"A Clear and Present Danger"
The phone lines in the office of Sheriff Bruce Bryant, of York County, S.C., started burning up around 8 p.m. on the night of Saturday, Sept. 15. Helicopters had been seen heading up the Catawba River toward a nuclear power station. Soon two F-16 fighter jets arrived on the scene, and Bryant heard a "tremendous, thunderous noise." A little later, choppers were spotted near the Oconee nuclear plant near Clemson, 90 miles away. Then, shortly after midnight, several more were reported flying over the Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy facility that occupies more than 360 sq. mi. along the border of South Carolina and Georgia. Nuclear waste is disposed of there, and weapons are restocked with tritium. Authorities closed down a highway that runs through the base, until the FBI gave the all clear. But Bryant and his frightened neighbors still don't know what happened that night. Utility-industry analysts say Catawba was subject to a security test, but the feds won't confirm anything. "It's like it never happened," says John Paolucci, of the South Carolina emergency preparedness service. "But it did."
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If people in York County are nervous, they've got a huge support group. America has become a jittery nation since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and with good reason. Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and declared that "terrorism is a clear and present danger to Americans today." Information available to the FBI, Ashcroft continued, "indicates a potential for additional terrorist incidents." He didn't bother to add what everyone knew: the next incidents could be even more ghastly than those of Sept. 11. A terrorist group prepared to murder more than 6,000 civilians would feel no compunction about killing 60,000--or 600,000--if it could deploy the necessary weapons of mass destruction. And so the fear of such an attack--and the government's hasty efforts to contain the threat--became the nation's No. 1 item of business.
From coast to coast, Americans experienced things for which they were quite unprepared. State troopers patrolled airports. "It was like traveling through a combat zone," said Marcia Brier, from Needham, Mass., of a trip from Boston's Logan Airport. At Reagan National Airport in Washington, the gleaming, airy terminal that opened in 1997 remained closed. A tanker carrying 33 million gallons of liquefied natural gas was diverted from highly populated Boston Harbor to Louisiana, just as a precaution. In Idaho and Maryland, there were panicky rumors of missing crop dusters. The Los Angeles subway was shut down for the first time in its history, as passengers complained of dizziness and itchy eyes. No chemical agents were found.
All the while, law-enforcement officers were continuing the greatest dragnet the world had ever seen. FBI sources downplayed the possibility of a second wave of attacks. But less than three weeks after the catastrophe, Ashcroft said that a total of 480 people had already been arrested or detained. Hundreds more had been picked up around the globe, with authorities paying particular attention to possible terrorist support networks in Germany and Britain. Those scooped up included a few who appeared to have links to the hijackers, and some who just had the wrong sort of look at the wrong sort of time. In DeFuniak Springs, a small town in the Florida panhandle, a local librarian remembered that the hijackers had used library computers to book flight reservations, saw a man from the Middle East seated at a keyboard and called the police. (The man was guilty of nothing.) Those driving into Manhattan were stuck in lines of the sort usually seen only in Bangkok or Mexico City, as authorities made carpools compulsory and searched every van and truck, especially those licensed to carry hazardous materials. "This is how it is because this is how it has to be," said a law-enforcement official, according to the New York Post. "This is a police state now."
It's not. But there was a pervasive sense that things weren't as they had been. How could they be, when the President gave the Pentagon the authority to shoot down any hijacked civilian airliner? Pundits quickly learned to trot out the phrase "homeland security," with its faintly Orwellian overtones. And, as often happens in national emergencies, the desire of law enforcement for a free hand bumped into the rights and protections set down by men in wigs in the late 18th century.
In one sense, that's surprising, because in recent years the police have pretty much got what they asked for. As recently as 1998, the year that terrorists bombed two American embassies in Africa, President Clinton granted law-enforcement officials a wish list of extra investigative powers. "Any one of these extremely valuable tools," said a senior FBI official at the time, "could be the keystone" to a successful operation against terrorists. For the bureau, it seems, no kit ever has enough tools. Three years later, it is back for more. In the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, Ashcroft seeks to give cops and the FBI yet more powers, including a provision that would allow the Justice Department to detain immigrants suspected of terrorism indefinitely, in contrast to the current time limit of 48 hours. A coalition of civil libertarians and conservatives suspicious of big government has slowed the bill's progress through Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy told TIME that "the biggest danger is that [terrorists] unravel the constitutional protections we've spent 200 years as a democracy to build." By last Thursday, however, Leahy was on the phone to Ashcroft, suggesting that staff members work through the weekend to iron out the remaining points of disagreement.
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