It should also be on Mr. Thompson's conscience that for the first two weeks of the anthrax crisis he kept the federal government's house physician - David Satcher, the surgeon general and a much-needed honest broker of public health - locked away, presumably because Dr. Satcher, a Clinton appointee, became persona non grata in the Bush administration for issuing a June report on teenage sexuality that angered the religious right. Only after Mr. Ridge arrived on the scene was the surgeon general liberated from the gulag.
As for Mr. Ashcroft, he has gone so far as to turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political reasons. Planned Parenthood, which has been on the front lines of anthrax scares for years and has by grim necessity marshaled the medical and security expertise to combat them, has sought a meeting with the attorney general since he took office but has never been granted one. This was true not only before Sept. 11 but, says Ann Glazier, Planned Parenthood's director of security, remains true - even though her organization, long targeted by such home-grown Talibans as the Army of God, has a decade's worth of leads on "the convergence of international and domestic terrorism."
Ms. Glazier found the sight of Mr. Ashcroft and other federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for anthrax terrorists a laughable indication of how little grasp they have of the enemy. "Religious extremists don't respond to money," she points out. Such is the state of the F.B.I., she adds, that one agent told a clinic to hold onto a suspect letter for a couple of days "because we have so many here we're afraid we're going to lose it" (perhaps among the Timothy McVeigh documents).