Panel Warns That Defense Against Germ Attack Is Weak [NYT]
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: April 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, March 31 - Warning that the United States has escaped catastrophic biological attack largely by luck, the presidential commission on intelligence urged the American government on Thursday to intensify its efforts to block any biological assaults by terrorist groups or other countries.
The recommendation, which was made in some of the most strident language found in the 601-page report, came even though the commission, like others before it, confirmed that the United States was wrong in its assertion that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons before the start of the war with Iraq in 2003.
In other places around the globe, including Afghanistan, United States intelligence officials have apparently underestimated progress by terrorists and others in developing biological weapons, which are much cheaper to use and easier to acquire than a nuclear bomb, the report said.
"The threat is deeply troubling today; it will be more so tomorrow," it said. "The intelligence community, and the government as a whole, needs to approach the problem with a new urgency and new strategies."
Global searches by the Central Intelligence Agency and other investigators for evidence of stockpiles of bacteria like anthrax, toxins like ricin, or viruses like smallpox or the plague have been inadequate, the report said. Even publicly available sources of information about biological weapons were not being monitored closely enough, the report said.
The effort suffered, the report said, from "a poorly focused collection process that is ill equipped to gather and sort through the wealth of information that could help alert the community to crucial indicators of biological weapons activity."
Evidence of the severity of the threat were widespread, it said. Anthrax-tainted letters killed five people in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. The anthrax scare crippled mail delivery in several cities in the United States and required a cleanup costing more than $1 billion, the report said. In 1995, it further noted, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin on subway trains in Tokyo, killing 12.
Although the United States planned to spend $5.6 billion over the next decade to stockpile new vaccines and treatments for use if a biological or chemical attack occurs, the most important weakness, the report said, is in prevention.
"We should consider ourselves lucky that we have not yet suffered a major biological attack," the report said.
In Afghanistan, for example, investigators found evidence after the war there that Al Qaeda operatives had the equipment necessary for limited production of a particularly virulent biological weapon that the report identified only with a code name, Agent X, which unclassified documents suggested was anthrax.
"The program was extensive, well organized and operated for two years before Sept. 11, but intelligence insights into the program were limited," the report said.
The report recommended closer interaction between scientists and spies to improve the detection of biological weapons, which are hard to find because they can be manufactured anywhere from a brewery to a pharmaceutical plant. The report urged the passage of laws on an international scale to make the production of biological weapons a crime.
Experts who have studied the threat posed by biological weapons said they welcomed the recommendations made by the commission because cold-war-era spy tools like spy satellites did not work against the biological threat.
nytimes.com |
