DAY NINETY-THREE:Dec. 12:
It was a year ago today when the Supreme Court decided who should be President of the United States. I was at the Harvard Club, having arrived late in the day, delayed by a terrible snowstorm, and walked straight up to the podium to give my AIDS speech. Exhausted by a grueling day, I staggered down to the bar and had just ordered a cognac when on the TV a breathless MSNBC reporter, standing in falling snow outside the Supreme Court building, was handed the thick decision. As he desperately tried to interpret a document he hadn't yet read, the Harvard alumnae seated at the bar animatedly dissected the information. When it was obvious the Republican members of the Court had twisted and gyrated to find a Constitutional grounds for giving Bush the Florida vote the group grew silent. And then a very dignified elderly woman turned to her white haired husband and spat out, "I told you we should have moved to France!"
Well, Lady, this sure ain't France.
Tonight the sky over midtown Manhattan had three large stripes in it, which puzzled the heck out of our throng of celebrants out in the chill on the Brooklyn Promenade. Having downed a fair quantity of Rioja and bad Spanish brandy to ring in a friend's birthday we ambled down to pay homage to Ground Zero. But that damned tricolor in the sky stumped us. Was it an aurora, perhaps? After a time we realized that the combination of a low cloud cover and smoke from Ground Zero had produced a ceiling effect, off of which the red, white a green lights of the Empire State Building, now our city's tallest, were reflected.
Having Manhattan shrouded in a green glow warms the Irish in me, but remains eerie.
It is also eerie, even a bit ghoulish, to see the competition now brewing among historical societies, museums, TV and radio producers and general collectors over possession of September 11 artifacts. Anything goes: a shoe found outside the World Trade Center right after the towers collapsed, presumably fallen from the foot of a deceased victim. Twisted venetian blinds from a smashed storefront, debris-encrusted clothing, desiccated flowers once left in aromatic bouquets to honor the dead. Let's face it, this is capitalism in action. But it's certainly a bit ghastly. The race is now on to preserve the memories in a manner that honors the event and the dead before the entire market of September 11 memorabilia turns into a sick collectors' fantasy. Museums are already jockeying for the job, and good friends (of Lost and Found Sound) are scrambling to collect the sounds of that dreadful day, in hopes of creating an audio memory for posterity.
I find myself wondering: If Jackie Kennedy's pink pillbox hat had fallen off her head at the moment the bullet pierced President Kennedy's skull, would that hat now be worth $1 million? How in the world can people place "value" on such things?
And how are we to place value on lives lost, jobs lost, families disrupted and hopes destroyed? Most Americans have no idea that the families and unemployed affected by September 11 haven't yet received a dime of the millions of dollars - no, billions - that were raised in telethons and charity drives. The second largest of those charities, The September 11th Fund, says that some time after Christmas it will finally disperse $75 million to some 20,000 people. Two thirds of the recipients will be people who lost their jobs when businesses were destroyed downtown. Some $347 million has been raised by the Fund, and fights have ensued over how the money should be spent.
The other funds, including the Red Cross, have also been mired in controversy, and failed to date to give anything to the bereaved or jobless of New York.
Meanwhile, the politicians are - well, being politicians - except for Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose term will shortly end. He confirmed today that he will no longer serve in politics in any capacity.
"I want to take on challenges that maybe I haven't had before in business," Giuliani told reporters today. "I haven't been in private law practice for eight years, and when I was much younger I ran a business and took it out of bankruptcy and I really enjoyed that, and maybe there are more things I want to prove to myself."
So Giuliani, along with several members of his inner staff, will form a company. What, exactly, that company might do isn't clear - rather, as the Mayor put it, "it's formative."
While his replacement, Michael Bloomberg, maps out a strategy for governing the beleaguered city the campaign for the Governor's job is heating up. A major poll, results of which were released today, shows that New Yorkers are rather happy with current Gov. George Pataki, a moderate Republican. Some 65% of New Yorkers rate Pataki's performance as good-to-excellent. And 79% give a similar level of approval to the performance of Pres. George Bush.
In contrast, Pataki's leading opponent, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, yielded dismal results. Fewer than 31% of New Yorkers say they would consider voting for him, and by a wide margin the electorate says that were they to choose a Cuomo, it would be his father. Mario Cuomo was Governor of the state prior to Pataki, and 63% of the populace said they would vote for him today were he to run for President.
God knows why anybody would want either job: President or Governor of New York. The looming economic crisis, war, terrorism...who needs it?
For example, the nation's leading disease and law enforcement agencies admitted today that they are stumped in their anthrax investigations, largely because remarkably little is known about the bacterium that causes the disease.
