04.22.10
Bioterror Defense Lobbyists = Broken Record
The Graham-Talent Commission on WMD’s (that isn’t the commission anymore) had its usual pitch to submit to a Congressional hearing yesterday:
Al-Qaeda was well down the road to producing [bioweapons] prior to 9/11. Due to the ease in creating a clandestine production capability, our intelligence community had no knowledge of two such facilities in Afghanistan prior to their capture by U.S. troops and a separate, but parallel bioweapons development program al-Qaeda ran in Malaysia.
(There was a one-man company in Malaysia but never any suggestion that anything was going on with it. See here. And because the story of al Qaeda’s total non-achievement of biological weapon capability in Afghanistan is complicated and historically contaminated with misstatement and exaggeration by US officials, it has always lent itself to simple inversions, as demonstrated by Graham and Talent. — DD)
Facilities with more sophisticated equipment than those found could be in operation today without our knowledge.
When would we find out about such a facility? It is possible, even likely, that we would not know until after an attack took place. Consider this scenario: a team of engineers sympathetic to al-Qaeda bring a seed culture of anthrax spores to the U.S. from an overseas laboratory. They purchase and modify a truck so that it sprays anthrax spores into the air. They load up the truck with its deadly cargo, and slowly drive it through the downtown traffic of a mid-sized city during rush hour, at the end of the day. No one notices the truck, or finds it at all unusual that the truck is emitting fumes. No BioWatch sensors go off. Days later, however, desperately ill people start flooding emergency rooms. In the following weeks, 13,000 people die. The city may need to be cleaned up so that people can safely enter the downtown area, at a cost of billions of dollars. And as tragic as this event could be, the terrorists remain at large, free to commit the same murder twice.
It’s always worth noting the Graham/Talent claim that al Qaeda was “well down the road” to producing bioweapons has always been bullshit.
And they have told the same Biblical-catastrophe story about foreign terrorists attacking US cities with anthrax so many times that such pieces are almost no longer worth counting, they’ve become so devalued through numbing repetition.
The dirty laundry list is here. The two work under the directive that the truth and certainty of a thing is determined by how many times you get to plant a frightening scenario pertaining to it in newspapers.
And they continually distort and exaggerate what was found with regards to ‘al Qaeda’ capabilities for the purpose of advancing their recommendations. It’s a manipulative and deceptive tactic.
The two men and their agency are lobbyists, sock puppets or astro-turfers — if you prefer, for the bioterror defense industry, more specifically the Center for Biosecurity/University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Their two chief staffers are indistinguishable from the latter, having effectively taken over the emissions of the Graham-Talent commission last year.
The real purpose of Graham and Talent is to help promote the bioterror defense business goals of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Reporting from a homeland security trade publication here, we read:
Graham and Talent particularly emphasized the need for more spending on medical countermeasures in both their oral and written testimony. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) would receive $476 million in the fiscal 2011 budget proposal for HHS, but a study by the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center determined BARDA should receive about $3.4 billion annually for five years to produce enough medical countermeasures for the top eight pathogens.
“It now falls to the US government to fund the development of medical countermeasures based upon the level of risk that is deemed tolerable,” the commissioners wrote “An amount of $1.7 billion per year would meet roughly half the estimated need to provide a significant and necessary down-payment on the nation’s preparedness. Given the threat, $1.7 billion per year for prevention and consequence management is a reasonable and comparatively sound investment.”
This is Graham-Talent’s tricky way of disguising that the figure they ‘independently’ furnish on what constitutes appropriate bioterror defense spending was actually given to them by Tara O’Toole and the Center for Biosecurity/University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
(‘One point seven billion’ is half of what should be spent, they say. Get it? Two times 1.7 billion = $3.4 billion, the UPMC number.)
Of course, the UPMC wants a huge slice of taxpayer funding for a bioterror defense nostrum/vaccine production center.
Just last week — the Buttinski Bioterror Defense Lobby.