WASHINGTON, 17 July 2004 — Let’s take a “for instance.” What would happen in the United States if, for instance, a terrorist group decided to broadly introduce mad cow disease into America. Could it be done and would it work?
President Bush’s administration has recently been criticized for being lax in the official mad cow testing program, and critics say this could lead to disastrous effects on the American public.
No one has yet connected mad cow disease with terrorism, but could terrorists somehow make this connection?
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, it was pointed out that US government investigators are skeptical that President Bush’s expanded mad cow surveillance program could actually determine the prevalence of mad cow disease in American cattle.
These investigators in the Office of the US Inspector General found that the Bush administration’s 6-week-old testing program “might be misleading the public and trading partners about the abilities of its surveillance program.”
In December of last year, the first case of the brain wasting disease, officially named bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was discovered in the US.
Consumption of cattle infected with mad cow disease can lead to a rare but always fatal neurological disease in people.
Most political observers, including members of Bush’s own Republican Party say that George W. Bush is not a “details” guy.
He is a “broad stroke” guy who lets others handle the details. It is likely that Bush himself knows little or nothing about the mad cow issue. But yet the “buck stops” with the president, and he hasn’t handled the issue well.
Now, let’s move back to the issue of terrorism and mad cow disease. President Bush and his administration prefer to be the saviors of the United States and, for that matter, the whole “civilized world” on the issue of terrorism.
We have spent billions of dollars on “terrorism” including two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to defend and protect the American people. Almost daily we are given rainbow colored alerts on the status of potential terrorist activities from the Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.
Yet we constantly ask the question: Are we any safer now than before President Bush declared his “War on Terrorism”? There are many who say that we are only “closing the barn door after the horses got out” with their terrorism tactics.
And it has been pretty much proven that American Armed Forces, though very good at conventional warfare, are not very effective against individual terrorists and small cell terrorist organizations.
As previously stated, its like using a machine gun to shoot mosquitos.
But what is being done to prevent terrorists from, for example, loading a fishing boat with explosives on a major American dam and blowing up the dam. And what about a terrorist attack on a shopping mall in an American city?
Might it not be possible for terrorists to introduce a major mad cow epidemic into the US? Many of those questions have probably already been contemplated by thinking people.
Yet President Bush still seems to be treating these threats as an issue with a military solution. The reality is that the terrorists are criminals. They have and will commit criminal acts. And the response to their actions should be similar to our usual response to criminal acts, not a military/war response.
The last few days we had President Bush extolling the virtues of his “War on Terrorism” and the way this war removed Saddam Hussein. He goes on to say that the US is now safer from the “terrorists” because of the removal of Saddam and our ongoing activities in Iraq.
“Better Baghdad than Brooklyn” one hears from the Bush administration. Yet the terrorist criminals might have something else up their sleeves right here in America while the net to capture them doesn’t even exist.
Please, President Bush, strengthen our domestic criminal investigations to capture the criminals and potential criminals. And while you are at it, please take care of the mad cow disease problem.
(Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.)
