
state propagandist, explained to CNN, "it takes a
highly sophisticated agency to produce anthrax in the
lethal form-. Not many parties can do that." Saddam
Hussein "continues his part of the war in the form of
terrorism. It is unlikely that that anthrax will
remain in letters. It is likely that it will be used -
in the subway of a city, or in the ventilation system
of a U.S. building. Saddam wants revenge against us.
He wants to do to the U.S. what we've done to Iraq."
This cover story didn't hold up under the tension of
scientific deduction, though. The true culprit - it
emerged after Dr. Barbara Rosenberg of the Federation
of American Scientists pestered the Bureau with facts
and public exposure - was an obscure, right-wing
biochemical warfare "counterterrorist." The serial
killer took his training at the NIH in Bethesda,
Maryland and other civilian-run, federal facilities,
also a two-year fellowship from the National Research
Council, the country's leading CBW defense lab. He
moved on to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute
of Infectious Diseases - USAMRIID - at Fort Detrick.
He experimented with biological responses to
filoviridae, the family of viruses that transmit
Ebola. In September 1999 - as the Jerry
Hauer-SAIC-Fort Detrick-USAMRIID West Nile Virus was
taking hold in New York - the terrorist began working
at the very same lab.
By March of 2002, it was clear that the FBI was
protecting him. Spokesmen for the Bureau were evasive
about the source of the anthrax but it gradually
emerged, by process of elimination and genetic
analysis, that the culprit worked at the SAIC facility
in Maryland.
CounterPunch commented a month later on geographic
connections that bore directly on the case: "The South
African media [have] been abuzz with details of that
nation's former biological warfare program and its
links to the CIA. The South African Nazi Party.
But some of Hatfill's closest friends maintained his
innocence. Stan Bedlington, a veteran CIA agent, told
the Washington Post that he'd known Hatfill for
several years: "They were drinking buddies who'd both
been involved in anti-terrorism efforts long before
the World Trade Center crumbled. Now, suddenly, people
were saying that Hatfill could be responsible for the
country's first case of domestic bioterrorism, a
release of lethal anthrax through the mail that had
left five people dead and 17 others infected in the
fall of 2001."
Bedlington had fond memories of Hatfill, though he
hadn't seen him for some time. They'd met at a
Baltimore symposium on bioterrorism. Bedlington had
spent six years bent over a senior analyst desk at the
CIA's Counter-terrorism Center. Hatfill was a
virologist at the U.S. Army-SAIC Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases, "where he'd begun
making a name for himself preaching the dangers of a
bioterror attack. Soon they ran into each other again
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