Granted, I already mentioned this just a couple of posts ago, but upon further reflection (and upon seeing a bunch of other good posts about this elsewhere), it probably deserves an item of its own.
In his State of the Union address last night, Bush boasted, “We are grateful that there has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11.”
Except, of course, that’s wrong. I’m not trying to play a cute semantics game; I know what conservatives mean when they talk about “terrorist attacks.” They’re describing devastating, cataclysmic events that kill a lot of people at once. I get it.
But about a month after 9/11, someone sent weaponized anthrax to two Democratic senators and several news outlets. Five Americans were killed and 17 more suffered serious illnesses. For reasons that I’ve never been able to explain, the incident — it’s entirely reasonable to call it an “attack” — is hardly ever mentioned. No one knows where the anthrax came from, who sent it, or why. It was a horrifying incident, immediately on the heels of another horrifying incident, but more than six years later, it’s almost as if the episode never happened.
After Yglesias noted that it seems as if the “whole episode has been officially erased from the historical record or something,” Atrios added:
And anthrax was what made things like “mobile chemical weapons labs” sound so scary. Not everyone agrees, but I think more than 9/11 the anthrax freaked the country out. 9/11 was horrible, but the anthrax made it seem like we’d reached a new era where some horrible creepy shit was going to happen every day.
And then it was all forgotten.
Quite right. Every time I hear someone talk about the absence of 9/11 attacks, I twitch, wondering why the anthrax incident has somehow been downgraded in the national memory.
The White House, at least for a while, knew better.
Ezra reminded me that Jacob Weisburg has some important insights on the administration’s response to the events of 2001.
The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a larger impact than is generally appreciated — one in many ways bigger than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.[…]
Then on October 4 the worst fears inside the White House were realized. Bush choked up as he thanked government workers in a morning speech at the State Department. Ari Fleischer reports that he had “never before and never since seen the president look as tired and as troubled as he did that morning.” When they returned to the White House, Bush called Fleischer into his office and explained the reason: he had just learned that a Florida man had been stricken with anthrax. Bush feared it was the dreaded second wave.
Another anthrax letter, never recovered (or at least never disclosed), was apparently sent to the White House. On October 22, anthrax was found on an automated slitter used to open letters at a Secret Service facility in an undisclosed location some miles away. This meant the White House was a target of biological terrorism. “I think the seminal event of the Bush administration was the anthrax attacks,” someone close to the president told me. “It was the thing that changed everything. It was the hard stare into the abyss.”
And yet, here we are, wondering why the president feels confident announcing that “there has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11,” knowing full well that this simply isn’t the case.
I should note that, from a purely personal perspective, I was in DC for both attacks, and I found the anthrax letters at least as scary as 9/11, if not more so. It’s not that I thought anyone would send me an anthrax-laced letter, but there was a very real threat of cross-contamination — and at the time, my office mail was going through the same DC post office that the anthrax letters to Democratic senators had gone through. Indeed, two of the five people killed were postal workers at my post office.
More than six years later, the mysterious example of bio-terrorism is not only unresolved, it’s become easily-overlooked trivia. It’s bewildering.