03.08.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism, Extremism at 5:54 pm by George Smith
“It is always easy to find people who will pontificate about these matters and blow smoke in everyone’s ears … It’s a fancy idea lab, but the ideas are not that good.” — Me
“Electromagnetic pulse guns, genetically designed killer diseases and swarms of miniature self-guided missiles — if these sound like the products of a mad scientist, they should,” reports the Washington Times here. “They are among the threats predicted during the U.S. Army’s 11th annual Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar (no, really) in Newport News, Va.”
“It is only a matter of time before there is a significant high-tech surprise awaiting U.S. military forces” … is this bullshitters paradise’s motto, reads the newspaper.
Refreshingly, DD was asked to deliver a dash of ice-water to the face.
“The summary lists five ‘significant findings’ of the seminar, concluding that ’emerging biological technology … especially in the hands of non-state actors, has the greatest potential to catch the Army unprepared in the short term’ by allowing the creation and delivery of new diseases for which there is no cure,” continues the Times. “The summary states that this capability likely will be available to U.S. adversaries ‘as early as 2015.'”
“The seminar concluded that ‘EMP weapons will become available to potential adversaries in mortar and artillery rounds soon … blending technologies necessary to generate an EMP with advances in miniaturization could produce a hand-held EMP gun before 2020.”
EMP guns lagging behind custom-made plagues? You don’t say, Misters Science Fiction Men! How about turning people into living shrapnel bombs, like they did in an episode of Fringe last year?
George Smith, a defense technology analyst and a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, said in an interview that he was skeptical about the value of such exercises … They have been predicting some of these things for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said about some of the advanced threats discussed in the summary.
That’s just a fact. Electromagnetic ray guns have been promised for as long as DD has been in cyberspace. It’s the weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving, despite much hoping and wishing.
And a few times a month DD gets querulous mail from people wishing to show me their EMP guns or impugn my character for writing stuff like this here.
What’s changed most, however, is the need for the Army’s ‘mad scientist’ picnic.
There isn’t any.
Anyone who follows national security affairs knows there’s no shortage of predictive analysis rank bullshitting about the many enemies the US is likely to face. Potential foes and their fancy weapons and plans lurk everywhere! MacGyver-like terrorists will make Facebook and bags of high-tech dirt into existential threats.
“[Adversaries] are likely to try to bypass the military, shifting ‘toward a focus on disrupting transportation, banking, and government infrastructure within the United States’ by exploiting malicious use of the Internet and other computer networks, ‘generating greater stress in an increasingly vulnerable U.S. homeland,” says some alleged director of Army intelligence analysis named Tom Pappas.
Nope, you certainly don’t hear that everyday now.
Brilliant stuff, lads, just brilliant! Tis a shame the taxpayer has to underwrite it. I sure could use a year of free lunches.
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03.02.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 7:52 am by George Smith
When the US government closed the anthrax case recently, the committee to clear Bruce Ivins and all the conspiracy theorists again emerged from the closet. Because the case took so long and the bioterrorist was at the center of the US biodefense research community, careers and reputations were made and lost on it.
The Department of Justice and FBI released a 96-page executive summary of the case. It contains a good picture of the flask of anthrax death, the gold standard for bioterrorism. In recapping, the scientific work teased out the unique mixture of genetic fingerprint – morphological variance, it’s called – in the mailed anthrax, and matched it with the flask of spores in Ivins’s control.
Ivins was not the only person with access to the glass of horror. However, the bureau eventually cleared Steven Hatfill because he never had access to the area of Ft. Detrick where it was stored when he worked at the institution two years prior to the attacks.
As the FBI continued its investigation, closing in on Ivins’s lab, the scientist made a number of attempts to throw them off the case. At one time Ivins indicated in analysis that a freshly made culture plate of the mailed anthrax looked like that of a colleague’s when it actually looked like his own. In another, he furnished a purposely misleading sample to the FBI.
The rest of the piece by your host can be read at el Reg today here.
The story will never finish cleanly. There are too many who not only don’t trust the US government but who also cannot abide the fact that anthrax was made by one of their own.
Jason at Armchair Generalist dissected a NYT op-ed on the same issues yesterday here.
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02.15.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, Phlogiston at 11:04 am by George Smith
It’s hard to outdo the New York Times when the newspaper reports on the field of synthetic biology.
What you always get is a radical departure from reality for the sake of hype and nonsense to delight the inner child. Or, on the other hand, something radically intelligence insulting.
It’s a nice gig, particularly when it’s done from within the pages of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
It’s hard to come up with a more ludicrous lede graf than this:
It all started with a brawny, tattooed building contractor with a passion for exotic animals. He was taking biology classes at City College of San Francisco, a two-year community college, and when students started meeting informally early last year to think up a project for a coming science competition, he told them that he thought it would be cool if they re-engineered cells from electric eels into a source of alternative energy. Eventually the students scaled down that idea into something more feasible, though you would be forgiven if it still sounded like science fiction to you: they would build an electrical battery powered by bacteria. This also entailed building the bacteria itself — redesigning a living organism, using the tools of a radical new realm of genetic engineering called synthetic biology.
“Synthetic biology is the coolest thing in the universe,??? babbles some community college biology professor to the NYT writer, Jon Mooalem.
It’s here.
