NEVER MIND. WE ARE STILL ONLY AT YELLOW ALERT

Yesterday morning the media warned us that the bubonic plague, the Black Death that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages, was on the loose when 30 vials of the bacteria went missing at Texas Tech in Lubbock. At the same time the news that anthrax may have been detected at the Federal Reserve building in Washington and the Post Service was testing at the DC sorting facility that handled the central bank’s incoming mail moved on the wire services. At the same time the warnings were going out FBI headquarters was telling the public that while there were probably a lot of Al Qaida sleeper cells in the US there were no top commanders here

By late afternoon the Postal reported that their tests were negative and the sorting center was reopened. The FBI then issued an all clear on the Black Death story and announced that it had a Texas Tech professor in custody charged with lying to the FBI. The professor, who was in charge of the lab researching the plague bacteria, apparently first reported the vials missing, and then admitted that he had destroyed them. I’d think that odd except that it was Texas Tech that hired chair throwing, player choking basketball coach Bobby Knight after Indiana finally had enough of the General and fired him. No story out of Lubbock after that is too weird to be believed.

Buried in the AP story announcing the Postal Service anthrax all clear at 2:45 AM EST was the real hard news. The Federal Reserve letter that started the DC flap addressed to Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson had tested positive for live anthrax spores. Preliminary follow-up tests conducted by the State of North Carolina were negative but the letter was being sent to the CDC in Atlanta for more testing.

It was a stream of stories that said, “Be afraid – be very afraid” followed by “Never mind. We are still only at Yellow Alert.” If the release of all of this information, first the warnings and then the all clears is supposed to reassure a war nervous public that the government is out there protecting us it is falling short of the mark. It only serves to remind us that the person or persons who terrorized the country by mail in the fall of 2001 is still out there and the progress in the investigation has been nil.

We have been able to detect and indefinitely detain Jose Padilla incommunicado because he is alleged to have been thinking about maybe stealing nuclear material and building a dirty bomb and setting it off somewhere in the US, just the sort of operation that a penny-ante Chicago street punk is capable of pulling off single handedly. But, with all of the resources of the FBI, CIA, and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security, the Anthrax Killer is still out there. But then his prime targets were only a tabloid picture editor and Senators Daschle and Leahy – notorious Liberals and the rest of the victims were just collateral damage.

If, as Secretary Rumsfeld said yesterday the fact that no evidence has been found is itself evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing, what does it tell us about our own government when no evidence can be found to explain how anthrax spores were sent from Ft. Dietrich and ended up at the Senate Office building in the Democrat's mail. But never mind, we are still only at Yellow Alert.