Outrage, Hope and Action

The anthrax attacks of 2001 are now so out of memory that it's hard to recall the panic and fear caused by the appearance of those first envelopes, spilling deadly powder and containing threatening letters. But according to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That's the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror.

Looked at with a cool eye, this buried nightmare could be seen as the more threatening of the two attacks that year. The 9/11 assaults were, of course, vastly more costly in lives -- almost 3,000 dead against just 5 from anthrax inhalation. On the other hand, the al-Qaeda strike only simulated a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack. You had to use some sci-fi-style imagining -- and perhaps your knowledge that the old Soviet Cold War weapons labs and arsenals were now ill-tended and leaking material -- to conjure up a situation in which Osama and crew might get their hands on a real version of the same. (The administration, of course, did exactly this -- from Attorney General Ashcroft's sudden announcement in Moscow of the arrest of Jose ("dirty-bomb") Padilla to those Iraqi mushroom clouds that went off rhetorically over American cities in speeches by the National Security Adviser, the President, the Vice President, and other top officials before we launched our invasion of Iraq.

With the anthrax killer, no sci-fi imaginings were necessary. He (she, them) used an actual weapon of mass destruction -- highly refined anthrax, the Ames strain that almost certainly fell out of the not-so-perfectly guarded American Cold War weapons labs. And then, after the series of postal attacks ended, the anthrax killer(s) remained at large not in the mountains of Afghanistan, but somewhere in the United States -- with no evidence that the supply of anthrax had been used up. Who needs to imagine al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" here in the U.S., when you have such a live wire in the neighborhood?

Keep in mind that visions of anthrax-like weaponry would soon mobilize a nation in fear and hysteria around orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox-inoculations and finally a war lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, drip out of the hands of Saddam Hussein and into those of terrorists heading our way. And yet, by early 2002, the first WMD attack in the U.S. was already slipping out of the news and drifting from memory. Here was the stuff of a terrifying made-for-TV movie or simply a trailer for the end of the world. It should have been unforgettable.

Had the anthrax attacks been -- as the threatening letters, ominously dated "9/11/01," that accompanied them implied -- the work of an Islamic terrorist group, we would probably still be talking about it -- and we would have no control group to measure 9/11 against. But let's briefly review what did happen.

Just a week after the Twin Towers went down, the first of seven letters filled with anthrax arrived not from the distant outlands of the planet, but from Trenton, New Jersey. This first wave was sent to a potpourri of media outlets: ABC, NBC, and CBS news as well as the New York Post and the National Enquirer in Florida. They proclaimed, "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." Two more, also postmarked from Trenton and dated October 9, 2001, were sent to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These letters emptied prime-time TV newsrooms and, for the first time since the British burned Washington in 1814, cleared the halls of Congress while it was still in session. It should have been unforgettable.

The cast of characters would come to include bumbling or recalcitrant FBI agents, intrepid disease investigators, amateur sleuths, heroic postal workers, a wounded child, brain-damaged survivors, TV personalities like Tom Brokaw, the top politicians of our nation, and the most secretive weapons scientists, labs, and arsenals of the Cold War. Just to make matters more interesting, Steven Hatfill, a bioweapons expert and for some time the main (as the Attorney General put it) "person of interest" in the investigation, had access to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland at Fort Detrick where some of the country's most secret bioweapons work was done. It should have been the case of the century. It should have been unforgettable.

September 11, 2002 rolled around amid weeks of ceremonies and rites, interviews with survivors, and memorial articles galore, while TV shows and books poured out. But where were the survivor interviews with those victimized by the anthrax killer(s)? Where were the books, the dramas, the movies, the TV shows? Four years later, the victims and heroes of 9/11 are still being written about; their "sacred" ground in New York is still being bitterly fought over, but when was the last time you saw anything about the victims or the heroes -- mainly postal workers -- of the anthrax attacks?