Change the world, make bacteria that squirt gasoline and/or electricity,
transform the world from community college at 26 dollars a credit. You name it, we’ll do it.
“Moo,” said the synthetically engineered cow as it ate ground-up rubber tires and plastic from a landfill, converting them to USDA grade-A beef.
But the magazine won’t let up. Once the magic wand of literary license begins to wave, there’s no putting it down:
As commercial applications for this kind of science materialize and venture capitalists cut checks, the hope is that synthetic biologists can engineer new, living tools to address our most pressing problems. Already, for example, one of the field’s leading start-ups, a Bay Area company called LS9, has remade the inner workings of a sugar-eating bacterium so that its cells secrete a chemical compound that is almost identical to diesel fuel. The company calls it a “renewable petroleum.??? Another firm, Amyris Biotechnologies, has similarly tricked out yeast to produce an antimalarial drug. (LS9, backed by Chevron, aims to bring its product to market in the next couple of years. Amyris’s drug could be available by the end of this year, through a partnership with Sanofi-Aventis.) Stephen Davies, a synthetic biologist and venture capitalist who served as a judge at iGEM, compares the buzz around the field to the advent of steam power during the Victorian era. “Right now,??? he says, “synthetic biology feels like it might be able to power everything. People are trying things; kettles are exploding. Everyone’s attempting magic right and left.???
If you want to build a bookcase, you can find a nice tree, chop it down, mill it, sand the wood and hammer in some nails. “Or,??? says Drew Endy, an iGEM founder and one of synthetic biology’s foremost visionaries, “you could program the DNA in the tree so that it grows into a bookshelf.???
DD broke down the hype at The Register last year in a piece entitled Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
Let’s take the wayback machine and see how well the Times story fits the cliches and rubbish:
Having delved into Lexis, [I] can say with authority that a couple of hundred major stories have run on [synthetic biology] in the last two years. They fall into two categories: Rewritten press releases distributed by newspapers, made only for the purpose of announcing the synthetic biologist and how world-changing his research effort/company will be; and stories explaining how synthetic biologists will revitalise the world, but bad synbiologists will be making diseases, bioterrors and bio-errors, killing millions.
Margaret Atwood wrote a hack sci-fi novel, Oryx and Crake, on this in 2005. The most amusing part was the premise that only two jobs will exist in the future – a person could be a synthetic biologist, or an ad copywriter doing promotions for synthetic biology companies. This showed Atwood had an appreciation for the megalomania in press release news on the subject …
The more one reads the proclamations from synthetic biologists, the more one finds they seem to have in common with the claims delivered by civilian egotists at the Pentagon who went on about a revolution in military affairs before Iraq went bad.
Biology, in fact all science, is given new starch. And anything fantastic that can be imagined will happen. The obstinacy of nature, results dictated from Murphy’s Law in which experiments simply do not work – or actually do work, but just in ways that are no more or less productive than previously – is not in this story.
The script on synbio also demands the saluting of Amyris Biotechnologies, founded by Jay Keasling, as the firm which will cure malaria, according to the New York Times. The Times, by the way, appears to have had the greatest number of significant suck-up pieces on synbio published in newspaperland in 2007. If the number of times Amyris’s work on producing a new source of the anti-malarial, artemisinin, is the criteria by which such a thing is accomplished, malaria’s trouncing is in the bag; with the answer to global warming as the icing on the cake.
Since this is the active reality, one must expect bragging about the character of our future saviors.
“[There’s] a nobleness and commitment they bring to these problems that I find really inspiring,” said [prince of Silicon venture capital] John Doerr to the Times in June. Of course, he was bankrolling the same noblemen.
Summer was also for newspapermen to declare a consortium of universities working on biofuels – Stanford, UC Davis and UC Berkeley – to be the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, press which some scientists actually involved seemed to believe. (This Manhattan Project is in addition to the Manhattan Project the US military mounted to conquer IEDs. That went well.)
A lab director from Berkeley, Graham Fleming, told the Contra Costa Times the work was “probably the most important thing any of us will do in our scientific lives… We’re off on a great adventure”.
“Cellulosic ethanol is just the beginning, and not even an ideal one,” reported the journalist tasked with delivering the grand vision. The reader will have noticed that, historically, the work of many scientists being compared favorably to the Manhattan Project prior to actually achieving anything is a recent American invention, perhaps to sow confusion and head off disappointment if, and when, new Manhattan Projects flop.
“‘Grow a house’ is on the to-do list of the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches,” reported the New York Times in publishing another blowhard piece on synbio in July.
Ten years ago, people from MIT were dispensing this scented bathwater.
“[We may develop] a tree which has gasoline or kerosene as its sap… Maybe you’ll plant a house, let it grow, and then move into it,” wrote W Daniel Hillis, ex of the MIT Media Lab for the LA Times in 1997.
While at Lehigh University and working on a PhD in chemistry in the mid-Eighties, this writer was familiar with a faculty member, a molecular geneticist, studying Trichoderma reesei, a fungus which produced cellulases. Of course, the big-eyed idea then was also to define and apply the science enough so as to enable the maximum production of cellulase for use in production of biofuels.
The scientist built a career on it, but cellulosic ethanol still isn’t running the country. Although cellulase from T. reesei is used in the digestion of cellulose, it is not especially inexpensive or practical. In the past couple of years, an oil-rush-before-actual-oil industry has sprung up, one which promises cheap cellulases as well as many other things. Much of it is new snake oil for the investment rubes, lubricating jacked-up subsidies, grants, and hand-outs to the corn industry for benefits no one sees except as costlier food.