Since October 4, when the first case if inhalational anthrax was discovered in Florida, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and scientific teams within the Department of Defense and FBI have repeatedly been surprised by the ways people have become infected and the clinical course of anthrax illnesses in this fall's bioterrorist incidents. For two days this week teams of scientists from a host of federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and FBI, have been making up lists of puzzles about anthrax, hoping to rush a research agenda that might, within a year's time, yield some answers.
The CDC's Dr. Bradley Perkins said today that, "during the course of our investigations we and our partners have identified many areas that need additional research."
The puzzles include how best to evaluate anthrax powders, the ways anthrax spores spread within enclosed environments, best methods for diagnosing anthrax disease, clean-up of contaminated sites, what dose of spores constitute an inhaled hazard and many more.
Paramount for investigators are just how difficult it is to make anthrax powder, what exactly constitutes so-called "weapons-grade anthrax", and how such powdered anthrax may differ from natural forms of the spores in terms of their behavior in the air and in the cavities of the human lung. The answers to such questions could both help save lives in another bioterrorist incident, should there ever be one. And they could guide stymied law enforcement investigators that are trying to figure out what sort of sophistication is required to make the types of powder that were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.
Prior to 1969 when the biological warfare program was disbanded, the U.S. military conducted tests of spore behavior, using finely powdered spores of less dangerous, but similar, organisms such as Bacillus subtilis and Serratia marsecens. They demonstrated that air intake systems readily absorbed the spores, and in one study managed in 1949 to contaminate the entire Pentagon via a single intake duct. During the 1950s and '60s these same organisms, substituting for anthrax, were released over San Francisco, in New York subways and in numerous other settings.
Those experiments showed that the spores, which were not prepared in any highly sophisticated manner, according to published studies, could be carried tremendous distances, and would lift back up into the air when hit with gusts of wind produced either naturally or as a result of machinery or human movement. More recently Canada's Defence Research Establishment in Alberta ran tests this year using another substitute for anthrax, Bacillus globigii. The tests were in response to a hoax anthrax letter mailed to a Canadian government official. Their studies clearly demonstrated that such spores readily leaked from sealed envelopes, popped out and quickly inundated anybody who opened such envelopes, and were instantly in sufficient dose to have caused disease, had they been actual anthrax spores The Canadian researchers Emailed this information to the CDC on October 4, but the Email was never opened. But Perkins claimed the information would not have changed how the CDC assessed the risk to US Postal workers.
Today the Baltimore Sun disclosed that the U.S. Army has discreetly conducted anthrax tests, using precisely the same strain as has been mailed to members of the Senate. The anthrax was produced and tested at Dugway Proving Ground, located 80 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. And samples of the Army anthrax have for at least 8 years been mailed to laboratories in Ft. Detrick using Federal Express shipping. The Dugway anthrax operation has been underway since 1969, according to an official statement released by the Army in response to my queries today, but escalated in 1993 following Operation Desert Storm. The focus of Dugway's activities has been on spore behavior, identification and decontamination.
"By far, most of the testing has been conducted with biological simulants," the Army statement said. "The production of biological pathogens, to include bacillus anthracis, is conducted to support this and decontamination testing, which that must be performed with live agents to evaluate the efficacy of decontamination solutions. In the past, very small amounts of anthrax have been shipped in paste form in hermetically sealed containers from Dugway Proving Ground to USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick for irradiation, and then returned. Inactivated anthrax spores can be used for most of the tests that are conducted at," Dugway.
At USAMRIID--the US Army Medical Research Institute on Infectious Diseases--all anthrax work has focused on vaccine development, spokesman Chuck Dasey told me today. Some anthrax was routine irradiated and sent back, again via FedEx, to Dugway.
"Each of these shipments was done in accordance with the stringent federal regulations governing transfer of hazardous materials," the Army response continued. "Each was carefully tracked and there was no loss of accountability nor any amount of anthrax paste. Anthrax in paste form cannot be the source of contamination for the anthrax letters mailed after Sept. 11, and Dugway has never shipped any dry anthrax by commercial carrier. All anthrax used at Dugway has been accounted for."
The FBI has repeatedly stated that the powdered anthrax sent to members of the Senate was "finely-milled", and its suspect profile describes the perpetrator as either a scientist, or someone with scientific training. The New York Times has repeatedly speculated that the perpetrator might have military science training, and perhaps be a currently employee of Ft. Detrick or Dugway.
A careful study of the www.fbi.gov website offers little comfort. The FBI asks the public to help the agency find the culprit, and indicates in its profile that the anthrax terrorism was probably executed by a lone wolf sociopath with scientific -- possibly also military -- training.
At tonight's drunken revelry among birthday celebrants one woman said this had been just about the first night out on the town for her since September 11th. She said it had simply been too hard to face social situations. Happily, the rest of the rowdy crowd was of a different ilk - the sort that prefer to drown their sorrows in loud laughter, song and chatter.
Be well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
