Sen. Richard J. Durbin sat in a leadership meeting Monday night in the same room he was in the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, with the location and today’s environment reminding him of that fateful day.
“Looking down the Mall, as the white black smoke came across from the Pentagon. I remember it well,” the Illinois Democrat said in an interview Tuesday.
Those attacks on Washington and New York — followed five weeks later by anthrax-laced letters sent to two senators — prompted a sweeping review of doomsday planning for how to keep Congress running in the event of a terrorist attack or other calamity. The past few days have sparked anew talk about the continuity of Congress but against an entirely different threat — a threat from within, literally, a virus that two members of the House announced late Wednesday that they had been diagnosed with, setting off a round of self-quarantining by other lawmakers.