Without going into great detail on why the infinite bounty of nature’s enzymes has resisted easy lending to cheap-as-water industrial transformations, it may suffice to say that old-timey molecular geneticists and biochemists knew something of the limitations in engineering various microbial boxes. And they tended not to waste a lot of time explaining it to journalists who usually didn’t want to hear it, anyway.
It involves some complication to explain precisely why, for example, active proteins which work miraculously well for the microbial systems in which they evolve, tend to become increasingly unstable when removed, purified, and put in a different environment. Regardless of having genetic sequences for the production of cellulases in hand, lifetimes can be spent puzzling over and characterising the fine details of a protein’s chemistry and its interaction with the world at large.
You also can’t have a proper synthetic biology blowjob without including a storm cloud amid all the sunny skies. And Drew Endy, as genius and wizard, must make an appearance.
“The rise of synthetic biology only intensifies ethical and environmental concerns raised by earlier forms of genetic engineering, many of which remain unsettled,” reads the Times. “Given synthetic biology’s open-source ethic, critics cite the possibility of bioterror: the malicious use of DNA sequences posted on the Internet to engineer a new virus or more devastating biological weapons.”
For Oryx and Crake , Margaret Atwood’s bit of science-fiction on what synthetic biology would do to the world, almost everyone is killed off with a manmade plague put into pills for increasing sexual potency.
“So beware of how we are being sold this scientific revolution with pledges to help Africa’s poor and ease global warming,” wrote someone for the Brit newspaper The Guardian around the time I did Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
“How synbio could go wrong keeps even dedicated synthetic biologists awake at night,” it was said.
Since I purposely kept away from mentioning Drew Endy for the piece in el Reg, sort of like a tree growing into a roving bookshelf, he showed up for the comments section — a keen observer of the press on the subject.
“I was grateful to see your article’s attempt to bring some perspective to the current press-driven hype frothing around synthetic biology.” commented Endy. “It would be good to develop still more perspectives on how synthetic biology is (or is not) any different from the last 35 years of biotechnology and genetic engineering. There are some real changes underway, but most of them are at the level of underlying technologies used to design and build genetic systems, and not in the high profile applications that attract most of the attention. A good place to learn more is to study the student project presentations from the iGEM jamboree … ”
I bet.
Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist is here.
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Posted in Bioterrorism at 9:05 am by George Smith
“BigGovernment.com and other news outlets are reporting that PharmAthene, closely tied to late Congressman John Murtha and DHS Under Secretary Tara O’Toole, has seen millions of dollars added to a 2003 contract without competing for it,” read the lede of a piece at BioPrepWatch on Friday.
“O’Toole, who once advised the Alliance for Biosecurity (believed to be run by PharmAthene), is now in a position to steer business to PharmAthene at the expense of taxpayers,” it concluded.
And like terrorist-caused infection that national threat assessment always likes to warn about, the perception of influence peddling in this part of the bioterror defense research industry has inexorably spread.
Because of it, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity quietly divorced itself from its old lobbying group, the Alliance for Biosecurity last year, shortly after O’Toole’s confirmation at DHS.
The divorce were not posted on the Center’s website, however, until January 14.
News of the post was first advanced to Armchair Generalist who graciously showed it to DD.
And it was written about here in January.
“I am writing to let you know that the Center for Biosecurity at UPMC has resigned its membership in the Alliance for Biosecurity,” wrote Thomas Inglesby, its director.
“The Alliance has established itself as a substantive credible stakeholder working in the nation’s best interests on complex and challenging biosecurity policy and technical issues,” he continued.
“Unfortunately, there was an effort to undermine these contributions in the last few months,” alluding to the news that won’t go away.
The impression of taint and cozy dealing in the small part of the biodefense industry represented by the Center for Biosecurity and the Alliance for Biosecurity has persisted and exacted a cost. It appears the bad odor won’t go away just yet.
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02.03.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 9:41 am by George Smith
Last week the Washington Post published an extraordinary number of articles on bioterrorism. Extraordinary not because of the information they delivered, but outstanding because they were very bad. And all written by reporter Joby Warrick, seemingly synchronized to lead up to the Graham-Talent special interest group’s critique of the Obama administration on preparedness.
Today, the Post’s Fred Hiatt continues the atrocity on the editorial page.
One of last week’s particularly bad pieces of reporting concerned ex-CIA man Rolf-Mowatt Larssen’s Harvard-issued ‘study’ on al Qaeda and WMDs.
It was an example of astonishingly poor work and it was destroyed by DD here in a piece entitled The Busted Watch of US Threat Assessment.
Another copy was posted at GlobalSecurity.Org here.
The Mowatt-Larssen report — entitled Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality? could not even get the simple facts concerning a policeman’s death right in the famous case of the alleged London ricin ring. And this was information published countless times in newspapers all over the United Kingdom.
That was hardly all that was wrong with the Mowatt-Larssen report. But readers can skip back to the original posts to get the details on this shabby piece of work.