Within the last year, the ongoing investigation of the case has, according to the Washington Post, been significantly downsized. The number of FBI agents assigned to it has dropped from 31 to 21 and postal inspectors from 13 to 9. Many of those remaining are now said to be "in the process of taking inventory. The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the investigation..." It has "cold case, dead file" written all over it.

When it comes to costs, according to the Post, "at least 17 post offices and public office buildings were contaminated. Including cleanup costs, an FBI document put the damage in excess of $1 billion." And that doesn't account for the more subtle costs such as the role the attacks played in panicking Congress into an invasion of Iraq. Would the administration's various bizarre fears and alarms about the dangers to us of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have had such a realistic ring to them if our representatives hadn't actually experienced a bioweapons attack? It should have been unforgettable, but by some mysterious process that has yet to be considered, the attacks were, in a sense, "disappeared."

A Terror War of Choice

If, as an editor of a major newspaper, you were to draw a single conclusion from this horrifying episode, it might be: Despite what we've heard, the greatest WMD danger to Americans comes not from impoverished Third World or rickety Middle Eastern rogue states, but from the arsenals and weapons labs of the two former Cold War superpowers. But nothing in the media coverage since then has indicated anything of the sort. While, prewar, reporters prowled Iraqi nuclear facilities, wrote major pieces on Iraq's "Dr. Germ," and brought down whole forests of trees in the service of WMD programs at Iraq's Tuwaitha or North Korea's Yongbyan, or on gassed dogs in Afghanistan and the Iranian bomb that also wasn't, the Soviet and American weapons labs, the Soviet and American Dr. Germs, the Ames anthrax strain, and the anthrax killer hardly took out a tree or two.

When was the last time you read a major report on the state of American biowarfare work? When was the last time you encountered a significant story about the weapons labs at Fort Detrick in suburban Maryland where the Ames strain was evidently first researched or the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah where it was produced and tested? How much attention has been given to recent contracts linked to Dugway that signal a desire on the part of the U.S. military to "buy large quantities of anthrax, in a controversial move that is likely to raise questions over its commitment to treaties designed to limit the spread of biological weapons"? When was the last time you read an article on whether the Homeland Security Department or the Pentagon is attending to the potential dangers of the American WMD arsenal? How much attention has gone into the decrepit system for locking down Russian WMD stocks? The odd news piece, nothing more. And while this administration spends about a billion dollars a week on its war in Iraq, it has hardly had the will or interest to raise the few billion dollars a year needed to help lock-down the Russian arsenal. Imagine that. If, of course, the President had chosen to launch his "war" on terror against the anthrax killers, this might have been our top priority.

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A couple of questions:

Once the anthrax threat was identified as coming from U.S. military labs, why did the administration, the FBI, and the media assume that only a single individual was responsible?

Read as much of the coverage of the anthrax killings as you want and you'll discover that the FBI has long taken for blanket fact that a single "mad scientist" was the culprit -- and, no less important, that that theory has been accepted as bedrock fact by the media as well. No alternative possibilities have been seriously considered for years.

For instance, it is known that a set of the anthrax letters was sent from a mailbox in Princeton, New Jersey, some hours from Ivins's home and the Fort Detrick lab in Frederick, Maryland. The question the FBI puzzled over -- and the media took up vigorously -- was whether, on the day in question, Ivins had time to make it to Princeton and back, given what's known of his schedule. The FBI suggests that he did; critics suggest otherwise. No one, however, seems to consider the possibility that the lone terrorist of the anthrax killings might have had one or more accomplices, which would have made the "problem" of mailing those letters into a piece of cake.

What of those military labs? Why does their history continue to play little or no part in the story of the anthrax attacks?

In reading through reams of coverage of Ivins's suicide and the FBI case against him, I found only a single reference to the work his lab at Fort Detrick had been dedicated to throughout most of the Cold War era. Here is that sentence from the Washington Post: "As home to the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, the facility ran a top-secret program producing offensive biological weapons from 1943 until 1969." And yet, if you don't grasp this fact, the real significance of the anthrax case remains in the shadows.