Posted on: Monday, November 5, 2001

The September 11th attack
Mink's mail not from D.C.

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

It's not just that Congresswoman Patsy Mink hasn't gotten any mail in Washington D.C. since Oct. 12.

Now her constituents are telling her they won't open any mail that comes from her, for fear it will carry the anthrax bacteria that has shown up in the nation's capital.

So Mink is doing all her mailing from her Honolulu office, stamping it with a red label saying it was mailed in Hawai'i, not the District of Columbia.

"Nobody need fear if you are getting mail from members of Congress, because it is all being sent from our home offices," she said. "Essentially everything (in Washington) is shut down for us."

From the trivial to the terrifying, the world after Sept. 11 is both strange and frightening for a variety of reasons, Mink said before returning to Washington today.

While Mink is confident no anthrax will get from D.C. to Honolulu, she acknowledges that no one knows the extent of contamination in the capital.

She is the only member of Hawai'i's congressional delegation operating out of her own office since anthrax concerns closed buildings where Rep. Neil Abercrombie and Sens. Daniel Inouye and Dan Akaka, all Democrats, normally work, she said.

But the nation at large also has its strange aspects, she said, as an uneasy public reacts to myriad threats, real and imagined.

"The tragedy is that a lot of it is just being done by people who get a thrill by being the ones that incite this kind of domestic terror," Mink said. "For the FBI to get 500 hoaxes in one day, that's an incredible commentary on our society.

"I think we just have to cringe and bear it," Mink said. The nation has no choice but to take threats seriously, she said, defending the decision to recess the House while the Capitol was being swept for traces of bioterrorism.

She said she can't understand how all of America's expertise and medical research hasn't produced any indication of where the anthrax bacteria came from.

Anthrax mailings have not been linked to terrorists abroad, but that doesn't mean that there may not be foreign involvement, she said. "All they mean to say is that it appears the distribution, source and manufacture, the technology, is being implemented within the United States."

Mink said the country has seen just the beginning of the struggle. "They haven't found Osama bin Laden, we don't see any demonstrable weakening of the Taliban forces, so I think we are just beginning the commitment of the administration to tough it out."