Remember Steven Hatfill? He was the main suspect in the 2001 anthrax deaths before the FBI turned its attention to Bruce Ivins.
Five people were killed by anthrax being sent in envelopes through the mail. Among them were the Black postal workers Joseph P. Curseen, Jr. and Thomas L. Morris, Jr. These attacks, which terrified millions, began one week after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Hatfill has now been named an adviser to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Trump.
One of the reasons that Hatfill was under suspicion was his support for racist regimes. This included going to pre-liberation Zimbabwe in 1978, when the African country was run by white settlers who called it Rhodesia.
Their leader, Ian Smith, declared, “I don’t believe in majority rule, black majority rule, not in a thousand years.”
Smith was no different than the white landowners from South Africa who are being welcomed as “refugees” by Trump.
When Hatfill arrived in so-called Rhodesia, a liberation struggle — or Chimurenga — was being waged by Africans against Ian Smith and his white minority dictatorship. Thousands of Africans died fighting for freedom. By 1980, the people of Zimbabwe had overthrown Ian Smith and colonial rule.
Hatfill was already enrolled in the Godfrey Huggins Medical School, which is now the University of Zimbabwe’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. He graduated in 1983 with a doctor’s degree.
It’s alleged that Hatfill claimed to have served with the Selous Scouts, a death squad that hunted liberation fighters and massacred many Africans during the Chimurenga. These terrorists were blamed for an anthrax outbreak that killed 182 people and thousands of cattle.
Hatfill then went to South Africa, where the apartheid system
was still in power and was keeping Nelson Mandela in prison. Its Nazi army was continuing its war against the People’s Republic of Angola.
The war against Zimbabwe
Hatfill may have been exaggerating his racist activities, particularly
whether or not he had any connection with the bloodthirsty Selous Scouts. But his bragging only burnished his credentials with the military-industrial complex. It certainly endeared him to Trump’s aides.
Hatfill had no trouble getting hired by Science Applications International Corporation, a major military contractor. Or being employed as a researcher for the U.S. Army’s biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
Keeping Ian Smith and his fellow white settlers in power had been a holy cause for racists in the United States and Britain. Soldier of Fortune magazine encouraged mercenaries to volunteer to fight for the white minority government.
Writers for William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine and the ex-or maybe not-so-ex CIA ghoul David Atlee Phillips formed the
American-Rhodesian Association. Many researchers believe that Phillips played a key role in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
In 1971, the U.S. Senate lifted sanctions passed by the UN on chrome imported from Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime. This was the senators’ response to African delegates welcoming the People’s Republic of China to its rightful seat in the UN.
The wealthy and powerful have continued their attacks against Zimbabwe. For 25 years, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on the African country, which include cutting off Zimbabwe’s access to credit from Western financial institutions.
This was revenge for Zimbabwe’s people taking back their land, which was stolen by white farmers. That’s what should have been done after the U.S. Civil War.
Formerly enslaved Africans deserved the land that they had worked for centuries, along with members of Indigenous nations from whom it was stolen. The slogan “land back” echoes from Wounded Knee to Palestine.
Reopen the anthrax investigation
Hatfill also became an attractive job candidate for the Trump administration because he endorsed quack cures for COVID-19. The entire crew of Trump’s health appointees — starting with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — are quacks.
This goes hand-in-hand with Trump’s proposed budget that will cut 14 million people from Medicaid by 2034.
Another reason Hatfill was hired was his support for the phony claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. This big lie was the rallying cry of the fascist mob, which was allowed to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
There’s never been a satisfactory answer to who committed the 2001 anthrax attacks, despite the FBI hounding Dr. Bruce Ivins to commit suicide. The attacks helped drive through the misnamed Patriot Act — which gave U.S. spy agencies greatly increased power to wiretap and other violations of civil rights — through Congress.
The U.S. Army has had a long record of experimenting with anthrax and other biological weapons.
The war criminals in the Japanese Army’s Unit 731, who killed at least 14,000 people in biological warfare experiments, were given immunity from prosecution after World War II. This was in exchange for sharing their research with the Pentagon. (“Unit 731 Testimony,” by Hal Gold.)
In 1968, 6,000 sheep were killed by a nerve agent near the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, 85 miles west of Salt Lake City.
The body of the U.S. Army’s anthrax expert Frank Olson was found outside a New York City hotel on Nov. 18, 1953. The official story was that Olsen jumped out of a window because of an LSD experiment gone bad. His son Eric Olson believes his father was murdered.
The FBI claims that Dr. Bruce Ivins was guilty of the 2001 anthrax attacks. After Ivins committed suicide, the FBI closed the case.
Many people have doubts about Ivins’ guilt, including his co-workers at Fort Detrick. Dead people like Lee Harvey Oswald or Bruce Ivins can be blamed, but can’t testify.
If Ivins was responsible, that means the attacks came from within Fort Detrick using the U.S. Army’s supplies of anthrax.
It’s time to reopen the investigation into the 2001 anthrax deaths. And take another look at Steven Hatfill.
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