BIO-TERRORISM:
You ain't seen nothin' yet!
As seen by the recent rash of Anthrax letter mailings, either someone has
been paying careful attention to the media...or the author of LIVING
TERRORS: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe
is prescient beyond belief.
In his book of the above title, released in 2000, author Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, presents his concerns over the use of bioagents as terrorist weapons. Until recently, the threat of terrorist use of bioagents has been conveniently lumped together with chemical and nuclear weapons under that tired catch-all buzz-phrase, "weapons of mass destruction". Osterholm, among his other objectives, strives to have us consider bioagents as a far more sinister and immensely more formidable threat that deserves discrete star billing, separate from chemical agent hazards; in my opinion, he succeeds. [The salient point emerges that although most politicians simply love using the "weapons of mass destruction" descriptor, this has become one of the most tediously overworked phrases in the basic primer of 'A Child's Garden of Political Phrases'--thereby blunting, if not completely destroying any possible inherent usefulness of the term to stimulate our continued awareness and/or concern.]
In this interesting book, Dr. Osterholm, an eminent epidemiologist who has all the right credentials auguring credibility up the ying-yang, investigates and exposes the frightening vulnerability of the United States to an attack by terrorists using bio-weapons. Among the 'table-top' scenarios Osterholm describes is the efficacy of a mock-Anthrax attack carried out in 1999, which bears a rather striking resemblance to the recent mailing of Anthrax spores to prominent public figures.
While several of the things Osterholm stated in the initial chapters of his book struck me as somewhat irritating and gratuitously dismissive of certain genuinely legitimate social criticisms, it is hard to ignore the fact that much of what Osterholm has described in terms of an attack with bioagents--and the immediate effects of such an incident--has already occurred. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1999--long before the September 11th terrorist events, and certainly well before the Anthrax Letters event of recent months took place.
Dr. Osterhom's central thesis is that Hemorrhagic Smallpox (Variola Haemorhagica) is the bioagent we should fear most, due to the fact that it is extremely contagious and very difficult to contain (due to secondary considerations introduced by the presence of this disease, such as widespread panic, free-floating anxiety, and other psychological effects). In the course of his observations, Osterholm presents some very sobering possibilities and dissects some important, but little known facts: principally, that due to a number of critical considerations that range from factional politics to the present status-quo of (mis)managed health care, if smallpox were ever used as a weapon in a concerted attack by a lone terrorist (or terrorist group), the resultant disruption of American society (& economy) would be nothing short of a protracted and highly disruptive nightmare of unimaginable proportions. Other facts reiterated by Dr. Osterholm are that although smallpox was ostensibly eliminated in the 1970s, the virus was preserved in a number of places around the world and is probably today in the hands of such nations as Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Russia, and a number of others (in addition to the United States). Vaccinations against smallpox in this country ceased in the 70s, of course, and there are very few stocks of 'reliable' (unspoiled) batches of vaccine (against the strain active 35 years ago) left in storage today. Further, any weaponised strains likely to be used now may have been genetically altered so as to render them far more fearsome and resistant to any of the remaining decades-old stocks of vaccine that are still in storage.
Perhaps most sobering is Osterholm's observation that the US Government is virtually completely unprepared for a bioemergency of this scale and magnitude, despite the almost daily media stock-footage showing HAZMAT teams suited up for practice on chemical hazard emergency exercises that news programs dutifully trot out for the 5PM evening news. His reasoning is compelling, and it is made more so by awareness that due to political infighting and factionalism, continuing irresolvable discussions over a range of topics ranging from jurisdictional arguments to funding arrangements have made it impossible for any overall, comprehensively satisfactory national or local policy to emerge for coverage of such a crisis.
All of this is knowledge that our government would prefer the public to not have, if for no other reason than to reduce pressure on elected politicians and officials to come together in consensus and DO SOMETHING, but also due to the fact even if some sort of cogent national or local approach to this problem were successfully formulated and instituted today, the result of a well-planned bioterrorist attack of this sort would still be catastrophic.
