The Bush administration has been pouring money into "special interests" involved with Homeland Security but it has not demanded results, assessed progress in programs over specific periods of time or sought to penalize any of the many failures to achieve goals or deliver quantifiable or assessable results, Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

"Homeland Security should not be a subsidy for special interests," Cordesman said. "If I could put some of that money back into public health program (I would)," he said.

"You are talking about a $50 billion effort where at least $5 billion says it is about bio-terrorism," Cordesman said. Yet this huge national effort "doesn't seem to require a real plan; it doesn't seem to require real management, it doesn't seem to require any accountability," he said.

"I don't know where we go from here," he said.

Cordesman cited as one example of the diffuse, over-ambitious and uncoordinated programs that had been green-lighted by President George W. Bush and the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, an enormously costly and ambitious program funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop "a universal vaccine to protect everyone against everything, which we've actually funded."

And more than four years after the mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed more than 2,800 people, Cordesman also expressed skepticism that the vast sums that had been poured into the national intelligence budget had appreciably improved human intelligence, or HUMINT, on terror groups like al-Qaida that would seek to inflict massive casualties on the United States with weapons of mass destruction if they could acquire them.

No significant discernible improvement had been made in improving the false alarm and failure rate of U.S. equipment to detect potentially dangerous biological and chemical agents, Cordesman said. "We don't seem to have solved (that problem) over the years," he said

"I'm not sure we can count on improvements in HUMINT, on penetrating these groups and on getting credible sources (from within them)," he said. "We need to spend a lot more time planning for low-level (biological) attacks. We need to spend one heck of a lot more time planning for them."

"The technology and equipment is available to carry out far more lethal biological terror attacks especially if a state does it or supports a terrorist group as its surrogate," he said.

Cordesman, with 35 years experience in the federal government, made several proposals to streamline the government's bureaucratic process on collecting, assessing and taking necessary preventive measures in dealing with the threat of potential biological attacks.

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte should "use the Joint Intelligence Command Council to form a Biological Weapons Working Group," Cordesman said.

"The National Security Council should found a new Joint Interagency Task Force to develop a counter-biological weapons plan that draws on all elements" of available and relevant national resources, he said.

Also, Cordesman said, the federal government should work with the main media outlets, especially the television networks, to prepare a plan and guidelines with them on how they would cooperate in informing the public in the event of any significant biological warfare attack on the American mainland.

"No network has any guidelines about what to do in the event of a biological incident," he said.

Yet the danger, Cordesman said, was in the long term going to be greater than ever.

Fortunately, weaponizing biological materials remained vastly more difficult than was generally realized, Cordesman said. "It is much, much harder to do than people think," he said.

However, Cordesman warned, advances in gene-splicing and other genetic techniques and the rapid, universal dissemination of information across the Internet made it more likely by the day.

Also, the U.S. government since Sept. 11, 2001, had failed to institute any viable proposal to enforce effective security on medical laboratories and hospitals across the United States -- a task made almost impossible by the ubiquitous availability of equipment and biological material that could at least theoretically be used for hostile purposes, he said.

The surge in new, difficult-to-treat and often impossible-to-cure diseases, or new strains of old diseases resistant to antibiotics over the past 30 years had increased the danger that eventually some hostile group might be able dramatically increase the lethality and/or means of transmission of such diseases, he said. Tuberculosis, malaria and hepatitis remained among the seven main killers of the human race, he said.

"At least 30 (new) disease agents have been discovered since 1973, including HIV, Ebola, Hepatitis C and the Nipah virus," he said.

Cordesman said that as a retired veteran of government, he remained determined to speak frankly about the problems that concerned him. "I didn't spend 35 years being nice in the government to retire to be nice today," he said.

Source: United Press International

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