Homeland Insecurity

-#include virtual="/time/2001/includes/latest_1023.htm"-->The standards by which we judge public servants changed on Sept. 11, and maybe the guys in the Congress just never got the word. When buildings in New York City were targeted and ablaze, the fire fighters ran into them. Last week, when buildings in Washington were targeted, the House members left town. While Senators camped in cubby holes and went about their business, Congressmen called it a day and adjourned. They forgot that in wartime, symbols have substance: no war--not World War II, not World War I, not the Civil War, not even the War of 1812, when British forces burned the White House--has forced the U.S. Congress to evacuate. But that has happened twice in the past five weeks: after the Sept. 11 attack and then again last Thursday, after Senate majority leader Tom Daschle's office joined the newspapers and networks as an anthrax hot zone. Is it possible our enemies may have tried to do with an envelope what they failed to do with a 757?

For leaving, of course, House members came under fire. WIMPS, shouted the New York Post. "Another chapter in Profiles in Courage," snarked Senator John McCain--proud that his chamber hadn't closed up shop--who had headed to New York to do Letterman. All the House did, embattled legislators insisted, was adjourn a day early to get out of the way of the guys in the haz-mat suits who would be sweeping for spores in the halls of power. It would have been irresponsible and dumb to do otherwise, they said. And they could claim some vindication on Saturday when investigators found anthrax in the mail area of the Ford Office Building, on the House side of the Capitol.

But the Senate had managed to find somewhere to stay in session and keep working, and it would have helped if the House had done the same, instead of sending members home. In a week when events were conspiring to make people wonder what we were getting into and whether we were up to the job, the timing of the House hiatus could not have been worse. The very idea of Congress adjourning at all was breathtaking, when everything from airline security to the stimulus package to smallpox vaccine demanded immediate attention, and the new Director of Homeland Security barely had a job description, much less a budget to fulfill it.

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Nor did it help that the President, stopping over in California on his way to an economic summit in Shanghai when Congress evacuated, had virtually nothing to say about the matter. "We cannot put him out at each new development," a senior Administration official told TIME. "And there were a lot of developments this week." Bush doesn't want to be announcing the results of each nasal swab; that's what Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge are meant to do. But Wednesday they were saying little and nothing, respectively, so Bush's silence just compounded the concern about who knew what and who was in charge and where this all was heading. The anthrax incidents presented both a health threat and a crime scene, and the airwaves were dense with fear but short on facts. There was no domestic Don Rumsfeld, whose Pentagon briefings are reassuring even when they aren't especially revealing. Was the anthrax strain detected last week in the Congress "weapons grade" or not, easily spread or not, related to the other attacks or not? Are we ready or not? And when public officials offer answers like "I'd rather not comment about any of the specifics," as Daschle said one day last week, it can make people wonder how long our institutions and our psyches can withstand the strain.

In some sense the House was especially representative last week, because the fear in the Capitol was reflected far and wide. Northwest Airlines had to remove all the Sweet'N Low from its planes because so many flights were being delayed by powdery fears. Emergency rooms all over the country were swamped with people with flulike symptoms: Was it anthrax, or anxiety, or just October? Mail handlers were wearing rubber gloves, office workers were refusing to open their mail; and there were so many hoaxes that frustrated cops are threatening to put the wise guys in jail for life if they catch them. Local police departments were deluged with reports of suspicious substances. "The green stuff on the street is guacamole!" said an exasperated Chicago police department spokesman. "The white powder on the stairs is baking soda. These are not reasons to call 911. People have got to start using some common sense."

The FBI admitted that with only 11,143 agents, the hunt for the anthrax perpetrators meant the bureau had to reduce its effort to track the Sept. 11 clues--and, in the process, perhaps reducing its chances of uncovering and preventing the next attack. "Every day is Groundhog Day," sighed an overtaxed investigator whose morning begins before dawn. "By 9 a.m. I'm brain dead and we're just starting." On Friday Ridge disclosed that the strains of anthrax bacteria sent to Florida, New York and Washington were "indistinguishable," which suggested a concerted attack by a disciplined network. So did the origin of the envelopes: Trenton, N.J., in the same state where several hijackers lived before boarding their plane in Newark; and Palm Beach County, Fla., where Mohamed Atta learned to fly, investigated crop dusters and appeared one day at a pharmacy in search of something to soothe the bright red rash on his hands.