One of the major problems with such poor analysis from high places is that it continues to drive opinion, more news stories and, eventually, policy. Once it is embedded in a place like the Washington Post it becomes very damaging. It actively impedes legitimate efforts to educate the public on issues and reality in the so-called war on terror. It serves only as another citation for those writing more things asserting that one needs to be very afraid.
And today, Hiatt’s opinion piece, the WaPo man cites Mowatt-Larssen right off the bat. Mowatt-Larssen, Hiatt implies, has shown we ought to still be alarmed.
“Three thousand people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes Hiatt. “More than 300,000 could be dead within one week after a modest attack with biological weapons.
“For most people, the thought of such an attack is an unthinkable horror. For al-Qaeda, it is a lingering dream and one that it is working diligently to achieve … Al-Qaeda is engaged in a ‘long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks,’ writes Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs …’
“Mr. Mowatt-Larssen is not the only one sounding an alarm.”
It is a textbook pathological case of argument from authority without any vetting of that authority.
And it was part of an argument Hiatt used to belt the Obama administration over the head, chiding it to act quickly to remedy the nation’s unpreparedness so that the people would be protected from deadly bioterrorism.
This is not a new song. Played literally thousands of times in the last few years it has worn out its ability to enlighten, if it ever had much of that precious quality in the first place. Now it exists only to hector and terrorize.
Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist sees the problem clearly, too, and it’s not us or our inability to see the obvious.
He writes, in this case addressing some information concerning the Graham-Talent special interest group:
“Bad enough that Hiatt joins those who would continue overstating the actual threat of terrorists using nuclear or biological weapons to cause mass casualties. I thought newspapers were supposed to, you know, report facts. But pinning the G-T commission’s report on the Obama administration runs counter to what the commission said – that this was a report on the government’s efforts over a period of time, not within the last year …”
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06.14.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 9:18 am by George Smith
An audio file of DD on the radio for Ian Masters’ Background Briefing show on FM radio is here.
There is also a stream and iPod broadcast here. Note, though, that the broadcast, which took place on May 31, is mislabeled as one with Colin Powell’s adjutant in the Bush administration, Lawrence Wilkerson, who was the primary guest a week earlier. This is coincidentally absurdly humorous, since Wilkerson is one of the high-ranking people responsible for so badly informing Powell about the ‘UK poison ring’ for his infamous UN Security Council address, a claim officially destroyed in 2005 by me.
But since Wilkerson is now a convenience to the left — someone from the Bush administration willing to regularly call Dick Cheney nuts — he was granted a get-out-of-jail-free card by the mainstream media.
I digress.
The show lasted an hour and I was on third, so if you want to skip the other hosts, advance in your player to around minute 40 and you’ll be in the general vicinity. However, the entire show is worth a listen.
Subject material was a discussion of Obama’s cybersecurity plan and other things readers of the blog will be familiar with.
Do people listen to these radio Pacifica stations? I have been told so by acquaintances. But often I have doubts.
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06.03.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 2:47 pm by George Smith
Al Qaeda men continue to show ignorance on even simple things while trying to scare us into believing they’re ready to launch bioterror strikes. The wishful thinking doesn’t fool people in the know. But it does give some news agencies material to keep their boogeyman stories fresh.
“U.S. counterterrorism officials have authenticated a video by an al Qaeda recruiter [named ‘Abdullah al-Nafisi’] threatening to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border, the latest sign of the terrorist group’s determination to stage another mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland,” reported the Washington Times today. (Caveat emptor: This is another website that tries to put your browser in a high bandwidth full nelson.)
The story continued to explain that al Qaeda is apparently interested in alliances with ‘white militia groups’ — which only shows the pitiful nature of the intelligence. The second thought that occurs: Why are anonymous US intelligence officials gossiping about this with a newspaper?
“The officials, who spoke only on the condition they not be named because of the sensitive nature of their work, stressed that there is no credible information that al Qaeda has acquired the capabilities to carry out a mass biological attack although its members have clearly sought the expertise,” continued the piece.
“Four pounds of anthrax — in a suitcase this big — carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S. are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour if it is properly spread in population centers there,” the al Qaeda recruiter is said to have said.
Three hundred thirty thousand in one hour, eh? DD guesses they’ve managed a revolution in weaponry and bypassed the normal disease process.
“Symptoms of [anthrax disease] vary depending on how the disease was contracted, but symptoms usually occur within 7 days,” states the CDC. Guess we’ll have to change that.
Bootnote: The al Qaeda man’s claim re anthrax does show that the US government’s hyping of the threat of bioterrorism has had effect: Al Qaeda takes its ‘statistics’ and wishful beliefs almost directly from our official utterances.
“Milton Leitenberg, a biological arms expert who has been regularly critical of the fear agenda, addressed two [Richard Danzig]-penned position papers in 1997 and 1999,” DD wrote for el Reg a number of months ago. “In these, a kilogram of anthrax was said to able to kill hundreds of thousands.”
“[100 kilograms] of weaponized anthrax dropped on D.C. under good weather conditions, is likely to cause about the same number of casualties as a one megaton bomb dropped on the city” — a quote from Tara O’Toole, the recent Obama nominee for head scientist at the Dept. of Homeland Security, delivered in congressional testimony in 2007.
These statements, and many others like them emitted by government officials or experts wishing to shape government policy, have indeed shaped and inspired al Qaeda perceptions about bioterrorism.
