This will raise some eyebrows:
The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001.
The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall.
Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television.
I think that counts as a pretty thorough vindication. I don’t even know what category to file this under since I don’t have an “Epic Fail” label.
Tom
This sounds like a silly comment, but…
150K X 20 = 3 Million
3 + 2.825 = 5.825
5.825 != 4.6
Zifnab
Shit. Half of me wants to say that this is just another case of the government fucking up. But the other half of me notes how Dr. Hatfill is making a shit-ton of money out of this deal. And I can’t help but recall that the anthrax letters went to Tom Daschale’s office. And the DoJ is corrupt as a porn-filled Window’s ME boot disk.
So now all I can conclude is that Jan 2009 can’t come fast enough.
Shey
Yet.
It would probably be pretty useful.
TheDeadlyShoe
Tom: Presumably the 20-year payout is valued according to estimated inflation.
AnneLaurie
Because Mr. Ashcroft’s Merry Men made him unemployable, if I understand the reasoning. I remember public statements that Hatfill was being “made an example of” to deter future ‘persons of interest’ from raising a stink in public about their lousy Fourth Amendment rights.
The Moar You Know
I don’t know what to call this, but when an express stipulation of the settlement is that the government admits no wrongdoing, I find it hard to call it a “vindication”.
You know, we’ll never know. The guy may be completely innocent, his life ruined by Ashcroft and his goons, or he may be guilty as sin – with every piece of evidence against him tainted by the many unconstitutional practices of the past eight years, and therefore untriable.
We deserve better than this. The people who died deserve better than this.
myiq2xu
He didn’t get treated as bad as Richard Jewell.
Jewell was a bona fide hero. He was a guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and spotted a suspicious backpack. He warned people away from it minutes before the bomb inside it exploded. Thanks to his alert reaction, only one person was killed.
Instead of a medal, the FBI named him as a “person of interest,” suggesting he planted the bomb himself. Jewell was exonerated completely when Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to carrying out the bombing. Jewell died last year.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Silly, everyone knows Saddam was behind the anthrax. That’s another reason we had to invade Iraq.
Caya
Tom, that’s because 150k in 20 years != 150k now, unfortunately I don’t know the English term for it, but it is devalued according to what compound interest it would bring in those 20 years, which are figured into the final 150k.
pfrets
Yeah, the government admits no fault, but $5M+ is more than nuisance change for any entity. It speaks volumes to the case that Hatfield had against the JD.
There is a part of me that wishes he would have run this case all the way through, but he needs to get his life back. Six years of hell is enough.
dbrown
Hatfill often said that we were not paying people like him (He was trying to create a small company to advise on bio attacks) to protect us from a bio attack; he said that we were wide open to such an attack (while true, no one was really making a fuss, but him.) Still, this raised red flags.
He also was one of a very few (try like 10 or so)that could make true weaponized anthrax from a simple R&D setup(he had work for some years doing this as his job) and more damning, he was at the Ft. Detrick when some bio weapon grade materials (including anthrax) went missing. This is a critical point since once having some anthrax, growing more at home is VERY easy IF you know what to do.
Strangely (and very damning), some equipment that could possibly be used to safely grown cultures was found in a small pond (under the water; that destroys all evidence) not more than a few miles from where he lived. Finally, the man grew up in South Africa and strongly back that gov efforts in taking out the enemy blacks by any means (but as a MD he never was part of the army nor did any fighting but was very vocal – not proof of anything but is required that you be a strong military/right wing supporter of extreme measures if you would really try a bio attack.)
Finally, all issues aside, the real terrorist went to great pains NOT to kill anyone. But no one then realized that anthrax could ‘leak’ through envelopes like it did and kill other people. This attack was done by someone who only wanted bio terror to be on the radar screens, not really kill anyone. That pointed towards someone who fit this guy’s profile so he was, and still is, a person of interest; only the FBI got too vocal about fingering him and that ruined his future job prospects and made the settlement possible.
