Senate office buildings undergo anthrax testing

By Pete Yost

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Capitol police declared two anthrax-tainted Senate office buildings off-limits today in preparation for environmental testing. Hundreds of congressional employees awaited results of tests for exposure to the spores.

Federal investigators struggled to trace the origin of a spate of anthrax-tainted letters, and administration officials said they still had no evidence of a connection between the bioterrorism and the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings that killed more than 5,000 people in New York and Washington.

“I do not have knowledge of a direct link of the anthrax incidents to the enemy, but I wouldn’t put it past them,” President Bush said at a news conference in China.

Six people have been diagnosed with anthrax in the past two weeks, including one at a New Jersey postal facility where tainted letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw were processed. Officials theorize the letter carrier, a woman whose name has not been made public, may have handled the envelopes at a West Trenton, N.J., post office facility.

Officials also disclosed Thursday that the woman who opens CBS anchorman Dan Arthur’s mail had been infected with the treatable skin form of the disease.

In Washington, police issued orders saying that “no member, staff member or congressional employee will be permitted to enter” the Dirksen or Hart Senate office buildings without personal protection gear.

Anthrax has been discovered in both buildings, in a mail facility in the Dirksen building and in Daschle’s office in the Hart building.

One congressional source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said another 1,300 people showed no sign of exposure in tests completed overnight. Hundreds more awaited their results.

Thirty-one people tested positive for exposure to anthrax earlier this week after powdery substance fell from mail opened in Daschle’s office. They included 23 aides to the majority leader, five police officers and three people on the staff of Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who occupies the office next to Daschle’s.

Feingold has said his three aides were not present in Daschle’s office on Monday, the day the letter was opened. Officials have refused to answer questions concerning the circumstances of their exposure, or even to acknowledge that the anthrax escaped Daschle’s two-story suite of offices.

Apart from the New Jersey letter carrier, officials said they believed that a maintenance worker who serviced mail-sorting machines at the Trenton post office’s regional distribution center in Hamilton, N.J., has anthrax, the Postal Inspection Service reported.

Another postal worker at the Hamilton facility was being tested for possible exposure to anthrax. The two employees were being treated and taking antibiotics, Acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco said. Customers who visited the West Trenton post office in the past three weeks were urged to see a doctor if they had any symptoms of illness or a rash.

As reports of new anthrax exposures came in, Bush administration officials tried to assure a jittery nation that authorities were on the alert for terrorist acts.

“Our antennae are up for all conceivable risks,” said Tom Ridge, the new chief of homeland security. While saying there was no specific threat, the government notified doctors nationwide that they should watch for possible cases of smallpox, food poisoning and deadly viruses like Ebola.

Surgeon General David Satcher said stockpiles of antibiotics were sufficient to respond to the anthrax threat.

Congressional activity was largely shut down by the anthrax scare – the House officially in recess because of the threat, the Senate in session but with its sprawling complex of three office buildings closed.

CBS officials said the aide to Rather, Claire Fletcher, 27, was recovering. “She’s doing fine,” network news president Andrew Heyward said. “Her prognosis is excellent.”

Federal investigators, meanwhile, pressed for evidence at research labs and universities that may have access to anthrax and questioned pharmacies to see if anyone tried to buy large amounts of antibiotics before the nationwide anthrax scare.

One scenario being explored is whether someone living in the United States might have worked with a foreign country or an overseas domestic terrorist group with enhanced biochemical capabilities, officials said.

“We think it may be ill-advised to think about the situation in terms of an either-or matrix,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said. He also raised the possibility that the anthrax attacks could be the work of more than one homegrown terrorist.

“It might well be that we have opportunists in the United States or terrorists in the United States who are acting in ways that are unrelated,” the attorney general added.

Ashcroft said that he could not rule out a connection between the anthrax attacks and the events of Sept. 11.

Tests have concluded that the anthrax in the letter sent to Brokaw was of the same strain as the anthrax sent to an American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla., where one man died.

Investigators were intrigued by the fact that the anthrax sent to NBC in September was in a heavy granular substance that would not likely go airborne while the anthrax found in the later Daschle letter was professionally made and more likely to float into the air.

Given that the similar handwriting and envelopes suggested a single sender, the differing anthrax specimens suggest the sender may have received sophisticated assistance in between the Brokaw and Daschle letters, government officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Some of the traditional evidence-gathering was slowed because the envelopes were contaminated with anthrax, making tests such as fingerprinting, DNA analysis and saliva more risky for lab technicians.