Hyping security threats for the big $$$'s

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-oe-leitenberg17feb17,
0,3489887.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

> From the Los Angeles Times
Bioterrorism, hyped
By Milton Leitenberg
February 17, 2006

THE UNITED STATES has spent at least $33 billion since 2002 to combat the
threat of biological terrorism. The trouble is, the risk that terrorists
will use biological agents is being systematically and deliberately
exaggerated. And the U.S. government has been using most of its money to
prepare for the wrong contingency.

A pandemic flu outbreak of the kind the world witnessed in 1918-19 could
kill hundreds of millions of people. The only lethal biological attack in
the United States - the anthrax mailings - killed five. But the annual
budget for combating bioterror is more than $7 billion, while Congress just
passed a $3.8-billion emergency package to prepare for a flu outbreak.

The exaggeration of the bioterror threat began more than a decade ago after
the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways in
1995. The scaremongering has grown more acute since 9/11 and the mailing of
anthrax-laced letters to Congress and media outlets in the fall of 2001. Now
an edifice of institutes, programs and publicists with a vested interest in
hyping the bioterror threat has grown, funded by the government and by
foundations.

Last year, for example, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist described
bioterrorism as "the greatest existential threat we have in the world
today." But how could he justify such a claim? Is bioterrorism a greater
existential threat than global climate change, global poverty levels, wars
and conflicts, nuclear proliferation, ocean-quality deterioration,
deforestation, desertification, depletion of freshwater aquifers or the
balancing of population growth and food production? Is it likely to kill
more people than the more mundane scourges of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria,
measles and cholera, which kill more than 11 million people each year?

So what substantiates the alarm and the massive federal spending on
bioterrorism? There are two main sources of bioterrorism threats: first,
from countries developing bioweapons, and second, from terrorist groups that
might buy, steal or manufacture them.

The first threat is declining. U.S. intelligence estimates say the number of
countries that conduct offensive bioweapons programs has fallen in the last
15 years from 13 to nine, as South Africa, Libya, Iraq and Cuba were
dropped. There is no publicly available evidence that even the most hostile
of the nine remaining countries - Syria and Iran - are ramping up their
programs.

And, despite the fear that a hostile nation could help terrorists get
biological weapons, no country has ever done so - even nations known to have
trained terrorists.

...

________________________________


MILTON LEITENBERG, a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland,
is the author of "Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat."
The book can be downloaded from the U.S. Army War College website at
www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs.

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