WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- The Bush administration attempted Monday to shift its beleaguered public relations image away from its confusing message connected with a series anthrax-tainted letters that killed three people, instead focusing on a new task force set up to track immigrants and those who will serve as Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge's inner circle.
"The American people need to know that -- that we are doing everything we possibly can to prevent and disrupt any attack on America, and that we're doing everything we can to respond to attacks," said Bush after the first meeting with his new Homeland Security Council.
The shift re-emphasized the fact that the playbook dictating the rules of communication that White House officials have traditionally used are unable to keep up with fast-paced developments surrounding the increasing numbers of exposed people and contaminated post offices and work spaces.
On Monday Bush announced the formation of the council's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force would be tasked with tracking immigrants to the United States to ensure they are using their visas properly, he said. At least two of the 19 terrorists who commandeered four passenger airliners on Sept. 11 and used them as fuel-laden bombs came into the United States presumably on student visas. Two of the jets were crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, one hit the Pentagon outside Washington, and the fourth plunged into a Pennsylvania field after passengers apparently tried to retake control of the plane.
More than 5,000 people were killed in the attacks.
Homeland Security chief Ridge - who had been criticized for not providing consistent information on the anthrax scare - named six people serve with him as he begins a week where he will regularly update the nation on contamination and the number of people infected, and how the government will be handling what has become a crisis.
Retired Adm. Steve Abbot will serve as Ridge's deputy director of the Office of Homeland Security. Abbott has been serving as Vice President Cheney's executive director of National Preparedness Review. Abbott led the staff that was asked by Bush to review and make recommendations to strengthen U.S. preparedness against an act of domestic terrorism.
Also named was Mark A. Holman as deputy assistant to the president for Homeland Security. Holman served as Ridge's chief of staff when Ridge served in Congress and also during his time as governor of Pennsylvania. He also appointed Becky Halkias as deputy assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs; Carl M. Buckholz as special assistant to the president and executive secretary for the Office of Homeland Security; Barbara Chaffee has been named special assistant to the president and public liaison for the Office of Homeland Security; Susan Neely as special assistant to the president and director of communications.
Whether a now-fully staffed Homeland Security office will change how the administration deals with the anthrax threat remains to be seen. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Oct. 23 found that two-thirds of Americans are not worried about being exposed to anthrax and that eight out of 10 feel it is not likely that they or a family member will be a victim of anthrax. At the same time, about half say that the anthrax incidents are the beginning of a sustained terrorist campaign.
Nearly one month after Florida photo editor Bob Stevens, 63, was diagnosed with anthrax, the Bush administration and public health officials have been fielding sharp criticism for what has been called its slow reaction to test postal workers who came in contact with the letter sent to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., resulting in the death of three post office workers.
The White House, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and military officials spent more two weeks waving off suggestions that the anthrax included in the Daschle letter was either unusually potent or "weaponized" -- a term they have particularly eschewed as an inaccurate characterization. Then on Thursday Ridge called the substance on the letters "highly concentrated" and "more dangerous." Ridge said, "It is clear that the terrorists responsible for these attacks intended to use this anthrax as a weapon." He stopped short of calling it weaponized.
By Sunday, locations in the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Department of Justice, and on Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had tested positive for anthrax.
How President Bush has reacted to the anthrax scare sent mixed messages. Citing White House policy not to reveal security precautions, officials declined to say whether President Bush was either taking an antibiotic preventatively or whether he had been tested for the pathogen. He declared emphatically in a photo opportunity with reporters, "I don't have anthrax," without explaining how he knew that, particularly after the White House off-site mail facility was found to be contaminated.
CDC officials have warned against the general public stocking up on antibiotics, even as the federal government moved to strike a deal with the Bayer Co., the maker of Cipro, sealing a bulk price to shore up public health stockpiles at 95 cents per pill.
While President Bush visited both sites of the Sept. 11 attacks, he did not travel to the Brentwood Postal facility in Washington where two postal employees who died of pulmonary anthrax worked, nor did he attend their funerals. Instead, he remembered them as dying "in the line of duty" from the East Room of the White House when he signed the anti-terrorism bill, and again as he spoke to a cadre of business leaders. He then left Washington to spend the weekend at Camp David, the Maryland presidential retreat.
What appeared to be the administration's lack of attentiveness to the plight of the postal workers quickly became a sharp contrast between a predominately white Congress who were set up for anthrax testing within hours with Deputy Surgeon General Kenneth P. Moritsugu stationed on Capitol Hill, and a mostly black postal workforce that went untested for weeks. Investigators suspect the letter containing anthrax was originally handled at the Brentwood facility and forwarded to Daschle's office, where it was opened Oct. 15.
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer adroitly sidestepped the uncomfortable dichotomy during a briefing with reporters early last week, saying the postal workers were tested once evidence warranted it.
"As soon as the anthrax was received, they took all the same actions in Sen. Daschle's office they did at NBC, for example, or that they did at AMI in Boca Raton, for example. So you can make it an analogous situation between the way government workers and Sen. Daschle's office were treated and the media was treated," Fleischer said last week. "Then, they walked backwards to determine where the letter could have come from. And as a result of what they learned, they started treating in Trenton, for example -- the postal workers there were given the antibiotics as they identified the hot spots in the facilities there."
But postal workers were angry. Several postal workers being tested early last week at Washington's D.C. General Hospital -- once the site of the city's only official bioterrorism treatment facility before it was shut down several months ago -- expressed dissatisfaction with the response of the authorities.
"This is getting worse," said Antoinine Tucker. "They didn't tell us anything, they should have done all this testing sooner."
Mail handlers in Boca Raton, Fla., said Friday they were planning to file a federal lawsuit in Miami asking for the shutdown of all postal facilities testing positive for anthrax.