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05.18.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Phlogiston, War On Terror at 4:51 pm by George Smith
“The Al Qaeda videotape shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage,” writes famous reporter Peter Bergen today for the New Republic.
“A milky gas slowly filters in. An Arab man with an Egyptian accent says: ‘Start counting the time.’ Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving.
“This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Derunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by an Egyptian with the nom de jihad of ‘Abu Khabab.’ In the late 1990s, under the direction of Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group’s WMD research program, which was given the innocuous codename ‘Yogurt.’ Abu Khabab taught hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas. The Egyptian WMD expert also explored the possible uses of radioactive materials, writing in a 2001 memo to his superiors, ‘As you instructed us you will find attached a summary of the discharges from a traditional nuclear reactor, among which are radioactive elements that could be used for military operations.’ In the memo, Abu Khabab asked if it were possible to get more information about the matter ‘from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere.’ This was likely a reference to the retired Pakistani senior nuclear scientists who were meeting then with Osama bin Laden.”
All of this sensational material, a lead-in for Bergen’s discussion of the US’s Predator drone assassination campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For it to have value in this story, one must buy into the idea that in erasing ‘Abu Khabab,’ a Predator drone strike eliminated an al Qaeda capability in chemical and biological weapons. Instead of just offing some odious nobody.
But readers have learned that when it comes to the war on terror, and what the enemy is said to be able to do, much is exaggerated, the product of gossip passed on or published by someone else, or simply made up out of whole cloth by unreliable or anonymous sources working their own agendas.
Indeed, many will remember videotape of a small dog being gassed in a room, recovered during the invasion of Afghanistan. Played hundreds of times during news shows, you would have had to be living without power and water in the hills of North Carolina to have missed it.
However, since then, al Qaeda has shown zero capability in the area of chemical and biological weapons. What has been shown, again and again by DD on the web, is that they have had aspirations and lots of rubbish documents, all amounting to nothing. If ‘Abu Khabab’ had been training “hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas,” he was the world’s worst ‘teacher,’ an unmitigated failure and fool.
For examples of jihadist ‘capabilities’ and ‘documents’ on deploying poisonous chemicals see here and here and here on dirty bombs and here on even more poisons. And for a discussion of al Qaeda’s somewhat less-than-successful stabs at making a cyanide gas bomb, see here. And, since Bergen mentioned ricin, don’t forget all the evidence from the London ricin case, here.
Related:
‘Abu Khabab,’ the alleged chemical weapons expert, has been peddled for awhile now.
In a longer form at the SITREP blog.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 2:47 am by George Smith
“[A $198 million biodefense] lab complex stands completed between an apartment building and a flower market [in Roxbury]” reported the Los Angeles Times on the frontpage today. “But state and federal lawsuits by anxious residents backed by skeptical scientists, have blocked the opening [of the Boston-based lab] until late next year at the earliest,” reported the LA Times on its frontpage today.
“The battle marks the first major setback in the vast growth since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks of labs authorized to research the world’s most dangerous diseases.”
That big daily newspapers are finally getting around to acknowledging that a problem may exist with such an expansion — and that reasonable people are actively opposing it — is a remarkable change from the state of affairs two years ago.
What the Los Angeles Times does not yet understand (and, perhaps by extension, its reporter — Bob Drogin) or is unwilling to say, is that the most logical problem associated with such labs are not those mentioned most prominently in the article: that anthrax or Ebola will escape into the local community or that “hot strains in the labs may attract terrorists…”
The problem is one that has already been demonstrated twice: reliability and the nature of the enemy from within.
There have been only two malicious events associated with biological agents during the war on terror. Both came from within the US. And both were associated with labs working within the bioterror defense infrastructure.
The obvious stand-out is the story of the anthrax mailer, Bruce Ivins, working from the heart of the biodefense industry at Fort Detrick in Maryland where he was the caretaker of the gold standard in anthrax spore cultures and privy to the inner details of the investigation which would eventually drive him to commit suicide.
The other case involved simple greed from the US cosmetic surgery industry. In this little-publicized instance, two scam artists commissioned a research laboratory called List, located in Campbell, CA, to make purified botulinum toxin. That lab was part of the US government’s select agent control regime, one designed to oversee the production of materials thought to be of practical use to terrorists.
Purified botulinum toxin was sold without due diligence and then used by the scam artists to make money through de-wrinkling treatments, undercutting the price of treatments using Botox, the only botulinum toxin drug — made by Allergan — licensed for use on patients in this country.
That story is told here in “Dr. Frankenstein’s cure for aging.”
The scam would have worked if four people had not come down with such severe cases of botulism they required long-term hospitalization. If not for care on life-support, they would have died, making the death toll from misuse of American-made botulinum toxin, one less than the anthraxer’s — who used American-made anthrax. And so it stands to reason that putting more and more people in positions where they are working on, or responsible for, the most dangerous biological agents increases risk to the American public, even if that risk is not precisely measurable. And, if recent history is to serve as an example, such risk is demonstrably real and not to be pooh-poohed.
“Critics of the labs cite the 2001 anthrax attacks as proof that gates and guards cannot stop an insider who aims to do harm,” continues Drogin.
What the Los Angeles Times story does show is there is not a natural enthusiasm among all citizens for yet another bioterror defense laboratory, once they understand all the ramifications of it. They may also instinctively understand that Biodefense Research Corp/University USA is also not much of big-time employer for everybody, like General Motors or Ford in Michigan in their heyday. And so their economic value to any community is not yet proven to be significant.
