DAY THIRTY NINE:Oct. 19:
The saber-rattling NY Post, which days after the World Trade Center disaster called for dropping nukes on Kabul, was the fifth media target, cutaneous anthrax infection in an employee having been confirmed today. The pattern is beginning to fall into place. At first it seemed bizarre that terrorists would attack the supermarket trash tabloids, the Sun and National Enquirer. Taking on ABC, NBC and CBS made sense. But today's Post attack offers clairity. The assailants, one can now assume, speak English as a third language. As a result, they don't read the nation's sophisticated newspapers. Rather, they are visually oriented, picking targets from television and images they see in the markets. The Sun, Enquirer and NY Post had for ages been running nasty photos of Osama bin Laden, pictured with devil horns on his head or banner headlines calling for his death.
Now that it is clear, based on lab work done at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, that the strains used in these attacks are identical it's possible to create plausible scenarios for what is going on. The discovery of an anthrax-exposed postal worker who delivered mail on a particular route in West Trenton and of a spore-contaminated mailbox in that neighborhood allows the possibility of finding the assailant(s) swiftly. The area is rich in pharmaceutical plants, with world headquarters nearby for several of the largest drug companies in the world. The FBI is undoubtedly studying the mail route, looking for any nighborhood residents who have lab experience -- even as janitors -- coupled with suspicious criminal records or INS problems. The strain of anthrax in question appears, according to sources I spoke with today, to be a standard vaccine research strain used in research labs since the 1950s. Thus, it seems probable that the perpetrators stole their panic-inducing microbes from a lab in the area and doled it out in small quantitites, envelope- by -insidious- envelope.
Another key clue surfaced: the Nairobi case. This offers the strongest evidence to date of a link between these anthrax acts and the events of September 11, because the postmark on the envelope containing spores, sent to an MD in Nairobi, is September 8.
Even as the noose tightens in the FBI investigation, panic continues to spread nationwide. The NY Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, American Media and Senator Dachle's office have all received the anthrax mailings, and everybody in the New York media wonders who is next. Today I appeared on a truely ghastly program, "The Crier Report" on Court TV and nearly decked Ms. Crier when her very first question was along the lines of, "My goodness, who's left in New York media for them to hit? Oh! I guess they haven't hit you and Newsday yet, have they?" Ha ha ha. Thanks for giving them the idea.
Why did I do that hideous TV show? I was talked into it by folks who look out for my interests. Following the horrid gaffe about targeting Newsday, Ms. Crier -- actually, that's Judge Crier --- asked me how a postal worker could get infected; was the mail contaminated? As I tried to explain, careful not to say anything that could cause panic, she interrupted me mid -sentence and said she needed to switch to another guest. Outrageous: I fear viewers came away wondering if tommorow's junk mail will kill them. Had I known that my entire alloted time to answer her inane question would be merely 20 seconds I might hav chosen my words differently.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson held a special press conference today, along with several top Bush Administration officials, to address panic and the nation's mental health. They have finally gone beyond the earlier Presidential message of, roughly, "Buck up, America! Go out and shop! Act normally!" Now they are acknowledging that, as Thompson put it, "fear is a normal response to the events we have, as a nation, been experiencing."
Dr. Steve Hyman, who heads the National Institute for Mental Health, said there were two basic human mechanisms playing out among Americans right now. First, a sense of exaggerated fear due to powerlessness. People are willing to take enomous risks, without fear, if the choice is their's and they feel in control. But when the risk comes from outside, and cannot be controlled, it induces great fear and the risk is magnified in the human imagination. The second sensation is empathy, Hyman said. Compassionate people ten to empathise with the suffering and pain of others, and in extreme circumstances this can become magnified to the extent that they live with repeated visions and nightmares of horrors that were actually experienced by others: victims leaping to their deaths from the top of the World Trade Center, weeping rescue workers unable to find their colleagues, the towers collapsing, the imagined terror of passengers on the crashing jets.
Talk about it, they said. Seek therapy. Get help. Share your pain.
But they omitted grief, mourning, loss: feelings that complicate the picture here in New York. Gotham's fear is currently focused on anthrax. And that is, based on my interviews and phone calls today, the same all over the world. But here in New York it is compounded by grief. We cannot get over what we have lost. Tonight, for example, HBO aired some typically crappy Hollywood action movie that was punctuated with aerial shots of Manhattan, the Twin Towers prominently displayed. It hurt --- literally caused pain -- in my heart to see those pictures. I channel surfed madly, too exhausted to do something more useful with my precious down time, but no image on television could distract me from those Twin Towers.
In Grand Central Station the transit workers union erected a special wall for posting the photos and MISSING PERSONS signs for people who perished in the World Trade Center. Most such postings have been pulled down citywide, but a few remain, made all the more poignant by their rarity. Downtown, near Union Square, the entire front of a Staples Store is plastered with such signs. Two or three weeks ago the then-ubiquitous postings drew small clusters of people who stared, agape, silent. The Grand Central wall now draws a very different sort of attention: Huge throngs of commuters stand and study, reading each and every posting, discussing them, sometimes reaching out gingerly to stroke a piece of paper or touch the image of someone's face. It's a big therapy session, of collective grief and loss, carried out with dignity.
Dignity has, at last, come to the warring Democrats. Fernando Ferrer finally conceded that he lost the primary elections, dropped his lawsuit threats against Mark Green and agreed to reunite the party. Now the city only has to face one more ugly fight: Republian Michael Bloomberg v Green. Billionaire Bloomberg will count on his money to buy votes with slick advertising gimmicks. Green will simply have to count on Democrats to be Democrats, which should guarantee him the election given they outnumber Republicans in this city 5-to-1. But you never know --- not in this post-911 world.
Last night I worked until 11:30 pm, reporting and writing for this Sunday's edition of Newsday. Today the workload was lighter: only a 9-hour workday. During the Tommy Thompson press teleconference I started chuckling when Surgeon-General Dr. David Satcher urged Americans to get plenty of sleep and return to routine work schedules. Nothing has been routine for reporters in New York since September 11, and it's hard to see when "normalcy" will routine. Hard as we are working, it is nothing compared to the burden on workers in the city health department, innundated as they are with hoaxes and the realities of anthrax terrorism.
US ground troops went into Afghanistan tonight. It seems wise to ask, "Is there a Plan C?" What retribution did the terrorists plan for this eventuality?
Be well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