Did he do it? He had the opportunity, motives, knowledge, and ability, and a lot of evidence was found near him, and of course, he did have a strong hatred of ‘liberals’ (note who was targeted) but without any direct proof, no, he cannot be proven as the person. Sorry for the long post but I followed this closely but some of this is rather old and may not be all correct.
JL
Interesting post but if they did not mean to kill anyone, why continue sending letters after the first person died? Wasn’t a worker in the National Enquirer the first to receive a letter?
Betty Cracker
What Moar said. Hatfill is guilty. The government screwed up the case. Now you and I will fund the good life for a mass murderer for a few decades. Epic fail indeed.
DonnaInMichigan
Good for Steven Hatfill
The FBI, along with an over zealous media, ruined this man’s entire life. Do I blame the FBI, yes, however I also put a lot of blame on the media. More so. As they make up stories to suit their agenda. They slant their news for GUILT while the injured party seems to have to PROVE their innocence.
Just like they did to my cousin by marriage Richard Jewell.
None of you realize that the stigma doesn’t just touch the “person of interest”, but also touches the lives of his close family and friends as well. My children lived through a nightmare for years. Their peers would call them jr. bombers, etc.
Ok, that is all I will say on this subject.
Rich is resting in peace now. And I hope that Steven Hatfill can resume some type of normalcy in his life.
gypsy howell
From the Bush administration’s point of view, no biggie. A measley 5 million bucks to scare the bejeezus out of our democratic congresscritters so they’d roll over and sign onto Bush’s TerraTerraTerra! program?
Cheap, by any standard.
Mission Accomplished.
jake
Fixed for extra nuttiness.
The Googles iz ur friend.
gypsy howell
Donna, I’m sorry about your family tragedy. The whole Richard Jewell saga was a crime in and of itself. Just one of so, so many our government and media has foisted on us.
Tim Fuller
Richard Jewel thought experiment:
Assume Richard Jewel was married with a couple young sons and the incident he is famous for happened this summer (assuming Olympics was in the USA).
Question: Would they have put his son’s balls in a vise in an attempt to persuade Mr. Jewel to confess? There doesn’t seem to be a law against it.
Enjoy.
dbrown
Richard Jewell was a very great hero who was wrongly made a person of interest solely because he guessed what was going on (and saved a lot of lives!) However, that caused the FBI to focus on him but to make this public was outrageous and so wrong. Richard should have gotten the millions but at least we know that he saved other people and is a hero in the truth and real sense of that word.
As for Hatfill, I am sorry, but his being a person of interest was very justified (far too many facts and real evidence pointed hatfill and the FBI did not rush out and finger him like your poor cousin) and you do Richard a disservice by putting his name with that rightwing nut job hatfill (and possible mass murderer) and comparing their situations.
As for the Star killing, I have a theory but that and $5 might get you some coffee at Starbucks. As for the series of deaths caused by the couple of letters sent, since the letters were all sent before deaths were reported I still believe the man did not mean to kill. All the people who died were indirect contaminations that until then, not even experts would have guessed could occur. Also, the real letters with anthrax did have notes warning the receiver that this was anthrax and they needed medical attention right away.
Google is our friend but I don’t want to page through the massive hits to get the references I would need – that is spelled lazy and this story is really past history, now.
JL
dbrown, the original letter was sent Sept. 18 and Daschle’s a month later. The National Enquirer reporter didn’t die yet but was in critical condition. Sorry I just don’t buy, I didn’t mean for anyone to die theory. There has always been rumors about the National Enquirer being targeted. The MSM shouldn’t have reported immediately that it looked like American made anthrax but they were following orders from above I guess. They still follow orders from above.
HeartlandLiberal
It is rather disappointing to see the number of posters to this thread who would apparently be perfectly happy living in Communist China under a legal system that is specifically designed around the legal theory that if the state says you are guilty, you are guilty until proven innocent.
