07.28.11
Carpetbagging on tragedy
The bioterror defense lobby is easy to view with scorn. It works hard to earn it.
A reader of DD blog points out an ugly matter if you follow how people within the Beltway use world events to push their personal and professional hobby horses.
On Tuesay, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius used Anders Breivik’s Norwegian slaughter to pimp a report having to do with chemical and bioterrorism, a pamphlet issued by Richard Danzig and a lot of et al at the Center for New American Security.
But Friday’s attack in Oslo by Anders Behring Breivik teaches some broader lessons, too: There are homicidal cults all over the world — some in Muslim countries and some in the heart of Europe. Some attackers will be found insane by courts, but others will have a diabolical logic and lucidity — and the world has to be ready for all of them.
Most important, the next time the weapons of choice may not be a bomb and a semiautomatic rifle, as in the case of the Oslo attacker who killed 76 people. Lunatics and sane plotters alike may have access to chemical and biological weapons that could kill thousands.
As in so many terrorist cases — and with al-Qaeda itself — this latest extremist didn’t sneak up on the world. He all but announced his anti-immigrant views on the Internet.
To understand the dangers posed by these borderline extremists, I recommend a new report by Richard Danzig and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security. It’s a case study of the only terrorist group that has successfully used chemical and biological weapons on a mass scale — the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. It poisoned the Tokyo subway system with sarin, a deadly nerve gas, in 1995, causing 13 deaths and an astounding 6,252 injuries.
One can imagine this bit of opportunism just as it happened.
The Norway case is used as a convenient hook to carpetbag a report from the Center for New American Security into the news, a paper that under standard circumstances virtually nobody except some field experts and members of the bioterror defense lobby would read.
It’s transparently cynical, not only for what has been already mentioned, but for using the old Japanese attack by the Aum Shinrikyo group as an argument for stoking the usual fears as if these apply only to us.
Unfortunately, this tragedy is Norway’s and as for finger-pointing and lesson taking, and there has been some, parts of the twisted trail do not indicate much like the peculiar cult run by Shoko Asahara.
Instead, we have other novel peculiarities, like the fascination with the Knights Templar, the writings of American right wing bloggers and one famous US woodsman terrorist fond of inside-the-shack-made bombs.
The reports to read, then, on understanding extremist terrorism were not by Richard Danzig et al and the Center for New American Security at all.
But, instead, as most of the press has commented upon already — Breivik’s appreciation for such as the Unabomber Manifesto and the right wing blog of American Robert Spencer.
When looking at the Breivik slaughter, Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo aren’t the best match. There are no particular lessons here unless one takes the broadest strokes, that crazy and violent people sometimes but not often succeed spectacularly and that Aum Shinrikyo operated for a long time with Japanese authorities failing to act.
Neither of these are unique in the annals of terrorism. Really bad stuff happens and not very often. But when it does people are invariably taken by surprise even if in post-analysis it looks like they shouldn’t have been. To err is part of the human condition. Nothing can change it.
Somewhat less than a year later, the group attacked the Tokyo subway, killing about a dozen.
By the end of day [of Shinrikyo’s second attack], 15 subway stations in the world’s busiest subway system had been affected. Of these, stations along the Hbiya line were the most heavily affected, some with as many as 300 to 400 persons involved. The number injured in the attacks was just under 3,800. Of those, nearly 1,000 actually required hospitalization—some for no more than a few hours, some for many days. A very few are still hospitalized. And 12 people were dead.
Instead of using the Norway attack, instant worldwide news, as a convenience, the parties involved might have shown the good grace not to work it so.
As it stands, the Ignatius piece is noticeable for being flinch-worthy in its audacity. And for being a minor example/lesson on how people parked at national security think tanks view stuff.