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security beat
May 2007
Expert slams federal government pandemic plans
By Breanne Wagner
 The Bush administration’s plan for treating and stemming a pandemic outbreak in the United States will not work, said Barbara Billauer, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and a public health expert.
To prevent the spread of a pandemic disease, the government believes that mass vaccinations are the solution, but vaccines are disease specific, Billauer said at a Washington, D.C., conference on terrorism. The nation can try to inoculate the population against the one disease a terrorist may pick, but “it’s akin to a portfolio manager telling you to put all your money in one basket and not diversifying. If we get it wrong by one effective DNA sequence, it’s useless,” she said.
Billauer believes the government is shortsighted in this way. She said the avian flu vaccine being developed today would be ineffective.
Mass vaccinations are a horrible idea anyway, Billauer said. If we line up people in a room to receive a vaccine, we forget that some of those people have already contracted the disease. This is the best way to spread a communicable disease, she said.
To stem spreading, two executive orders in place today enable the president to declare quarantine for nine specified diseases, including influenza, Billauer said. It can also be called for “any re-emerging influenza that has caused or has the potential to cause a pandemic,” she said. Yet there are no standards in place for imposing or removing quarantine.
“Quarantine will only work if people have trust in their government,” Billauer continued.
Before the need for quarantine arises, the government could immunize 85 to 90 percent of the population to prevent a disease from spreading, Billauer said. However, she noted, there are two large populations within society that would most definitely not get the vaccine: prisoners and illegal aliens. Billauer explained that it is illegal to use experimental vaccines on prisoners, and the majority of illegal aliens are unlikely to come forward.
If a pandemic breaks out despite all its efforts, the Bush administration plans to increase hospital surge capacity, Billauer said. But hospital workers are most often diseased. If there is ever a major problem, hospital workers will be in short supply, she asserted.
So what can citizens do to protect themselves from a pandemic? Billauer recommended avoiding hospitals. She also suggested that the government create a database that would record when workers call in sick and track what disease they have contracted. Another idea is to pair cities together that would support each other in times of crisis and run training drills together for first responders and medical workers.
Heavy National Guard deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan are taking a toll on state disaster preparedness. The nation’s governors are responding by seeking a presence at the Pentagon to protect their turf.
“Governors are the commanders-in-chief of their state Guard and are concerned about the use of the Guard for national purposes,” Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons said during a media conference unveiling a new guide for governors.
“We need communication to coordinate with the Defense Department … a lot of Guard equipment is worn out, people are over utilized” because of the war, Gibbons remarked.
Gibbons and Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner introduced the “Governors’ Guide to Homeland Security” that was produced by the National Governors’ Association.
The guide gives an overview of a governor’s homeland security roles and responsibilities. It also outlines the role of the National Guard during state and federal mobilization.
Guard troops have been an important and measurable presence in the war; at one point, more than 40 percent of units in Iraq were from the National Guard, the guide said. This is a prime cause of concern for governors because they don’t have a voice at the Pentagon when their state troops deploy. Governors have their National Guard on alert in case of emergency and “speak with them daily about the status of the force,” Minner said. But as soon as that force is mobilized for war by the president, governors cannot call them back for state needs.
“The commission [on the National Guard and Reserves] recommends more formal communication among the Defense Department, the National Guard and governors,” Minner said. “We haven’t been able to get a Guard representative at the Pentagon,” she lamented.
Support for a lead National Guard position at the Pentagon first surfaced in April 2006 when Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., introduced legislation to make the National Guard Bureau chief a four-star general and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace turned down the idea, saying that separating the Army and Air National Guard from each service would be disruptive.
Potential terrorists often become suicide bombers when they already feel dead, according to terrorism psychologist Anne Speckhard.
In areas of conflict, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the population undergoes daily trauma and becomes frustrated with violence.
“When people become highly traumatized, they often enter into a state of dissociation — a state of already being dead,” said Speckhard, an adjunct professor at Georgetown. These people turn to suicide bombing because they have a shortened sense of life; they don’t expect to live very long, she continued.
Terrorism is also driven right now by community support, Speckhard said during an ASIS global terrorism conference. She believes that “there is a huge level of [community] support right now” in Iraq and Afghanistan and other volatile areas around the world for extremist causes. Local citizens largely support terrorism when they feel under threat, Speckhard said. Societies are often fed up with violence and just want to find good solutions.
Psychologically weak communities are more easily influenced by terrorist ideology.
Young people within these areas also accept terrorism because of trauma, anger and nationalism, she said. When they see family members die, it moves them to action.
Within Palestinian society, terrorists are recognized as martyrs. Terror groups in this case can just wait for those victims of trauma who are in a bad state psychologically to come forward, Speckhard said in a document. Recruitment is easy because the ideology has mass appeal, she said.
In non-conflict areas, such as Belgium, the Internet is the largest “tool of radicalization and recruitment” she said. In Brussels, where Speckhard lives and practices, 20 percent of the population is Muslim, and members largely feel alienated from society. The message of terrorism may resonate with marginalized Muslim youth “because they are looking for a sense of belonging, a positive identity that they can’t find at home,” Speckhard explained.
U.S. Food Supply Chain Among Nation’s Many Vulnerabilities
Among the dozens of potential targets terrorists can attack in the U.S. homeland is the nation’s food supply chain.
The demand for fresh produce, the quick and efficient distribution networks and the short shelf lives of products “makes it a very good delivery system for terrorists,” Frank Busta, director of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, told a gathering of Washington-based reporters.
Food products include ingredients from around the world that are derived from a range of sources. Oversight and security in the supply chain are often lacking. A food-borne biological or chemical weapon inserted into the nation’s just-in-time delivery system could rapidly cause havoc, he said.
The outbreak last year of e-coli bacteria found in spinach points to the potential devastation of an intentional attack. That was a relatively low concentration of contaminant, he noted. Because such products have short shelf lives, they are taken home and consumed before authorities even realize that there is a problem. A full-scale attack of an agent such as botulism would have a devastating effect, he said.
Nevertheless, there has been scant evidence that terrorists are planning such an attack, he conceded. There was some evidence uncovered in Afghanistan that al-Qaida had thought about the possibility. “Chatter” among terrorists contemplating such an attack has been low, although he noted that good terrorists don’t chatter much.
The food distribution network is almost entirely in the private sector’s hands, so the agriculture and food processing industries have major roles to play. The National Infrastructure Protection Plan, the federal government’s strategy to put appropriate agencies together with private sector role-players to protect vital U.S. economic interests, includes food and agriculture as one of the 17 categories.
The federal government has conducted several table-top exercises to look for vulnerabilities and shortcomings in its response plans. If a terrorist attack were uncovered, the FBI would take the lead in an investigation, with the Department of Homeland Security playing a coordinating role. The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would also be involved. The center, based at the University of Minnesota, conducts research on food safety and will act as an adviser to federal authorities in case of attack. It is one of DHS’ centers of excellence.
“We want to make the food distribution system a less attractive target for terrorists,” Busta said.
— Stew Magnuson
Please email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org or BWagner@ndia.org
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