Posted on 04/25/2003 7:18:12 AM PDT by coondawg
(CNSNews.com) - White powdery or granular material found by mail sorters has prompted several bio-terrorism scares in four states and London since January. Local businesses have also been hurt by the scares.
In one case, a Boston flower shop was partially shut down for half of Valentine's Day.
The culprit in all those cases was not anthrax, as some feared -- but an anti-war protest campaign called Rice for Peace.
The Rice for Peace campaign urges people opposing military action in Iraq to send envelopes containing rice to high-level government officials with the message, "If we are going to send something to Iraq it should be food, not bombs." The group's website said the amount of rice should be "the equivalent of one meal -- a vegan meal at that."
In many instances, the messages were accompanied by a New Testament quote from Romans 12:20: "If your enemies hunger, feed them."
Rice for Peace organizer Stirling Cousins of Boulder, Colo., says she got the "rice for peace" idea from anti-war activism of the 1950s, when protestors mailed wheat to the Eisenhower administration, urging it to send wheat to China instead of nuclear bombs.
"I felt the peace movement needed to be more innovative," Cousins said of the current protest, which began in January.
According to the Rice for Peace website, more than 50,000 packages of rice have been sent to the White House as well as to top government officials throughout Europe and Australia.
However, problems have cropped up when the rice-filled envelopes passed through high-speed automated mail-sorting machines used by many post offices. Jon Dunbar, postmaster in Glenwood Springs, Colo., said the rice gets crushed and sprayed "everywhere" when the envelopes break open.
Envelopes that survive the mail-sorting machines intact may be covered with an unidentifiable white powder, raising alarms among mail handlers who are now trained to look for anthrax-laced letters.
"It's something our employees have had to deal with for the past couple of years concerning biohazard issues," said Mark Saunders, a United States Postal Service spokesman in Washington, D.C. "When it happens, it might make some of our people a bit nervous."
Saunders explained that employees look for bulky or leaking envelopes, particularly those addressed to the White House. If such envelopes turn up, postal workers clear the area immediately and inform their supervisors, who then contact local emergency responders.
"We err on the side of caution," Saunders said, adding that USPS employees are aware of the Rice for Peace campaign. "We raised visibility to it through our numerous internal communications vehicles," he said.
According to news reports and rice campaign organizers, rice-filled letters have prompted bioterrorism investigations in Massachusetts, Montana, Idaho, North Carolina, and London, England.
Cousins said there was "absolutely" no intention to trigger panic in post offices or to give the appearance of bio-terrorist activity.
After causing some initial problems at her local post office in Boulder, Cousins e-mailed an alert with specific mailing instructions to other activist groups participating in the campaign and posted it on the website.
"We did what the post office asked us to do, which is put the packages in carefully sealed and padded envelopes," Cousins said. This prevents the contents from spilling out and, because the envelopes are larger, they are sorted by hand and don't go through the sorting machines.
While relieved that the packages were found to be harmless, Saunders noted, "There is a cost associated with having to shut down the mail system" at facilities while investigations are undertaken.
Business owners at Boston's Faneuil Hall were financially stung Feb. 14 when a protester attempted to mail a rice package to President Bush in the small post office located in the historic building.
"We were evacuated and we were out all day," said Daisy Hunjan, employee of the Faneuil Hall Heritage Shop. "We lost a whole day of good sales."
Photography shop owner Amy Gallagher said every store in the building was evacuated. Lost sales were hard to calculate, she said, adding, "Some places were hit harder than others."
"I'd say the stores that were hit harder than me were the flower store, the candy store and the card store because it was Valentines Day," Gallagher said.
While not interested in suing over the issue, John Canale, manager of Exotic Flowers at Faneuil Hall, said he wished there was some way the protesters could be held responsible for his financial loss.
"We had the fire department in half of this store for half of the busiest day of the year," Canale said. "So it definitely ruined part of the sales for the day. It cost about 20 percent of the sales for the day and it was a $20,000 day, so we probably missed out on about $4,000."
On Jan. 23, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw's office had to be evacuated for three hours because of the receipt of a rice-filled letter.
According to Voices in the Wilderness U.K., which organized the mail campaign in England, the activist who mailed the letter was allegedly placed on a suspected terrorist list and police told him "it was only his post code and respectable family that saved him from being raided by anti-terror police."
Closer to home on March 5, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and staff had to evacuate their Senate Dirksen building offices for over an hour because of a rice-filled letter from a Chicago constituent.
Durbin spokesperson Joe Shoemaker said the senator supports anyone's right to express their opinion freely but "does draw the line to people who abuse that privilege by trying to provoke a crisis." However, he said he considered this an instance of a "heartfelt political statement."
On Feb. 4, a Montana State University co-ed got a visit from university police during her classes over a rice letter she mailed to the White House that morning. According to news reports, she was not charged with any crime and was even given her letter back by police who told her she could mail it again, properly sealed this time, if she chose.
On March 7 the main post office in downtown Durham, N.C., was evacuated and surrounding streets blocked after police were alerted to a suspicious letter, which again stemmed from Rice for Peace.
"They did the right thing," Durham police Cpl. Robert W. McLaughlin said of postal employees calling 911. "We just wanted to do the right thing. I was glad it wasn't something worse," McLaughlin told the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
Even though the war in Iraq is winding down, Cousins said "there are definitely still people participating in the [rice for peace] campaign."
"At this point we are not continuing to try to push the campaign out there, but a lot of people know about it and a lot of people still have humanitarian concerns about Iraq. So a lot of them are still using the campaign to get the message of peace and humanitarian aid across," Cousins said.
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