Luckily, the message from Washington to Shanghai was that 'the mice are feet down', so US president George W. Bush and his entourage could relax; they would not be dead in a few hours.
Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed the mice message on ABC television - which should help to sell copies of her book about the inner secrets of the Bush White House. But it should also raise disturbing questions about American leadership in this troubled world. The incident occurred in the frenzied weeks after the al-Qaeda 9/11 murders, but the last few days have confirmed doubts about whether Washington has lost its way, with dangerous consequences for us all.
The message referred to a panicked video-conference call hours earlier between Bush in Shanghai and Dick Cheney in Washington, in which the vice-president said White House detectors had picked up deadly botulinum toxin, an almost certain death sentence for Bush, Rice and anyone else exposed to it. Samples were tested on mice that scampered away. If they had died, the message would have been 'feet up'.
In the television clip distributed outside the US, Rice does not explain what the foreign substance actually was or, equally important, how it had infiltrated the White House, or whether the scare was just a product of Cheney's fevered imagination.
The public clearly had no right to know that Bush and his team had come close to being poisoned - or not - and how Bush's and Cheney's fears may have influenced later decisions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bush and Cheney have left office but Cheney continues to exert his considerable baneful influence through the Republican right, which is harrying and hampering President Barack Obama on economic as well as political matters.
Obama has got some things right: he supported the effort to get rid of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi without wasting hundreds of US lives and billions of dollars; he is extricating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