It used to be that one of the benefits we enjoyed as Americans was a legal system that worked 180 degrees opposite of that.
You remember? Due process? Innocent till proven guilty?
Of course that was before the Bush / Cheney regime took power, and began their seven year reign of terror, including signing statements, a corrupted DOJ, science in the gutter, dogma ueberalles via apparatchiks placed in every department of government.
Hmmm. Not really much difference in China and us after all, maybe. Anymore.
dbrown
JL, I believe you are correct and I do fully agree with you that the Enquirer reporter was targeted to die by the anthrax terrorist. I do not believe the man meant to kill anyone else is what I should have said (but very clearly, I didn’t. My mistake.)
Ed in NJ
At current interest rates, it would cost about $1.8M to purchase a single premium immediate annuity that paid $150K for 20 years.
kid bitzer
maybe hatfill was guilty. we don’t know yet.
but i’d put about equal odds on this having been an early job out of cheney’s office.
JL
HeartlandLiberal, Bush and Cheney both live by the rule that dictatorship is best unfortunately but I disagree with the premise that most of the commenters agree with that view. Person of Interest has been used for decades and decades. In Atlanta the AJC was just as responsible for the hype around Richard Jewell.
gbbalto
The FBI would have been remiss in not giving Jewell a careful look, and even more remiss in not giving Hatfill a much harder look – he had worked at a facility equipped to weaponize anthrax, lied about his background, speculated in a report about how the postal system could be used to distribute anthrax, etc. Unfortunately, failing completely to learn from the Jewell case, the FBI’s sterling lawman gut feelings led them to focus on only one suspect. IIRC, I don’t recall anyone actually in a position to know (i.e. any expert colleague) believing that Hatfill himself had the lab skills and experience to generate the anthrax. I have been told by a senior colleague of his that he flat-out COULDN’T have managed it. As for not admitting wrongdoing, that is the common gutless CYA language that giant corporations and crooked brokers commonly use when they are forced to settle. IMO all that the FBI and DOJ succeeded in doing is giving the real culprit(s) 6 years to cover their trail.
BH-Buck
The government shat all over Valerie Plame too. When does she get her millions?
?
…?
Why are you all pointing and laughing at me? Did I make a joke or something?
JL
There’s a lot more to this story then we have been told. Whatever happened to investigative journalists?
4tehlulz
>>Whatever happened to investigative journalists?
It’s easier to get blind quotes from sources in your Rolodex than to do real work.
D-Chance.
Yes. How convenient…
and if anyone really thinks Rudolph did the bombing, I got a tract of swampland on the outskirts of Phoenix for sale.
Marshall
Dear TomK
The difference is called the present value of future money, or (more generally) the time value of money.
Here is a calculator
http://www.online-utility.org/math/present_value_of_future_money.jsp
Jay B.
and if anyone really thinks Rudolph did the bombing, I got a tract of swampland on the outskirts of Phoenix for sale.
???
Anyway, don’t forget Nick Kristoff’s role in this. He fingerd Hatfill in print for the FBI to investigate.
The whole anthrax thing is completely screwy. Nothing makes sense.
Bob In Pacifica
If I recall correctly, there was some evidence that South African special forces had used anthrax as part of the war against independence in then-Rhodesia. Whatever grade that they had turned out not to be a very effective weapon out in the open. I’d have to dig up the article which is probably fifteen, twenty years old.
However, I really doubt that this doctor did it. The motive goes to the Bush Administration, or at least the intelligence community, that wanted those post-9/11 laws pushed through. In fact, if I was an NSA “supporter” all I might have to do to encourage that FISA bill passing would be to float a few stories about that anthrax event right before the Senate vote. Great publicity for more power for the intelligence community.
Having been an employee of the USPS at the time, and knowing that there were deaths to fellow employees from this, I am pretty disgusted.