Related:
A Most Catastrophic Nomination
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05.07.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, Predator State, War On Terror at 4:44 pm by George Smith
Updated
Tara O’Toole, CEO of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity,
has been nominated by the Obama administration to be the top scientist at the Department of Homeland Security. While readers may not know the name, if one actually likes their science based in reality, not scenarios which are Biblically apocalyptic and free of facts, it is a dreadful choice.
At the Danger Room blog, Noah Schachtman queried DD and others on the wisdom of the administration’s move. (See here. And in another form, echoed by Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent. And from Fox News, here.)
“This is a disastrous nomination,” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and homeland security policy critic, told Schachtman.
“O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy
on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush dministration … O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.???
“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of overnment, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security … She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.???
More recently, O’Toole was discussed on this blog as part of a larger piece on predator state security practices. (See here.)
Predator state security ensures that nothing realistic gets done. Rather, it is simply the rapid diversion of taxpayer dollars into the hands of the private sector — in this case — the biosecurity industry. Threats are invented and the most scary predictions are publicized, all to grease the process. And this is what has happened in the United States. The biodefense industry has ballooned in size until it is out of all proportion to the nature of the threat. It has certainly increased the number of American scientists and technologists working with deadly microorganisms. And in these processes, it has escaped from rational, as well as fiscal, oversight. (It should be noted and reflected upon that the most famous bioterrorist, Bruce Ivins, came from the heart of the nation’s biodefense infrastructure.)
In the earlier piece from this blog, O’Toole was noted as “an independent panelist appointed to review the action of the super-biodefense lab called the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center when it opens in 2009.” It was a perfect illustration of a cheerleader for the massive growth of the biodefense industry being put in a position to oversee one of the best examples of massive growth in the biodefense industry.
The choice, in other words, was cooked. And that was because of O’Toole’s work as an advisor to the government, her participation in notorious bioterror wargames and her regular appearance in the media as a harbinger of bio-doom. O’Toole’s public words and actions often seemed designed to serve the creation of the belief in the imminence of catastrophic bioterror, one which led to the creation of an NBACC and many other similar defense research labs.
For example, O’Toole directed an exercise called Atlantic Storm in 2005 which purported to demonstrate effectiveness and consequences of an al Qaeda bio-attack using smallpox. It has been criticized effectively by other experts, most notably Milton Leitenberg, who listed a number of sins attributed to it — sheer exaggeration, juiced disease transmission and amplification of threat, a terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess.
“The 2005 Atlantic Storm exercise made ‘grossly misleading assumptions’ about the ease of creating and then dispersing the same biological agent … a dry powder smallpox preparation, a feat that neither the US nor Soviet BW programs ever achieved,” Leitenberg wrote in “Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat.”
“The [Atlantic Storm] scenario we posited is very conservative,” said O’Toole, for the Washington Post in 2005. “The age of biological weapons is not science fiction; it’s here.”
For the Los Angeles Times, O’Toole was attributed: “This could have been much worse. The age of engineered biological weapons is here. It is now.”
Later that year, again for the Post, in a story on how or why the failed national smallpox immunization ought to be revived: “People are now back in dumb-and-happy mode . . . [in contrast with] when we were going into Iraq, and the possibility of a smallpox attack was seen as much more plausible.”
While at John Hopkins University in June 2001, O’Toole also contributed to another al Qaeda-delivered smallpox wargame, one called Dark Winter.
“. . . spookily prescient,” the Post wrote of it, in a story entitled “A War Game to Send Chills Down the Spine.”
However, the Dark Winter exercised used a smallpox transmission rate that was three times its historical average. The alteration juiced the contagion, one that guaranteed the simulation would end in total catastrophe.
“We intentionally picked the absolutely worst-case scenario,” said Randy Larsen, a collaborator of O’Toole’s and one of the game’s architects, to the Post. “We designed a war game they could not win,” he added later in the story.
And ” . . . suddenly, ‘smallpox’ is the threat du jour,” wrote the Post.
Other O’Toole appearances in the press, and there have been many, have always been achingly predictable emphases on the ease of bioterrorism, doom (as in “we’re cooked”) and the inevitability of it all.
From the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001: “These [bio]weapons are cheap, they are easily accessible, and they are going to get worse as the science becomes more sophisticated.”
Attributed in Investor’s Business Daily, in an article about the need for new labs to fight bioterror: “The worst-case scenario is a concerted campaign . . . a little anthrax attack here, a little plague here, and . . . a little smallpox there, then the anthrax again.”
In the Los Angeles Times in 2003: “Bioterrorism is a whole new terrain of national security that’s going to have the same magnitude of impact as the creation of nuclear weapons . . . We should increase spending [on bioterrorism] to $10 billion next year.”
And on avian flu to human flu, in 2005, from various newspapers: “Once you’re there, you’re cooked”; “You’re looking at a nation-busting event”; “[an avian flu plague would be]more difficult and worse than a large terrorist attack, bomb, dirty bomb or airplane slamming into a building” and “If we don’t drive down the costs of drugs, we’re cooked –both in healthcare and biodefense.”
In the world of Tara O’Toole, bioterror has the nation cooked.