Many of the things predicted by Osterholm in his 1999 book have already come into being, in the wake of both the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Anthrax letters, of course. Further, when the book was written, William Clinton (and his more liberal constituency) was still President of the United States. Osterholm makes warning mention of the possibilities of civil liberties being radically swept aside in any possible response to his projected scenario, within the context of the Clinton administration; however, now that (in my opinion) certain political 'loose guns' (Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a host of other right-of-center Bush appointees) have gained ascendancy in the 'Dubya' Bush administration, this broad dismissal of American civil liberties is certain to gain even greater momentum than Osterfeld himself had anticipated. Even the precedent-setting constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 stand to become considerably diminished in effect, after state-of-the-art legal attacks on its limiting powers may be mounted by the present administration.
Osterholm, in his analysis, posited that although we stand to most fear the use of smallpox as the ultimate and catastrophically devastating bioagent weapon, its very virulent nature makes it somewhat less amenable to terrorist use than Anthrax (which poses somewhat less danger to its formulators & disseminators). Anthrax, the weaponization of which is far easier to effect than we would be led to believe by official policy statements on its potential as a weapon by terrorists, has already now been introduced through the mailing of inhalable (1 to 3 microns in size) Anthrax spore contaminated letters to various congressmen. So much for the comforting damage-control PR reassurances that this event produced! We have now further witnessed the massively disruptive economic and political chaos that even such a small-scale, strictly amateur bioattack as this has provoked, let alone the widespread anxiety and fear byproducts that are more often the greater and more formidable consequences of a well planned and effectively carried out act of this kind.
A similar terrorist attack, this time using the justly feared Variola Haemorhagica virus in a carefully planned and carried out action by a single antisocial savant would produce consequences far more deadly and infinitely more disruptive than the relatively 'minor' shock effects produced by the recent Anthrax Letters. Unfortunately, Osterholm presents several possible scenarios in his book which any modestly talented, but severely disgruntled graduate lab technician could carry out in a manner in which detection would be almost impossible; with the so-called "copy-cat" effect (produced by widespread television news media coverage) being a well known and established force in motivating individuals with deficit social consciousness to carry out similar acts of 'retribution', this is a further and greatly upsetting factor for further consideration.
Several other things Osterholm mentions in his book certainly ring true with the peculiar clarity of a church bell struck in cold weather. In the chapter titled 'Mitigated Disaster', Osterholm presents a list of what he calls his Eight Point Plan for Change. These include 1) "Stop talking about 'weapons of mass destruction'"--an argument that bioterrorist weapons belong in a critical category all by themselves, discrete from WMD; 2) "Build the stockpile"--an exhortation to produce and build up a stockpile of antibiotics sufficient to address something as predictable as a deliberately engineered smallpox epidemic (should it occur); 3) "Build up more 'surge capacity'"--an appeal to restructure health care institutions so as to allow more immediate, efficacious response to an emergency of this nature by existing healthcare systems; 4) "Shore up the public health infrastructure so as to allow a quicker response for outbreaks"--advocating a revitalisation of our presently lamentable & grossly inadequate public health resources; 5) "Clear up the roles of Federal, State, and Local Government"--i.e. clearly define and functionally delineate responsibility for a pandemic bioemergency response; 6) "Clean up the coverage"--the need to redirect public media's attention back from its present commercially driven and vapid infotainment focus; 7) "We'll understand it if we actually practice"--or 'let's stop the horse and pony HAZMAT drills and prepare for the purely bioagent threat that is most to be feared'; and 8) "We are on our own, together"--a reminder that all of us need to reinvest ourselves with personal responsibility for seeing to it that our elected officials undertake the best possible recourse to address these very real concerns.
Although the above 8 points could be summarised into the single phrase "Wise preparation is the best preventative", and aside from the fact that each of these recommendations is exceptionally salient, it is point number 6 that strikes a particularly resonant chord in my own awareness: Clean up the media! Osterholm makes a cogent observation in being critical of today's 'cheap-thrills' media coverage tactics that effectively mix a well tested formula comprised of perfectly-coifed news anchors giving news viewers just enough of the gory details to satiate their perceived need for vicarious thrills and chills. He points out the fact that the role of the press as (originally) envisioned by the framers of the American constitution was to keep lawmakers, agencies, and elected officials focused on the problems at hand and to keep them honest...and not to provide cheap gratification in the form of sexual innuendo, violent titillations, or coercive commercial brainwashing intended to sell material goods, which is the present focus of media broadcasting. Regrettably, since the press are today as much under the hypnotic sway of their powerful commercial benefactors as they used to be under the traditional ethical impetus of higher moral concerns, what we end up with on television is simply the aforementioned 'cheap thrills'. This results in grossly unnecessary hype, excesses of emotional exploitation, and unconscionable manipulations of that two-thirds of our society who lack even the barest vestige of critically reflective intelligence. Osterholm ends this particular indictment of our modern journalistic media by summarizing thusly: "...journalism, at its best, does serve the public interest..." (but perhaps this message is too subtle to register on most people).
