NEG/TERRORISM/BIOLOGICAL

TURNS" FOCUS ON BIOTERRORISM IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

MULTIPLICATION OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM PREPAREDNESS PROGRAMS ONLY MAKES THINGS WORSE

Amy E. Smithson and Leslie-Anne Levy, Stimson Center, October 2000 Ataxia:The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response, Report No. 35 http:///www.stimson.org/pubs/cwc/ataxiaexecsum.pdf //VT2002acsln

A series of expert studies and panels have labeled the federal preparedness programs a fractured mess and urged a national strategy to guide programs better. This counsel has fallen on deaf ears, for the executive branch continues to spawn duplicative programs, abetted by at least a dozen congressional committees that have authorized virtually any program with terrorism in the title. Throwing money at a problem is a costly substitute for effective government.

THE BEST POLICY WOULD BE A MORATORIUM ON NEW TERRORISM RESPONSE PROGRAMS

In fact, Washington should declare a moratorium on any new federal teams for unconventional terrorism response. Inside the beltway, the response to such criticism may be that these teams really do not cost much–just a few million dollars here and there. Such a rejoinder truly belies the fact that national policy makers have lost perspective on the program’s stated purposes.

BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS DEFENSE PROCEDURES ONLY INCREASE HOAX ATTACKS

LAURIE GARRETT, Pulitzer Prize -- winning science and medical writer for Newsday January, 2001 / February, 2001 Foreign Affairs SECTION: CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT; Pg. 76 HEADLINE: The Nightmare of Bioterrorism //VT2002acsln

Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig warned that panic, in and of itself, is becoming the new terrorist tool. "Only through a new union of our public health, police, and military resources," he said, "can we hope to deal with this dangerous threat." But Hamburg worried that the police and FBI responses actually encourage such false alarms. It seems that bioterrorist hoaxes attract the type of individuals who enjoy watching fire departments douse buildings they have set afire. "When an envelope comes in saying 'This is anthrax,' we don't need the fire department in full protective gear on site," Hamburg insists. "What we need is to discreetly move the envelope to a public health laboratory for proper analysis. Mass decontamination and quarantine only [add] fuel to the fire of the hoax perpetrators, and it's totally unnecessary in terms of public health."

BIOTERRORIST PREVENTION PROGRAMS ARE BAD BECAUSE THEY MAKE US THINK SUCH ATTACKS ARE SURVIVABLE

Some public health advocates are convinced that no marriage between their profession and law enforcement could ever work and have denounced all efforts to heighten concerns about bioterrorism. One prestigious group argues that "bioterrorist initiative programs are strongly reminiscent of the civil defense programs promoted by the U.S. government during the Cold War . . . [that fostered] the delusion that nuclear war was survivable."

FOCUS ON BIOTERRORISM CREATES A STATE OF PUBLIC PARANOIA LEADING TO CENSORSHIP AND CONTROL

For many older public health leaders, the bioterrorism scare evokes nasty memories of Cold War cover-ups and censorship. By adopting the bioterrorism issue, they warn, public health officials are buying into a similar framework of paranoid thinking. Indeed, in 1999, biologists working in national laboratories found, for the first time, their work facing censorship in the wake of allegations of Chinese espionage at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees the national labs, clamped down so hard in 1999 that the National Academy of Sciences warned that the future of U.S. scientific enterprise could be imperiled. Although the DOE's primary concern was computer and nuclear secrecy, the threat of bioterrorism prompted the agency to broaden its new security restrictions to embrace basic biology research as well.