Marshall
I used to work at an Government institution with bollards (the retractable kind) at the front gate. They would go down for a car to go in or out, and back up afterwards, with the down being slow and the up quite fast. One fine evening a colleague was leaving and the guard pushed the button too soon, so the bollards went up under his car, piercing his gas tank, which emptied onto the ground, which meant that the fire department had to be called. He was stuck for over 2 hours before his car could be towed.
Naturally, he filed a claim on his car repairs, for under $ 1,000 if I remember correctly. The Government fought him like gangbusters, said he couldn’t prove that the guard acted improperly, was too slow driving out, etc. They actually assigned an attorney to this and threatened to sue him. He settled for 50 %, saving the USG a few hundred dollars.
Experiences like this suggest to me that Mr. Hatfill probably had a pretty good case.
Cassius Chaerea
If the aim of the anthrax terrorist was to scare the hell out of the media and the Democratic congressional leadership and thus get the Patriot Act passed without review, the success was complete. That a few random people were killed in the process just added to the general we-must-do-something terror atmosphere.
There’s far more reason to suspect Bush-Cheney action here than for 9-11, but I suppose none of us living today will ever hear the real story.
Marshall
One other thing – the whole thing about weaponized anthrax is that the spores are supposed to be ground quite small – a few microns in size (comparable to talcum powder). It is hard (not impossible, just hard) for me to imagine that someone who was used to dealing with such fine powders wouldn’t know that they would leak from regular envelopes.
gypsy howell
Like I said — Mission Accomplished.
And the price for the red herring was only $5 million. Cheap by GWOT standards.
smiley
Pet peeve.
stuck in 200
dbrown says:
Strangely (and very damning), some equipment that could possibly be used to safely grown cultures was found in a small pond (under the water; that destroys all evidence) not more than a few miles from where he lived.
Not really. From an 8/1/03 Washington Post story:
The FBI spent about $250,000 and three weeks draining 1.45 million gallons of water from the pond in a search for evidence — including clothing and soil samples — that might lead to the culprit who sent the deadly anthrax bacteria in the mail that killed five people and sickened 17 others in the fall of 2001.
But the search netted nothing more than a hodgepodge of items — a gun, a bicycle, fishing lures — none of which appeared to be linked to the case, sources said.
Unless those are some very special fishing lures, this is a no-go. I have no idea if Hatfill did it or not, but this part of the urban legend should go away.
Duros Hussein 62
maybe hatfill was guilty. we don’t know yet.
but i’d put about equal odds on this having been an early job out of cheney’s office.
I highly doubt it. Wanna know why? It was moderately successful.
jake
OK, anyone still scratching his head over the size of the settlement (which Hatfill may or may not ever collect). Re-read all of the comments that boil down to “Maybe he’s not guilty, but we’ll never know for sure.”
In my experience the people who post here aren’t completely stupid and tend to be more thoughtful than your average parrot that squawks “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to hide!”
Hatfill’s life has been fucked good and hard. Lots of people will look at the fact he wasn’t found “Not guilty.” get hung up on the “We did nothing wrong” boilerplate that is standard for settlements and go on thinking he must have done something.
kid bitzer
“but i’d put about equal odds on this having been an early job out of cheney’s office.
I highly doubt it. Wanna know why? It was moderately successful.”
waddya mean? when it comes to killing americans, cheney’s shop has done good work:
“bin laden determined to strike inside us”–ignored, and 3000 americans dead.
iraq war: 4,000 americans dead.
katrina: one major american city lost.
and don’t forget: this is the guy who shot an american in the face, and then forced the shooting victim to apologize for it, on national tv.
they’re not incompetent at everything: only governance.
croatoan
It pisses me off that McCain and the Republicans are still going to claim that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11, when President Bush himself said the anthrax attacks were “a second wave of terrorist attacks upon our country” and a “biological attack.”
The Republicans didn’t prevent the 9/11 attacks or the anthrax attacks, and they haven’t punished the people behind them.