Despite billions spent, were not yet ready for a big attack.
by Judith Miller
City-Journal.org
October 29, 2008
The White House wanted to know: How much safer are Americans today than they were on October 4, 2001? That was the day when a photo editor in Florida became the first reported case of inhalation anthrax in America in decades. In what became biology's 9/11, five letters containing less than a quarter-ounce of anthrax total-the equivalent of two pats of butter-killed five people, infected 17, put more than 20,000 on antibiotics, and traumatized thousands more. Decontamination alone, including at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, took over three years and cost some $200 million.
Judith Miller
With these disturbing facts in mind, and keenly aware that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups have sought germ weapons, the White House in 2006 quietly directed the Department of Homeland Security to commission studies from teams of researchers on what Americans had received for the billions of dollars spent on preparing for a bioterrorist attack since 2001. Taken together, the papers-whose contents remain secret and whose authors have been asked by the DHS not to discuss them-constitute what officials call the first "net assessment" to focus exclusively on the issue. Though many of the papers were delivered to the DHS months ago, the net assessment remains unfinished and is likely to be handed over to the next administration, officials say. Still, its thrust is that while the estimated $50 billion spent since 2001 on countering bioterrorism has left us far better prepared for a bioterrorist attack, we remain vulnerable and, in some ways, may even be losing ground.
President Bush himself is said to have privately expressed frustration with the pace of biosecurity progress. At a meeting with cabinet members and other senior biodefense officials in the White House situation room on June 30, the president was briefed on yet another internal review of the administration's biodefense effort. After hearing that his agencies were unlikely to complete most of their 56 assigned tasks by the end of his term in office, says one official who was told about the meeting, Bush echoed the old Nike ad, in a display of irritated determination: "Just do it!"
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