Leitenberg added in e-mail to DD, one which had been originally forwarded to Wired but which did not make the cut at press time: “It is a black mark for an administration seeking rational fact based policies. The most absolutely catastrophic appointment conceivable, which promises to ensure continually misdirected resources in the forthcoming years. Whoever was responsible for the selection in the Obama administration should be replaced.”
“Holy Bad Nominations, Batman!” writes Jason at
Armchair Generalist.
“Also of note about [Tara O’Toole] are her ties to the Democratic Party and Congressman John Murtha,” writes Ken Silverstein at
Harpers’ blog.
“Since 2003, she has contributed a total of $8,300 to the Democratic National Committee, as well as a number of Democratic presidential candidates, including John Kerry, Wesley Clark, Hillary Clinton, and most recently Barack Obama. The only member of congress to whom she has contributed is Murtha. In 2004 and 2005, immediately before and after Murtha earmarked money for her center under the Strategic Biodefense Initiative, she gave him $1,750.
“As I’ve noted before, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – O’Toole’s center is one of its projects – retains as its lobbying firm Ervin Technical Associates, which has close links to the congressman. UPMC’s PAC and employees have donated heavily to Murtha, including $192,500 in 2006. That was the year after Murtha won an $8.5 million earmark for UPMC — lobbied for by Ervin Technical — for a communications network. Ervin Technical is also seeking to win support for a dubious UPMC project which is looking for funding to develop and manufacture biodefense vaccines.”
Protecting the nation from catastrophic bioterrorist health emergencies — the biosecurity industry press release, March 18 2009
David P. Wright, Co-Chair of the Alliance for Biosecurity and Chairman and CEO of PharmAthene, Inc., testified today before the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee on the critical importance of developing drugs, vaccines and other medical countermeasures needed to protect Americans from bioterrorism and other catastrophic health emergencies. Effective medical countermeasures for many of the chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) agents that pose the greatest threat to the United States do not currently exist, and Wright argued that the federal government should take a more active role in supporting their development to bolster the nation’s biosecurity.
“Protecting our nation against bioterror threats is no less important than ensuring that we have the tools necessary to fortify and protect our military,” Wright noted, but “funding for the development of CBRN countermeasures, particularly in the area of advanced development, has been woefully inadequate.” Wright stated that “without adequate funding, promising countermeasures will not be developed and the nation will remain vulnerable to a bioterror attack – and make no mistake, a bioterror attack is a real and credible threat.”
“Increased funding would advance the day when our nation has access to these critical countermeasures,” Wright stated, but “until that day arrives, the American people remain at risk.”
The Alliance for Biosecurity was formed in June of 2005 by biopharmaceutical companies and [Tara O’Toole’s] Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Alliance members are committed to partnering with government and promoting a new era in the prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases – particularly those that present global security challenges – through innovative and accelerated research, development and production of countermeasures. Company members of the Alliance include: Bavarian-Nordic, Cangene Corporation, DOR BioPharma, Inc., Dynport Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC Company, Elusys Therapeutics, Emergent BioSolutions, Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin, Human Genome Sciences, Inc., NanoViricides, Inc., Pfizer Inc., PharmAthene, Siga Technologies, and Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics.
Tara O’Toole predicts
U Pitt News, April 15, 2005
One hundred kilograms of anthrax dropped on Washington, D.C., would be as deadly as a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.
This is one of the many reasons why Dr. Tara O’Toole believes the use of biological weapons is “potentially imminent.”
O’Toole discussed bioweapons in her lecture “Disease as a Weapon: A New Challenge for the 21st Century.” The speech, full of cautionary words and threats of unavoidable disaster, fell upon the ears of an Alumni Hall audience Tuesday afternoon.
Bioweapons have been proven to work on a large scale; they can kill hundreds of thousands of people at one time. Generally, it is difficult to determine where a bioweapon was let loose, so an exact radius of destruction is hard to calculate, O’Toole said.
Australia Broadcasting System, September 2005
Participants in Atlantic Storm included former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright and former government ministers from Canada, Poland, France, the Netherlands and Italy.
As the exercise began, they were all meeting in Washington for a Transatlantic summit.
Tara O’Toole: We alleged that as these leaders were flying across the Atlantic for this meeting, there were reports of smallpox cases in Europe coming on to the airwaves, and by morning it was confirmed that there were smallpox cases in Turkey and in Germany, and of course since smallpox has been eradicated from the natural world, these confirmed reports meant that there had been smallpox attacks in Europe.
Tara O’Toole: We posited that we had a number of people walking through these busy airports and train stations and so forth, with a backpack on them, just releasing what would be an invisible, odourless cloud of smallpox into the air.
Tom Morton: Atlantic Storm was widely reported in the American media. There were editorials in The Washington Post, calling for urgent action to combat the bioterrorist threat.
The creators of Atlantic Storm knew which buttons to press. They’d already got the ear of Vice-President Cheney with a previous exercise called ‘Dark Winter’.
But prominent scientists have sharply criticised both Atlantic Storm and ‘Dark Winter’. But scientists say it’s highly unlikely that terrorists could mount a mass attack with biological weapons, as the scenarios depict.
One of those scientists is Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at MIT. King says that the creators of these scenarios are panic-mongering.
