04.14.10
Buttinski Bioterror Defense Lobby
It’s the Bob Graham/Jim Talent biodefense industry lobby, two guys who won’t gracefully leave the stage even when the US government has ended their lease.
Back in March DD wrote:
The most in-the-news duo of fuglemen for the US bioterror defense industry, the small operation known as the Graham-Talent WMD commission, will no longer be the Graham-Talent commission when its federal lease on life is not renewed this year. In short order.
It couldn’t come soon enough.
During 2008-09 the Graham-Talent Commission acted as an instrument of Tara O’Toole’s biodefense shop, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
After dismissal, they could no longer call themselves the WMD Commission. If the Obama administration rightly became tired of these guys, it was a very good thing.
Because a long time ago Graham-Talent ceased to actually be a commission for studying the threat of WMDs. Instead, it became merely a special interest lobby for biodefense, its staffers sock puppets of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
While this is obviously not well known by the general public, it’s well understood within the specialist corps of experts on bioterrorism.
So — this week — while everyone else in the news is talking about the nuclear security summit with Russia, Graham-Talent can’t resist being Buttinskis.
And they trade on their old name — the WMD Commission — in order to gull some editor who should know better into giving them space. In order to flog more bioterror defense.
Again.
At the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Graham and Talent write:
President Obama is right to seek significant reductions in the U.S. and the world’s nuclear weapons, but other proliferation trends are equally unsettling.
As the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism noted in our World at Risk report, without urgent and decisive actions, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction (nuclear or biological) will be used somewhere in the world before the end of 2013, but a biological attack is more likely than nuclear. Biological attacks could come from nation-states (the State Department lists at least six countries with suspected programs),
terrorist groups (al-Qaida first built labs to produce anthrax weapons in 1999)(Purposely deceptive and wrong. — DD), or lone-wolf terrorists (according to the FBI, the perpetrator of the October 2001 anthrax attacks was a U.S. government scientist) …(Actually, the lone-wolf bioterrorist, Bruce Ivins — our man on the inside at the heart of bioterror defense research makes for a cogent argument that maybe we need less expansion of the biodefense industry, if only to minimize the number of people with dangerous reliability problems and access to potential weapons. — DD.)
Today, we have the option of building a viable biodefense system that could allow a future Nuclear Posture Review to declare that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear force is to deter nuclear attack.
Just as President Kennedy gave us the challenge of going to the moon, President Obama can give us the challenge of removing bioterrorism from the category of WMD.