In the second chapter of LIVING TERRORS, Osterholm dedicates no small amount of thoughtful reflection to the subject of what exactly modern 'terrorism' has morphed into, in the 21st century. While he successfully addresses the issue of who these individuals who would create terror in our midst are, he nearly manages at the same time to effectively dismiss all who strongly feel that our modern American society is critically defective and dysfunctional as being somehow pathologically aberrant. Among his examination of modern terrorist profiles, he references in his 2nd chapter (dedicated to an analysis of who the modern terrorist actually is) the person he terms the Lone Wolf, or the single, unassociated instigator of such a wave of bioterrorism as is described in his book.
Osterholm portrays a profile of a talented but grossly overlooked and grievously under-recognized biolab savant, obscurely hidden somewhere within the depths of American society, who has finally crossed over that fine mental line wherein all means are justified by the end. In this passage he references such solitary and individually acting terrorists as Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Buford Furrow. etc. Of interest is the fact that he recognizes that while Kaczynski and Furrow gave sufficient evidence of mental illness, others (such as McVeigh) did not and appeared to act purely out of what he calls "clear-headed" systems of personal belief. This is an important distinction, I feel, for it allows for the possibility that there are those who may legitimately feel that the modern America's irresistible mix of materialism and highly technologised corporate style capitalism is leading the rest of the world down the path of ultimate destructive (of both human spiritual needs and environmental resources). It further offers the hypothecation that some individuals may be so concerned about these (truly) alarming aspects of American capitalism that they are actively determined to bring the process to a halt by any means within their grasp...even if this mandates the death of many, many innocent people. And THAT is truly something to think about and take seriously.
While I personally have never advocated the overthrow of any government, least of all my own, this does not make me blind to the many dangerously predative effects of the US economy felt by other nations of the world, nor does it make me any less determined that these outrageously excesses of global exploitation (carried out under the glamorous and innocently altruistic-sounding buzz-phrase, 'world-wide free enterprise') be reined in before we Americans succeed in ruining our (use of the word our in this context is surely irony of the finest sort) planet entirely. While I have myself never crossed that fine dividing line between 'maintaining philosophic belief' and 'revolutionary commitment to action', it makes me more prone to at least approach an understanding of the motivations of someone who may personally feel that society has turned its back in some egregious manner or another (thereby 'warranting' such a dire and catastrophic response as an individual act of bioterror constitutes).
Seen within the context of Osterholm's observations, the theory that the recent Anthrax Letters incident is purely the act of one of these solitary instigators gains more and more credibility; so much so, that it is even possible that the Anthrax Letters instigator is not even remotely affiliated with a terrorist group such as the Al Queda network. However, as more and more of these severely socially isolated & disgruntled 'lone wolves' turn to the feedback loop of the media as a source for amplification and encouragement of their desire for social retribution, it is distinctly possible that in the immediate future America will see more acts of individual bioterrorism. While Anthrax is bad enough, Osterholm's warnings about the great danger we face from Variola Haemorhagica should not be allowed to submerge unnoted and unremarked upon in the great sea of contemporary American 'public-awareness' literature.
The danger posed by a deliberately staged smallpox epidemic, regrettably, is VERY real and therefore let's all hope that we never have to discover just how real, because if we do.....you ain't seen nothin' yet......
(Nov 2001)+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[Postscript dated 1 Jan 2003: The specific strain of anthrax used in the above described attacks has now been traced back to the US Army's own Fort Detrick Biological Research Command facility, which while not definitively pointing an accusative finger at the US Army, certainly is a vastly amusing coincidence.......]
Postscript dated 2 Mar 2003: A former US military specialist named "Red" Thomas has recently published an article on the 'overblown' free-floating anxiety that possible terrorist use of NBC agents has created among the uninformed. Thomas takes a sharp candid look at this generalised fear and makes some pithy observations on the subject. Well worthwhile reading it (URL below): http://globalspecops.com/nbc.html
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