Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on this day that he would soon be sending an anti-terrorism proposal to the U.S. Congress and that he would ask Congress to enact the legislation by Friday, September 21. Given the length, complexity and importance of the bill (the Patriot Act) this was an astonishing announcement. He was asking Congress to act with blazing speed and to make an Olympian leap of faith. On the same day, September 17, an article by Rick Weiss appeared in the Washington Post entitled, “Bioterrorism: An Even More Devastating Threat.” Weiss explained that: “Biological attacks can be far more difficult to respond to than conventional terrorist attacks. For one thing, they are covert rather than overt; for days, no one would know that one had occurred. That’s a huge problem for a disease like anthrax.” If it was peculiar that the announcement of the proposed legislation should correspond with the announcement of a threat of anthrax, it was even more peculiar that the threat was simultaneously being made real. On September 17, or possibly on the following day, letters containing spores of Bacillus anthracis were put in the U.S. mail. As Weiss had suggested, although several people at the targeted sites (news agencies) developed anthrax, for some time after the disease was induced it remained undiagnosed. The pattern was now established. For over a month following Ashcroft’s announcement, as the Patriot Act made its way through Congress before being signed into law by G. W. Bush on October 26, the bill would be accompanied by anthrax—both the threat and the reality. Perhaps there has never been a piece of legislation in American history that was so clearly forced on Congress by a credible threat of death. ***Read full article here***
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