Jonathan King: I would say these scenarios were very deeply kind of irresponsible, almost dangerous. They present proposals out of the imagination as if they’re actually established, that some actual named al Qa’eda representatives were in the Soviet Union getting smallpox stocks. Every piece of which is a total figment of the imagination. The notion that the terrorists could grow up smallpox in hidden facilities, tissue culture facilities which have extensive maintenance requirements, this is not again a small-scale thing, it requires a lot of skill, a lot of money, a lot of people, material being delivered in all the time, sterile conditions, positive air control, this is not a low tech garage operation. These scenarios were loaded with proposals that represented a kind of misrepresentation of what’s known about these things, I would say in an extremely irresponsible way.
The Washington Post, July 2006
“We haven’t yet absorbed the magnitude of [the bioterror] threat to national security,” said O’Toole, who worries that the national commitment to biodefense is waning over time and the rise of natural threats such as pandemic flu. “It is true that pandemic flu is important, and we’re not doing nearly enough, but I don’t think pandemic flu could take down the United States of America. A campaign of moderate biological attacks could.”
Defense News, November 6, 2006
The risk and ease of a bioterror attack on either side of the Atlantic equals — or exceeds — that of low-radiation nuclear bombs and thus demands far more rapid-reaction planning compared to prevention, [said a number of bioterror experts.]
The U.S. experts addressed an Oct. 27 biosecurity workshop of European Union and NATO homeland security officials as part of their briefing tour of European capitals. Their organizations were directly involved in Atlantic Storm, the February 2005 high-level bioterror exercise involving U.S. and European politicians.
“There are a least 1 million people [across the globe] who have the academic and technical qualifications to build an antibiotic-resistant bug,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the University of Pittsburg’s Center for Biosecurity. “Ask any biologist whether they could make a bioweapon. I’ve not gotten a ‘no’ to that answer yet.
“Deadly toxins are a very appealing asymmetric weapon, and we see no obstacles to a terrorist getting his hands on them and dispersing them,” she said. “Our political leaders do not understand the urgency and lethality of this threat. And the only defense against bio-attack is post-event preparation, because all you can really do is mitigate the consequences and try to stabilize the situation.”
April 2007, in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security
Tara O’Toole:
[Most experts] have deemed a bioterrorist attack and a nuclear attack as the two types of terrorist assaults most likely to destabilize the nation.
Only bioweapons and nuclear weapons are in the top category of lethality.
And 100 kilograms of weaponized anthrax dropped on D.C. under good weather conditions, is likely to cause about the same number of casualties as a one megaton bomb dropped on the city. No other kind of weapon is in this category of lethality.
Furthermore, we know Al Qaida is pursuing biological weapons. We know that from evidence gathered in Afghanistan and documented in the Rob Silverman WMD report.
And we also know, and have explicit evidence that it’s very difficult to attribute a bio-attack to any particular perpetrator, as we’ve seen in 2001.
That means that our traditional means of deterrence against attacks in the United States, i.e., attribution with certain retribution, are weakened.
Really, the only strategy we have for biodefense is to be able to swiftly and very significantly mitigate the consequences of such attack.
In Comgressional testimony, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, October 2007
Tara O’Toole: I think it was the ease of carrying out a biological attack, because these organisms live naturally in the world and are available in hundreds of gene banks across the world. And also because these are replicating organisms. So if you can mount one attack, you can make enough anthrax — for example, if you’re patient — to do two, ten.
So everyone is going to feel vulnerable after the first attack. The whole country’s going to want anthrax vaccine. That’s why sitting here today with enough anthrax vaccine to cover only about 3 million people is so worrisome. And I suspect part of the reason behind HHS’s reluctance to get rid of expired vaccine might not be perfect, it might not what you’d use on a good day. But it might be a lot better than nothing in the breach.
So we need to take, I believe, a much more strategic look both at these two programs that we’re discussing today. And they’re both vital programs as well as at our overall biosecurity strategy.
And I think there’s a lot of complacency and misinformation abroad in the leadership of the country about the biothreat and biodefense. I think people think the threat is much more remote and much less potentially destabilizing than in the case. And I think they believe we’re more prepared than is the case, because we’ve done a lot. We’ve worked hard and spent about $40 billion since 2001 on civilian biodefense.
But the problem is that drugs and vaccines are a lot harder and trickier to make and a lot more expensive than sensors or engineering products. And I don’t think that when we embarked on the BioShield program in 2004, the complexity of this endeavor was fully realized, either by the Congress or by HHS.
The fact is that the $5.6 billion in BioShield is a fraction of what we’re going to need. And part of the delay on HHS’s part is trying to figure out how do we get countermeasures for all the possible threats within that sum of money. So we’re not asking what do we need to defense the country against bioattacks? We’re in effect asking what can we get from this amount of money? We’re basically shopping at Costco. All right?
This is part of the reason why big pharma doesn’t want to get into the game. It’s also why we are dependent upon small, daring biotech companies [see, for example, the Alliance for Biosecurity — ed.] who’ve never made anything before. And making a new drug or a vaccine is a lot more art than science.
That’s just where we are. We’re in a revolution in bioscience. There’s lots of very tempting possibilities coming down the pike in terms of new drugs and new vaccines. But at the current pace, it’s going to take us about ten years to get there. So the whole problem of trying to get what we need for a fairly paltry sum of money, when you compare it to other national security expenditures, is one of the big problems with countermeasures.
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