America's government institutions are so rickety that, at a time like this, the CIA, the FBI and the health services just can't cope

I was having breakfast here in Washington last Tuesday with Geoff Hoon, the British Secretary of Defence, and he said how much the atmosphere in DC had changed compared to when he and his family came on a sightseeing visit only last summer. True, Geoff, very true. Leaving breakfast, I was in time to see Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, being asked to confirm that my local mail sorting office was the latest to be contaminated with anthrax spores. "Er," he responded characteristically. "Well, they're doing quite a lot of testing," he went on, looking around again for support - which duly came when someone confirmed that anthrax had, indeed, been discovered at the Friendship Heights sorting office.

In other words, the right hand here still hasn't the faintest idea what the left hand is doing, and fear reigns. Partly that is because of a theme that has surfaced repeatedly in my reports - the inherent American mistrust of big government, and the resulting hokiness of its institutions. Hence, the CIA and State Department of the only superpower in the world, faced with a terrorist attack apparently with Arab connections, put out an urgent appeal for people who can speak and read Arabic. (Had there been more such people in 1993, the first attack on the World Trade Center that year might have been averted: the FBI had boxes of documents outlining what would happen beforehand, but nobody could understand them because they were in Arabic.) Since 11 September this year, almost half a million tip-offs of information have flooded the FBI - which has just 11,143 agents across the entire country to investigate them.

Polls still give President Bush above 90 per cent approval ratings, but this does not presage a sudden American awakening to the blessings of strong, central government. The first post-11 September political squabble here broke out over the workers who do the security screening at airports, with demands that they should be replaced by federally employed, trained police. Republican politicians protested that this would swell the federal workforce by at least 25,000; such growth of government power was unacceptable. The "low-income workers" - words guaranteed to bring a frisson of pleasure to the Republican right - should be left to muddle through as economic logic dictates and to hell with airport security. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that a firm called ServiceMaster supplies many of these low-income workers - and that firm just happens to be an important Republican donor.

It is much the same story when it comes to smallpox, tularaemia, botulism and all the other diseases that apparently await us if we are not finished off by anthrax. Despite the administration's panicky recent measures, the vaccines available next year will cover nothing like the US population. The federal government has no record of the academic or commercial laboratories where dangerous disease cultures are stored. There has been no centralised control of hospitals and their record keeping, so that rare diseases may appear in different parts of the country without anyone in authority knowing or being able to collate the data. Keeping central registers smacks of Big Brother, and that is unacceptable.

Indeed, when the anthrax deaths started, there was a sudden call for an antibiotic, Cipro - patented and marketed by Bayer AG. Canada, seeing what was happening on its doorstep, immediately announced that it was breaking Bayer's patents, and asking a generic manufacturer to produce a million tablets. No such action was dreamed of here, although the need for Cipro was considerably greater; one senior Republican heatedly insisted that "patents are the foundation of the US drug industry", and nobody in the administration dared interfere in the divine right of US pharmaceutical companies to make vast profits. A lower price was finally negotiated, but that was as far as the government would go, even when the health of the entire population was at risk. By last Tuesday, Cipro supplies were already running low; the predominantly black postal workforce was supplied with doxycycline (a cheaper drug that may be just as effective against anthrax, but which is not approved for that purpose).

Americans have an almost limitless faith in their government to look after them, but the machinery is simply not there; there is thus an inbuilt ambivalence in modern America. A week or so ago, on that wave of approval and bellicose patriotic fervour, the Bush administration pushed its "anti-terrorist" bill through Congress. The one Senate dissenter, Russell Feingold, a Democrat, said it was "a big government taking a big grab of power". The government can now detain illegal immigrants for up to seven days - John Ashcroft, the attorney general, wanted the powers to do so indefinitely - and the US Treasury can prohibit banks from doing business with foreign banks. The package (approved by the House by 357-66) also allows the government to tap phones more freely, to read e-mails, and to collect data on computers; the Immigration and Naturalisation Service is given sweeping new powers, too.

In normal times, such measures would horrify the right every bit as much as the left because of the degree of federal intervention - but the Republicans have managed to switch their logic. While civil rights groups announced that they would contest the legislation in court, the House majority leader, Dick Armey, said it was necessary to protect "the precious Bill of Rights that we are fighting to defend".

But in effect, the administration has given bodies such as the CIA or FBI carte blanche to do whatever they like, overseas and domestically. My latest figure for arrests in connection with 11 September is 1,017 and counting: the vast majority are Arabs, and most are being held as "material witnesses", meaning that they may not be guilty of anything but allegedly have information on who is. In theory, they all have access to a lawyer - but the FBI has adopted a policy of moving them rapidly from prison to prison, sometimes from one side of the country to the other, with the result that even the most assiduous lawyer has found it difficult simply to find the prisoner. Interestingly, the Supreme Court in Zadvydas v Davis in effect outlawed the new legislation in a judgement earlier this year, ruling that due process was an entitlement for "all persons within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent". Now the Supreme Court justices who put Bush into power will decide if this new legislation is constitutional.

And so America wends its way through its nightmare, knowing not what it does but determined to do it none the less - and to hell with anyone else. I was at a dinner party the other night when a middle-aged lady asked me what the attitude of the New Statesman was to "our war". I told her it was not wholly in favour, which was enough to trigger spasms of fierce hatred from her and others from which I speedily had to distance myself. Senator Joe Biden has been the only senior politician even to hint that the war is not a thoroughly Good Thing, when he said that because of its bombing raids the US risks being seen as a "hi-tech bully".

But this brought forth nothing but odium on his head, so much so that he had to backtrack soon afterwards. The speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert (who, very alarmingly, would succeed to the presidency in the absence of Bush and Dick Cheney) described Biden's comments as "completely irresponsible", adding for good measure that they "could bring comfort to our enemies". A Republican Congressman from Virginia, Thomas Davis, said that Biden had been "outrageous and negligent". Thus the "war" continues, and the chaotic indecision in Washington is every bit as shambolic as I described last week; the private mood at the highest levels of power is now grim and full of fear and foreboding, more so than at any time since 11 September.

Will it be Atlanta, Houston or Dallas this time, or perhaps the DC water supply? Or will more hijackers try again for the White House and the Capitol? Hoon had it right: the bombs may be raining down thousands of miles away, but Washington itself is almost paralysed with fear. And no end is in sight.

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