Contra Costa Times December 7, 2002
Iraq focus saps homeland security effort
By Kiley Russell and Andrea Widener
The Bush administration is weakening its fight against terrorism by concentrating so much effort to chase Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power, according to a longtime leader in the nation's science and public policy arena.
Lewis Branscomb, a professor emeritus at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, spoke Friday at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
"I think the Iraq venture is an expensive and dangerous diversion from getting at the real problem of defending the homeland," Branscomb said.
Branscomb is co-chairman of the National Research Council's report "Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism," published in June. The report concludes that the government should harness the country's existing scientific and engineering resources to better fight the war on terrorism. That goal is being subverted by the Bush administration's focus on Saddam, Branscomb said.
Branscomb's sentiments are echoed by many counterterrorism experts, who say that rather than pursue military action against the Iraqi dictator, Bush should concentrate on building the Department of Homeland Security, among other things, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research organization.
The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is a possible research hub for the new department.
"This administration has used Sept. 11 to help advance its pre-existing agendas, rather than altering its agenda to give terrorism a higher priority," Pike said. "I think that's what this whole (national) debate is gearing up to."
The task of girding the nation against catastrophic terrorist attacks is massively complex and should involve coordinating government and private-sector efforts in ways Americans generally aren't used to, Branscomb said.
That effort is ill served by a weak or poorly organized Department of Homeland Security, he said.
"Even though the new department is made out of some 50 agencies and bits of agencies, and will have 170,000 people and a (possible) budget of $37 billion," Branscomb said, "almost all the technical expertise in the country lies either in the private sector ... or in parts of the government that lie outside these agencies which make up the Homeland Security Office." The National Research Council's report makes several recommendations as to how science and engineering technology should be used to protect the country. Such uses include helping thwart radiological and chemical attack threats; countering threats to the human and agricultural health system, and threats to information, energy and transportation systems; and helping blunt attacks on cities.
Meanwhile, Friday at a UC Davis-sponsored conference on bioterrorism and infectious diseases, speakers said it will take years of work before local hospitals can rebuild neglected infrastructure and communication and disease reporting systems can take shape.
Such efforts involve training doctors to start thinking about rare diseases, hiring epidemiologists to track them, and creating the infrastructure to handle thousands of victims.
"There is more money going into public health and strengthening public health than I have seen in my career by many, many times," said D.A. Henderson, the renowned disease investigator who leads the federal office of public health preparedness in the Department of Health and Human Services. "We have seen a lot of good things done."
This year, the federal government designated $1 billion for rebuilding state and local health departments. In one year, the budget for biology labs jumped from $1 million to $120 million, and the fund to help hospitals plan for attacks vaulted from zero to $135 million.
Even the smallest things were neglected in the past. For example, a large chunk of the first grant went just to buy local health department computers, so they could participate in a larger disease alert network.
"That shows you the state of affairs at the time," said Michael Ascher of the federal office of public health preparedness and a former California health official.
California received $100 million to help it prepare for a bioterrorist attack. It is just now submitting plans on how it would deal, for example, with a smallpox attack.
© Copyright 2002 Contra Costa Times
