WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- For almost 10 days, the Bush administration has been trying to regain the high ground on the terrorism war at home, but the effort has not taken hold.
By Thursday, it was shaking the premise behind the Office of Homeland Security and raising questions about the government's ability to protect citizens against these new threats.
At first, President Bush's problems had been treated as issues of "message," whether his normally tightly controlled media operation was faltering. But as the days have gone forward, the confusing public messages of the White House have led to questions about whether the war on the home front was floundering.
Unchecked, one administration insider told UPI, "it could squander the enormous support for the president that welled up after Sept. 11."
The issue of public confidence began for Bush on Wednesday, Oct. 17, the morning he was leaving for China. He had breakfast with congressional leaders to "brief them," one participant said, on what the administration knew about the letter filled with anthrax that had been delivered to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office two days before.
The White House already knew that military scientists at Fort Detrick, Md., had concluded that the material was of a very fine texture, which made it easier to inhale and thus more lethal because anthrax by inhalation is more likely to result in death. Anthrax had already killed a man in Florida, and others in New York were gravely ill.
The administration itself was claiming that this was a terrorist attack, even though it could not connect it to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaida network, and now a top government official was a target.
The congressional leaders left the briefing deeply concerned. Two hours later, the House leaders, Reps. Dennis Hastert and Richard Gephardt, ordered the House of Representatives to suspend business Wednesday evening so a complete sweep could be done of the offices. They were ridiculed by a front-page headline in The New York Post as "Wimps," but within days the Post discovered that it, too, had received an anthrax letter and two employees have now developed a skin form of anthrax.
The Senate stayed open Wednesday and Thursday in a half-hearted way while thousands of employees at two Senate office buildings were tested for exposure to the biological agent.
Midday Wednesday, Tom Daschle brought to an impromptu news conference on the lawn outside the Capitol officials from Health and Human Services, the Army and a military research agency to reassure the media that tests were being conducted and buildings were being searched. It was clear the federal government was on the job, and by the weekend nearly 4,000 congressional employees had received nasal tests for exposure to anthrax and most had received doses of Cipro, an antibiotic.
All through Oct. 17, the news media focused on anxiety in Washington, with interviews of frightened Capitol Hill workers and photographs of long lines of people awaiting "swab tests" outside Senate office buildings.
Despite the growing sense that Washington was under a concerted attack, Bush continued his trip to China. His media secretary, Ari Fleischer, and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the president had determined that it was more important "to the war effort" that he attend the Asian economic conference than remain in Washington. And for the first of many times since, Fleischer said the president had faith in the government agencies dealing with the crisis.
Early the next day, Oct. 18, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, in office a little over two weeks, suddenly announced a hurried morning briefing on anthrax bringing together Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, FBI Director Robert Mueller, the surgeon general and his top aide, and Maj. Gen. John Parker, the chief of a unit at Fort Detrick that is working on bio-terrorism agents.
The group said nothing new on anthrax, but listed again all the efforts that were being made to find the people who mailed the anthrax and to protect people from the diseases the agent might cause. Ridge was asked again and again to define his powers to organize this defense against terrorism; he reiterated that though he had no statutory authority to order these agencies to cooperate, he had Bush's backing and this was all the authority he needed.
A U.S. military raid in Afghanistan kept the anthrax story out of center stage over the weekend, but on Monday, the anthrax crisis grew dramatically: Two postal workers, both men, both workers at Washington's central sorting facility on Brentwood Road N.E., died in area hospitals of inhaled anthrax.
At the time of those deaths, the government had done none of the things to test and treat the 2,000 workers at this postal facility that it had done on Capitol Hill. Postal workers charged that their government had abandoned them.
Ridge and others claim that they had traced back on the Daschle letter and had simply not concluded that the major sorting facility could be a site of anthrax infestation.
Since his return from China, President Bush has only addressed the crisis obliquely -- while visiting an elementary school, a packing company in Maryland and at photo opportunity. When a remote White House postal facility was found to have traces of anthrax, the president said at a photo opportunity that "he didn't have anthrax." Fleischer refused to disclose whether Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney had been examined for anthrax or given preventative doses of antibiotics.
Fleischer did disclose that the White House has been conducting special enhanced environmental screens since Sept. 11 to test for biological agents, but that these were not ordered for other agencies or residences. He said that White House mail was being subjected to a scanning process that killed some bacteria, but again this was not done elsewhere.
At the same time, administration officials were issuing confusing and often-contradictory public statements. While telling people not to stock up on Cipro, the government purchased millions of additional doses. The postal authorities first said the mail would be delivered as usual, but finally acknowledged that they couldn't guarantee its safety.
When they examined the Brentwood Postal facility and found anthrax in processing machines, they quickly went out and ordered medical tests for public officials and news reporters who had been invited there days before.
The concept of Ridge and the Office of Homeland Security, administration officials said, was that he would give the public face to the war on terrorism at home that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was giving to the war in Afghanistan.
But Ridge has not had one session in which he has not faced constant questioning about his authority. Thursday he addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors and was soundly applauded. Then Martin O'Malley, the mayor of Baltimore, stood up and told him that a task force on terrorism had voted that Homeland Security needed to be a Cabinet agency with real authority over the terrorism budgets and the 46 government departments that have a role in counter-terrorism. This is just the power that Bush has not wanted to give Ridge.
At this juncture, Ridge has 12 employees and a small office in the West Wing of the White House, which an administration insider quipped "couldn't field the telephone messages of an active Kinkos."
Without a surrogate to be the face for the war on terrorism at home, this insider thinks the "the president himself will have to take charge. He has to say that he's going to put the war at home on track."
