The cast of characters would come to include bumbling or recalcitrant FBI agents, intrepid disease investigators, amateur sleuths, heroic postal workers, a wounded child, brain-damaged survivors, TV personalities like Tom Brokaw, the top politicians of our nation, and the most secretive weapons scientists, labs, and arsenals of the Cold War. Just to make matters more interesting, Steven Hatfill, a bioweapons expert and for some time the main (as the Attorney General put it) "person of interest" in the investigation, had access to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland at Fort Dietrich where some of the country's most secret bioweapons work was done. It should have been the case of the century. It should have been unforgettable.

September 11, 2002 rolled around amid weeks of ceremonies and rites, interviews with survivors, and memorial articles galore, while TV shows and books poured out. But where were the survivor interviews with those victimized by the anthrax killer(s)? Where were the books, the dramas, the movies, the TV shows? Four years later, the victims and heroes of 9/11 are still being written about; their "sacred" ground in New York is still being bitterly fought over, but when was the last time you saw anything about the victims or the heroes -- mainly postal workers -- of the anthrax attacks?

Within the last year, the ongoing investigation of the case has, according to the Washington Post, been significantly downsized. The number of FBI agents assigned to it has dropped from 31 to 21 and postal inspectors from 13 to 9. Many of those remaining are now said to be "in the process of taking inventory. The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the investigation…" It has "cold case, dead file" written all over it.

When it comes to costs, according to the Post, "at least 17 post offices and public office buildings were contaminated. Including cleanup costs, an FBI document put the damage in excess of $1 billion." And that doesn't account for the more subtle costs such as the role the attacks played in panicking Congress into an invasion of Iraq. Would the administration's various bizarre fears and alarms about the dangers to us of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have had such a realistic ring to them if our representatives hadn't actually experienced a bioweapons attack? It should have been unforgettable, but by some mysterious process that has yet to be considered, the attacks were, in a sense, "disappeared."

A Terror War of Choice

If, as an editor of a major newspaper, you were to draw a single conclusion from this horrifying episode, it might be: Despite what we've heard, the greatest WMD danger to Americans comes not from impoverished Third World or rickety Middle Eastern rogue states, but from the arsenals and weapons labs of the two former Cold War superpowers. But nothing in the media coverage since then has indicated anything of the sort. While, prewar, reporters prowled Iraqi nuclear facilities, wrote major pieces on Iraq's "Dr. Germ," and brought down whole forests of trees in the service of WMD programs at Iraq's Tuwaitha or North Korea's Yongbyan, or on gassed dogs in Afghanistan and the Iranian bomb that also wasn't, the Soviet and American weapons labs, the Soviet and American Dr. Germs, the Ames anthrax strain, and the anthrax killer hardly took out a tree or two.

When was the last time you read a major report on the state of American biowarfare work? When was the last time you encountered a significant story about the weapons labs at Fort Dietrich in suburban Maryland where the Ames strain was evidently first researched or the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah where it was produced and tested? How much attention has been given to recent contracts linked to Dugway that signal a desire on the part of the U.S. military to "buy large quantities of anthrax, in a controversial move that is likely to raise questions over its commitment to treaties designed to limit the spread of biological weapons"? When was the last time you read an article on whether the Homeland Security Department or the Pentagon is attending to the potential dangers of the American WMD arsenal? How much attention has gone into the decrepit system for locking down Russian WMD stocks? The odd news piece, nothing more. And while this administration spends about a billion dollars a week on its war in Iraq, it has hardly had the will or interest to raise the few billion dollars a year needed to help lock-down the Russian arsenal. Imagine that. If, of course, the President had chosen to launch his "war" on terror against the anthrax killers, this might have been our top priority.

Since September 11, 2001, weapons of mass destruction have been dealt with purely as a danger from the peripheries, not as a heartland issue. In fact, the Bush administration has successfully focused all our WMD attention and fears out there, not in here. The Iranian bomb -- at best, years away according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate -- has been the singular focus of the world's attention; while the nuclearized "global strike force" the Pentagon has been preparing for future use in Iran, North Korea, or elsewhere is barely attended to.

