Anthrax, Ricin Mail May Impact Congressional Input
March 1, 2004
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The specter of terrorism may be falling across political activism in this country. At minimum it is likely to change the way Americans can communicate with their senators and representatives in Washington.
Of course, gunowners and firearms civil rights activists won’t be the only ones affected.
Associated Press (AP), commenting on the same change, noted that classrooms of children scribbling letters to Congress, perhaps asking for a flag that flew over the Capitol for their school, or legislation outlawing beets or broccoli at dinnertime, will be somewhat cut off from the process of representative government. So, too, might the elderly woman pleading to her representatives to get a local post office renamed after one of her heroes, or to get help with a Social Security dispute.
The problem arises from the possibility of bioterrorism through the mails as exemplified by the anthrax mail scare in Fall 2001 and the more recent finding of the deadly poison ricin in a Senate mail room.
The anthrax mailings have already overhauled the way mail is handled in the Capitol. And the changes don’t just affect Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. Already, most mail to various government agencies, including most noticeably for our readers the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), is delayed, sometimes as much as a couple of weeks, while it is routed to special postal facilities for advanced, high-tech screening.
Following the recent ricin attack on the Senate, the second time in history—both in the past 28 months—that the Capitol mail has shut down because of a letter laced with poisonous white powder, some lawmakers are now questioning whether it will ever be safe again to open and read unsolicited letters from their constituents.
Despite the flood of e-mails, faxes and telephone calls that Congress receives daily, handwritten and typed letters are still the main way members of the House and Senate correspond with the people who elected them, according to AP.
“Most people still send letters, about 5,000 a week in my office here in Washington, so it’s still the principal method by which people will communicate with us,” said Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH), according to AP.
No one among the several thousand employees of Congress became ill so far from the latest attack by mail. But dozens of people had to be decontaminated and three Senate office buildings were shut down after an intern in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office found a suspicious white powder while going through letters in his mailroom.
The powder tested positive for ricin, a deadly poison relatively easy to make from castor beans. More than 6,000 workers were locked out of their offices for two days; many of them longer, as experts collected, tested and likely destroyed unopened letters throughout the Capitol to ensure no others posed a biohazard.
It was the second time since October 2001 that congressional interns opening letters have proved to be the weak point in the Capitol’s security. The targets of anthrax-laced letters back then were Frist’s predecessor as majority leader, Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT).
“Something has to be done, because we can’t continue to put these young interns in danger like this,” said Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.
Lott is looking at new computer technology already being tested in the House for scanning letters and delivering them to lawmakers’ offices digitally.
However, many worry that any further change would make pen and paper the slowest and most unreliable way to talk to Congress. After the 2001 anthrax attack, Congress decided to irradiate most mail, delaying its arrival by two weeks on average.
Often, letters from their constituents are yellowed or shredded by the decontamination screening, if they show up at all, lawmakers complain. And nothing angers people more than writing to Congress and not getting a response.
“I just received in, I think either October or November, a Christmas card from December 2001. That was the postmark on it, December 2001,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). “And people wonder why we have a problem turning around our mail—not that part of it isn’t our fault.”
Letters have been a key element of the Capitol since it opened in 1800.
“Getting mail was so important that a room in the original Capitol that was designed to be a library was turned into the Capitol post office instead,” said Senate Historian Richard Baker.
Even after e-mails became popular, many lawmakers continued to prefer hearing from voters and schoolchildren through typed or handwritten letters.
“There were some members’ offices that would take e-mails and send them back asking for a handwritten or typed letter,” Baker said. “I think that’s all gone by the wayside now, especially after Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks.”
The wire service reported that many advocacy groups years ago switched their emphasis from letters to e-mailing, faxing and phoning. The National Rifle Association, for example, says it now sends 72,000 e-mails to Congress a year through its website. The AFL-CIO inundates lawmakers with more than 1.5 million faxes and e-mails each year, and AARP estimates its members make more than 500,000 annual contacts with Congress through faxes, e-mails and phone calls.
But 58% of US households didn’t have Internet access in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. And AARP says many of its older members still prefer to write their lawmakers by hand.
Although constituents are often encouraged to correspond by e-mail, telephone and fax, DeWine says it “would be a very sad day” if they were told they couldn’t do it with a letter.
“We still have a lot of schoolchildren who will write letters,” he said. “Sometimes we’ll get Boy Scouts and Girls Scouts who will write letters. It’s kind of the traditional way of doing it, but it’s very important.”
What’s especially ironic, I find, is that quite a few congressmen and senators—both pro- and anti-gun—are already slowing input by fax simply by having unlisted fax numbers.
But even as the elected and staff people on Capitol Hill were discussing the latest ricin mail scare and its consequences with the media, The Washington Post revealed on Feb. 4 that the Secret Service had intercepted a letter addressed to the White House last November that contained a vial of the toxin ricin, but never revealed the incident publicly and delayed telling the FBI and other agencies, law enforcement sources said on Feb. 3.
The letter, signed by “Fallen Angel” and containing complaints about trucking regulations, was nearly identical to one discovered Oct. 15 at a Greenville, SC, mail-sorting facility. It was accompanied by a metal vial that contained powdered ricin, sources said.
In the South Carolina case, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was called in to test the mail facility and its workers. The FBI also released detailed information about the case and, earlier this month, announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.
The existence of a ricin-laced letter sent to the White House coming on the heels of the ricin discovered in the Senate office building, adds even more cause for concern about the mail system. It used to be people started to be alert for mail bombs, but now those threats pale next to the threat of biological risks.
What new rules will be forwarded in the name of security remain to be seen, but gun rights activists who don’t have access to a fax machine or the Internet, may want to start planning to work closely with friends who do.
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