WMD Panel Gives an F to Obama and Congress for Failing to Prepare for Bioweapons Attack
The Obama administration and Congress get an F for failing to prepare for a biological terrorist attack—a “national security” risk that is getting greater “by the day,” according to the director of a blue-ribbon federal panel set up to study the issue.
Borrowing a page from the 9/11 Commission, the bipartisan WMD panel is today issuing a “report card” on how the U.S. government has responded to its December 2008 recommendations for steps needed to prepare for the threat that terrorists will strike using nuclear or biological weapons.
The panel—chaired by former Democratic senator (and intelligence-committee chairman) Bob Graham and former GOP senator Jim Talent—concluded more than a year ago that there was better than a 50-50 chance that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would use weapons of destruction somewhere in the world in the next five years.
Since then, the risks of such an attack have only gotten greater, said Randell Larsen, the executive director of the panel, in an interview. “The further we go down the road, the easier it gets to make a biological weapon,” he told Declassified. “It’s getting easier every day.”
Larsen acknowledged that the panel is aware of no “tactical intelligence” that Al Qaeda is about to mount such an attack. But the panel’s updated report being released Tuesday finds that “it is well within [Al Qaeda’s] present capabilities to develop and use bioweapons.” (One ominous development was the release from a Malaysian prison—just days after the panel’s initial report—of Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained microbiologist who had been working on developing a biological weapon for Al Qaeda.)
But the panel says the Obama administration and Congress get the lowest possible grade by failing to respond to one of its most important recommendations: taking steps to prepare vaccines, train medical workers, and conduct environmental cleanups in the event that a terrorist group unleashes anthrax or other biological weapons on the U.S. homeland. One development that underscored how woefully the government is prepared for such an attack was the problems encountered getting and distributing vaccines to deal with the H1N1 virus last year.
The panel estimates it would cost $3.4 billion a year for the next five years to do what is required to prepare for a biological-weapons attack, but the government is currently spending less than one tenth of that. Larsen noted, for example, that an anthrax attack in the New York subway system could cripple the city, but there are still no plans in place to decontaminate trains if such an assault were to take place. “If there were anthrax in the New York City subways, it could take decades to clean it out,” said Larsen.
The panel also gave the administration a D-plus for failing to tighten government oversight of high-contaminant labs where pathogens are stored, and Fs for failing to streamline and reform congressional oversight of homeland security and intelligence and for failing to implement programs to educate and train national-security experts who can deal with a WMD attack. But the panel gave better grades—ranging from A to C—for the response to some of its other recommendations, such as strengthening “domestic and global diseases surveillance networks,” strengthening nuclear nonproliferation programs, and creating a more efficient White House policy structure to deal with the issue.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman said the White House will respond on Tuesday.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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