Now, here's the interesting thing: Because this administration had its eyes set on the Middle East from the beginning, it essentially chose its terror war from column A (the September 11th attacks), not column B (the anthrax attacks, once it became clear that they were connected not to al-Qaeda but the American arsenal). Hence our control group. Here, for instance, is a very partial list of actions not taken by this administration in relation to the anthrax attacks:

Our President never swore to get the killer(s), "dead or alive." He kept no profile of the possible killer or killers in his desk drawer, so he could cross him/them off when caught. The President, Vice President, National Security Adviser, and others did not warn the public and Congress regularly of the possibility of "clouds of anthrax" being released in our major cities (though this had, after a fashion, already happened) even as they were issuing dire warnings about fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs that might at any time spray biological or chemical weapons over east coast cities. (Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.") No American planes swooped down to bomb the weapons labs of Fort Dietrich or the Dugway Proving Grounds; the only suspect publicly identified, while hounded for a period, was never declared an "enemy combatant." No one seized and rendered him; no CIA agents swept him from the street, cut off his clothes, shot him up with drugs, slipped him into an orange jumpsuit, whisked him onto an unregistered plane, and took him to a secret prison in Egypt or elsewhere to have "the truth" beaten or waterboarded or otherwise tortured out of him. Nor did he end up incarcerated in Guantanamo for years, trial-less and beyond the reach of the courts. Quite the opposite, Hatfill is suing former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department, and others for violating his constitutional rights and the New York Times for defaming him.

Nor, in the wake of the anthrax attacks, was any kind of global war declared on the killer or killers, or troops deployed anywhere. In fact, no drastic actions of any sort were taken. In the wake of the attack, the post office became more careful; U.S. weapons labs were assumedly better secured; and remind me what else occurred in response to one of the most dangerous attacks in our history? Beyond the dead and injured, the panic of the moment, and the monumental costs of cleaning up congressional offices, newsrooms, and post offices, what were the costs?

As it turns out, the Bush administration acted in response to 9/11 in every wild and extraordinary way -- and in response to the anthrax attacks in next to no way at all. Put the two together and what you can see is the degree to which the costs of 9/11, whether in Iraq or at home, are the responsibility not of the attackers, whose damaging acts were violent in the extreme, spectacular, and limited, but the Bush administration.

Embedded World

It's an irony of our world that neither Osama bin Laden, nor the anthrax killer(s) have been apprehended. By now, bin Laden has, in fact, disappeared into something like the kind of anonymity the anthrax killer had from the beginning. Whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or the exurbs of America, the search for the perpetrators of the two greatest terrorist attacks in our history -- the Twin Terrors -- was not expanded until success was achieved, but downsized. When it came to the hunt for bin Laden, this happened way back in 2002 when the Bush administration began switching key personnel out of Afghanistan to prepare for its long-desired invasion of Iraq. Both are now cold cases.

You might think that this administration, supposedly dedicated above all else to protecting the United States from terrorism in its newly formed Homeland Security State, would have devoted resources above all else to the task of implacably hunting down these particular terrorists, wherever they might be; that dead-ends met would have only led to redoubled efforts. That would have been, if not a "war" on terrorism, then at least a police action of note. Instead, with thousands of Americans and Iraqis now dead and an actual weapon of mass destruction still potentially loose in our land, the inability to focus all resources on real terrorists and bring them to justice seems but another cost of George Bush's "war on terror."

The saddest story is this: If tomorrow, George Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts were somehow tossed out on their ears -- call it indictment, impeachment, or something else -- what they, not Osama bin Laden or the anthrax terrorists will have cost us, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will still be incalculable. Among the greatest costs will be the way administration officials used the 9/11 attacks (and buried the anthrax ones) in order to breach so many levees of our world.

What they have embedded in our lives since 9/11 -- from Northcom to our newest pinheaded giant bureaucracy, the Homeland Security Department, from the Patriot Act to ever increasing domestic spying by the Pentagon and the National Security Agency among other organizations -- will be with us long after they are gone. Just imagine a political change of fortunes in our country in which the Democrats take Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Then ask yourself a single question: What will the Democrats do with Guantánamo. Unfortunately, you already know the answer.

Now, let that pause button go and watch not just the Twin Towers but so much else in our world tumble down one more time.

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