Confederate Memorial Association NEWS

P.O. Box 6010, Washington, D.C. 20005

www.confederate.org

For Immediate Release

Contact: Robert Hughes

202-483-5700 or 703-527-0237

August 29, 2002

'LOST' HEARING RECORD COULD BE ANTHRAX SMOKING GUN

WASHINGTON, D.C. --Recent inquiries to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have revealed that the hearing record of March 3, 1999 is not available. This means that the testimony of
William C. Patrick III on anthrax attacks on the Congress cannot be scrutinized.

Patrick has been mentioned in press reports on the investigation of Dr. Steven Hatfill, who had commissioned Patrick for a study on anthrax attacks when both worked for CIA contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The study, among other things, detailed how anthrax could be sent through the mail in envelopes to Congress.

William McFarland, Director of Security for the Committee, said that if the hearing record for a certain date was not available, it meant that the hearing was closed for national security reasons.

However, in a story by the Washington Post on March 4 of that year, Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) says that he called the unusual "open session" to help educate the public on what he called "a national security concern of the highest priority."

The Post story detailed how Patrick claimed to have brought a vial of anthrax through security at the Rayburn House Office Building. He said he had performed similar security tests at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, without being stopped by security.

John Edward Hurley, who was attempting to get a copy of the public record of the hearing, said that this could be the smoking gun of the anthrax investigation because "a lot was said at this hearing that could point to who is responsible for the attacks."

Hurley said his interest in the subject derived from his discovery of the involvement of Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a Special Forces lawyer, and Vicki Heilig, a SAIC contractor, in a lawsuit that closed the century-old Confederate Memorial Hall museum and library in downtown Washington.

Hurley said that Addicott had cited the hearing in a paper he presented to the U.S. Army War College in February of 2000 entitled "Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Review and New
Paradigm." References to airline hijackings, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, Hamas, anthrax and the toppling of the World Trade Center buildings were included in Addicott's report.

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