The 2001 anthrax mailings were the work of an Army microbiologist who killed himself in 2008, the U.S. Justice Department concluded last year.
Health and science writer Laurie Garrett doesn’t buy it.
“I get outraged because the FBI completely botched the investigation on the anthrax,” she said in a recent interview on NPR’s “Science Friday.”
“I get outraged because there is so much evidence that al-Qaida was behind the anthrax mailings and that at least as strong a circumstantial case as was made against Bruce Ivins can be made against al-Qaida, even stronger.”
Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize winner, makes her case in “I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks.” The ebook became available in July at Amazon.
Among the evidence she cited to NPR: The same anthrax strain was found in the cave in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, where al-Qaida leader and Sept. 11 planner Osama bin Laden had hidden, and a terrorist who helped hijack the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania tested positive for anthrax.
Rep. Mike Pence, R-6th, had his doubts about the anthrax source early on. In 2002, he wrote a letter to then Attorney General John Ashcroft to ask why international links weren’t being probed in the mailings that killed five people in three states and Washington, D.C.
“I am concerned we may possibly have missed the off-ramp to the truth,” Pence wrote.
Pence, who is running for governor, said in a recent interview he “expressed our frustration periodically” with the anthrax investigation. But he is not ready to try to name a suspect.
“I don’t know where the weaponized anthrax bacillius came from,” Pence said. “I don’t know who sent it.”
His office was among three in the Longworth House Office Building and 50 in the Hart Senate Office Building where at least traces of powdered anthrax bacterium were found in or on mail in October 2001. Pence and his staff had to take the powerful antibiotic Cipro for 90 days and move out of their suite for a similar duration while it was sealed and cleaned. They told recent visitors to the office of their possible exposure.
Pence believes it was a coincidence his mail had been contaminated by the toxin.
“It was literally in the same hopper as the mail coming in from New Jersey where the packages (of anthrax) had been mailed,” he said. “To this day I don’t think we have any reason to believe it was directed at our office or at me personally.”
Regardless, it was “a harrowing time, to say the least,” he recalled.
Another plane
Pence was a freshman congressman from Edinburgh when al-Qaida terrorists hijacked commercial jets and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people. As news of the attacks trickled in, he and his staff huddled in his office, prayed for the victims and their families, then fled.
Pence ended up at Capitol police headquarters with a group of House and Senate leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo.
While they were discussing how Congress should proceed, the police chief informed them another plane was over Pennsylvania, only 12 minutes away, apparently headed for Capitol Hill.
“You could have heard a pin drop in that room,” Pence said. “Everybody did the same thing and looked out at the Capitol Dome, wondering if that was next.”
Fifteen minutes later, they learned United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania.
Brian Bergsma, then a lobbyist for the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce, was in Washington for an Indiana Chamber of Commerce “fly-in” event to meet with congressmen that afternoon. But he had driven to the nation’s capital and was sight-seeing in the morning when he heard about the attacks in New York.
While in his car, moments before the Pentagon was struck, Bergsma saw a jet “that was going really low, really fast and not in a normal pattern” for a landing at Reagan National Airport. It took him five hours to drive to his hotel near the Capitol.
“You couldn’t get anywhere. … I literally sat in traffic for hours,” he said. “But it was the quietest traffic jam I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t necessarily somber; people were just very intent on listening to their radios. It was hot, so everybody had their windows rolled down.
“I was actually sitting outside the White House when I assume it was a lot of the panic over (another) plane coming around, because a bunch of people were running out of the White House.”
Bergsma – now a lobbyist in Indianapolis for Indiana Michigan Power Co. – left Washington about 8 p.m. on Sept. 11. By then, except for military vehicles and soldiers on street corners and helicopters overhead, “the streets were completely empty. It was a ghost town.”
‘Unity of purpose’
The framework of the congressional response to the attacks “all began in that Capitol Hill police chief’s office,” Pence said.
“After (the group) realized the plane had gone down in Pennsylvania, everybody sat down around the conference table and got out a yellow pad and said, ‘All right, what do we need to take off the schedule, what do we need to put on the schedule,’ ” Pence remembered. “The level of cooperation, the unity of purpose, would illuminate the Capitol Building for weeks if not months after 9/11.”
At the urging of President George W. Bush’s administration, Congress would approve wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, create the Department of Homeland Security, give new powers to the Transportation Security Administration and produce the USA Patriot Act, which, among other things, allowed the federal government to eavesdrop on citizens’ communications without obtaining a court warrant.
“When you stand on the east lawn of the Capitol and you see the sky filled with columns of mud-brown smoke, and you hear secondary explosions and sirens everywhere, these things are no longer theoretical,” Pence said. “It made an indelible impression on my life and my career and my belief that everything begins with public safety and security.”
Pence will be speaking at Sept. 11 anniversary events around Indiana.
“I’m going to say we come to the 10th anniversary not to remember the tragedy alone but to remember the triumph of freedom in the 10 years that have followed,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any question that the response by our government at every level – public safety personnel, elected officials and most importantly our military – is directly responsible for why our enemies have not succeeded in another major terrorist event for a decade.”
Bergsma has not visited the rebuilt Pentagon – he has seen it from an airplane – but he has been to ground zero in New York and the memorial in Somerset County, Pa., where Flight 93 crashed after passengers fought with hijackers.
On Sept. 11, 2001, when Bergsma and his wife, Wendy, were expecting their first child, Noah, he was stuck in traffic in Washington, unable to contact her because cellphone service was disrupted, after having watched a plane zoom by much too low to the ground.
“Now my son is turning 10 in November. … It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years.”
