Security officials were concerned that terrorists may have decided to target individual senators. For an hour, until he got an “all clear” from the police, Bayh drove his twin 5-year-old sons around the leafy-but no longer idyllic-neighborhoods of Northwest Washington.
This is now a global capital under siege. At another elementary school (my own son’s), kids on the playground hid under trees and behind bushes when they heard the news of the attack on the Pentagon. For kids, all terror is local, and they know the federal buildings best. They have no reason to think that what happened down the Potomac could not happen even closer to home.
At the Capitol, rumors flew this morning, none of them verified: that a bomb had been found in the Rotunda, that there was an explosion in the vicinity, that the plane that hit the Pentagon had originally been circling Capitol Hill.
Incredibly, sources told me, the Capitol Police continued to allow people into the building until about 9:45 a.m. More amazingly, I am told, there was no evacuation or protection plan in place for members of Congress, even those (such as Speaker of the House Hastert) who are constitutionally in line to run the government should catastrophe strike the president and the Cabinet. “It was every man for himself,” one top Hill aide told me. One by one, leaders on the Hill decided to get out. At least one of them (a top Senate Republican) chose to leave after his aides, glancing out of the windows, saw clouds of smoke rising from the Pentagon.
My sources tell me that the Senate Intelligence Committee did hear recently from CIA Director George Tenet about terrorist threats. But the committee had yet to consider any sweeping new measures to combat them. Instead, when senators asked a top administration intelligence official a few months ago what he needed, he talked about more spy satellites.
Hill leaders were to be briefed late today by intelligence officials. Sources tell me that it’s undecided when the Congress will again meet-or where.
