Wow!

I wonder how much Valery plame will get from the monkey if this chap
got this from the FBI:

<blockquote] U.S. to pay millions in lawsuit over anthrax innuendo
By Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau
Published: June 29, 2008

WASHINGTON: The U.S. government will pay $4.6 million to settle a
lawsuit brought by Steven Hatfill, a former U.S. Army biodefense
researcher who was intensively investigated as a "person of interest"
in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001, the Justice Department
announced Friday.

The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity
worth $1.8 million that will pay Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years,
brings to an end a five-year legal battle.

Hatfill, who worked at the army's laboratory at Fort Detrick in
Frederick, Maryland, in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of
news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras
showed FBI agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the
army base. John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, later called him
a "person of interest" in the case on national television.

In a news conference in August 2002, Hatfill tearfully denied that he
had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible
news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his
reputation.

Hatfill's lawsuit, filed in 2003, accused FBI agents and Justice
Department officials involved in the criminal investigation of the
anthrax mailings of leaking information about him to the news media in
violation of the Privacy Act. In order to prove their case, his
lawyers took depositions from key FBI investigators, senior officials
and a number of reporters who had covered the investigation.

Mark Grannis, a lawyer for Hatfill, said his client was pleased with
the settlement.

"The good news is that we still live in a country where a guy who's
been horribly abused can go to a judge and say, 'I need your help,'
and maybe it takes a while, but he gets justice," Grannis said.

The settlement, Grannis said, "means that Steven Hatfill is finally an
ex-person of interest."

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a statement
that the government admitted no liability but decided settlement was
"in the best interest of the United States."

In a written statement, Hatfill's lawyers said, "We can only hope that
the individuals and institutions involved are sufficiently chastened
by this episode to deter similar destruction of private citizens in
the future - and that we will all read anonymously sourced news
reports with a great deal more skepticism."

Hatfill also sued The New York Times, the owner of the International
Herald Tribune, and the columnist Nicholas Kristof, saying that
columns Kristof wrote about the case had libeled him by suggesting
that he might be the anthrax mailer. That lawsuit was dismissed last
year, but Hatfill has appealed the dismissal.

The former Army scientist also sued Vanity Fair and the author of an
article about the case in the magazine, Donald Foster, as well as
Reader's Digest, which published a condensed version. That case was
settled last year on confidential terms.

Nearly seven years after the toxic letters were mailed, killing five
people and sickening at least 17 others, the case has not been solved.

An FBI spokesman, Jason Pack, said the anthrax investigation, "is one
of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted by law
enforcement."

"Solving this case is a top priority for the FBI and for the family
members of the victims who were killed," Pack said. "Our commitment is
undiminished."

Representative Rush Holt, the New Jersey Democrat whose district
includes the site of a postal box believed to have been used in the
attacks, said he would press Robert Mueller 3rd, director of the FBI,
for more answers about the status of the long-stalled case.

"As today's settlement announcement confirms, this case was botched
from the very beginning," Holt said. "The FBI did a poor job of
collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one
individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous theory
of the case that has led to this very expensive dead end."

After Hatfill came under suspicion in the anthrax case in 2002, an FBI
surveillance team began following him everywhere, and a small
motorcade sometimes trailed his car around Washington.

In May 2003, an FBI surveillance car ran over Hatfill's foot in
Georgetown as he approached the car to take the driver's picture. He
was given a ticket for "walking to create a hazard" and was fined $5.

Hatfill subpoenaed a number of Washington journalists to try to learn
which federal officials had spoken to the news media about the case
against him in possible violation of federal privacy laws.[/
blockquote>

Come to think of it if the same rules apply everyone taken to Gitmo,
everyone kidnapped and rendered to a torturer, everyone tracked by
illegal electronic spying, and everyone killed in the attack on the
twin towers in New York in September 2001 will be able to sue the ...
so and soes.
.

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