-Caveat Lector-
[radtimes] # 179
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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Contents:
--Broken bodies, shattered minds -- The torture of women worldwide
--Mexico's Che brings crusade out of jungle to the masses
--Teen Asylum Seekers Sold As Sex Slaves
--South America Marked As Promising Niche - [arms trade]
--A Conservative Convert To Socialized Medicine
--Dangers of Biological Weapons
===================================================================
Broken bodies, shattered minds -- The torture of women worldwide
* News Release Issued by the International Secretariat of Amnesty
International *
6 March 2001
The torture of women and girls persists on a daily basis across
the globe, Amnesty International said today in a new report on
the torture of women worldwide -- Broken bodies, shattered minds.
"It is fed by a global culture which denies women equal rights
with men, and which legitimises violence against women."
"The perpetrators are agents of the state and armed
groups, but most often they are members of their own family,
community or employers. For many women, their home is a place of
terror."
"K", from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was married
to an army officer who regularly tortured her often in front of
their children. He repeatedly raped her, infecting her with
sexually transmitted diseases and frequently threatened to kill
her with a gun. During one incident, he knocked out a tooth,
dislocated her jaw and punched her in the eye so hard that she
required several stitches and had continued problems with her
nose, neck, head, spinal column, hip and foot.
"K", who finally sought asylum in the USA, said it was
futile to approach the police, both because of her husband's
connections to the ruling family but also because "women are
nothing in the Congo". A US immigration judge characterized the
abuses she had suffered as "atrocities" but denied her
application for asylum, a decision upheld by the immigration
appeal court.
The report is part of Amnesty International's global
Campaign Against Torture, and urges governments to commit
themselves to protecting women and girls from torture.
Governments which systematically fail to take action to prevent
and protect women from violence in the home and community share
responsibility for torture and ill-treatment.
"States have a duty under international law to prohibit
and prevent torture and to respond to instances of torture in all
circumstances. However, all too often, far from providing
adequate protection to women, governments have connived in these
abuses, have covered them up, have acquiesced in them and have
allowed them to continue unchecked."
Violence in the home is truly universal. According to
World Bank figures at least 20% of women have been physically or
sexually assaulted. Official reports in the US say a women is
battered every 15 seconds and 700,000 are raped each year. In
India more than 40% of married women reported being kicked,
slapped or sexually abused for reasons such as their husbands'
dissatisfaction with their cooking or cleaning, jealousy or other
motives. In Egypt, 35% of women reported being beaten by their
husbands.
Some groups of women are particularly vulnerable to
torture and ill-treatment and face multiple discrimination. They
are not only tortured because they are women but also on the
grounds of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social status,
class and age.
Many domestic workers are foreign nationals who are
frequently ill-treated by their employers. They are unlikely to
be able to obtain redress because of their immigration status.
Nasiroh, a young Indonesian woman went to work in Saudi
Arabia in 1993. She told Amnesty International that she was
sexually abused by her employer, falsely accused of his murder
and then tortured and sexually abused by police officers during
two years' incommunicado detention. Officials from her embassy
did not visit her once. Her trial was so cursory that she did
not know she had been convicted and she still has no idea for
what "crime" she was imprisoned for five years.
"Honour crimes", such as torture and killing, are
reported from several countries including Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan
and Turkey. Girls and women of all ages are accused of bringing
shame on their families and their communities by their behaviour
-- ranging from chatting to a male neighbour to sexual relations
outside of marriage. The mere perception that a woman has
damaged a family's honour can lead to torture and
ill-treatment.
Women who have been bought and sold for forced labour,
sexual exploitation and forced marriage are also vulnerable to
torture. Trafficking in human beings is the third largest source
of profit for international organized crime after drugs and arms.
Trafficked women are particularly vulnerable to physical
violence, including rape, unlawful confinement, confiscation of
identity papers and enslavement.
Women are frequently singled out for torture in armed
conflicts because of their role as educators and as symbols of
the community. Tutsi women in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and
Muslim, Serb, Croat and ethnic Albanian women in the former
Yugoslavia, were tortured because they were women of a particular
ethnic, national or religious group.
Women who have been tortured can face many obstacles in
seeking redress. Obstacles include police indifference, failure
to define abuses as criminal offences, gender bias in the courts,
and legal procedures which hamper fair criminal prosecution.
Ms G was traded by her parents to a neighbour as a wife
when she was 15 in exchange for his assistance in paying off the
mortgage on their farm in El Salvador. Her husband routinely
raped and beat her, resulting in injuries which required
hospitalization. Ms G went to the police twice for protection,
but was told her problem was personal. She ran away with her two
children when she was 20 but her parents and husband found her.
Her mother held her down while her husband beat her with a stick.
Ms G fled to the USA and applied for asylum and has been told
she will be deported.
In many parts of the world, police routinely fail to
investigate abuses reported by women and frequently send abused
women back home into abusive situations rather than file
complaints. A study in Thailand found that police usually
advised women to reconcile with their violent partners and women
have to bribe police to pursue the complaints. Globally only 27
countries have legislated specifically against rape in marriage.
If a woman in Pakistan fails to prove she didn't consent
to sexual relations with a man, she can be accused of zina
(fornication), an offence punishable by stoning to death or
public flogging. In some countries, women cannot got to court in
person -- their male relatives are supposed to represent their
interests. Women in Saudi Arabia who leave their home to seek
help from the police run the risk of arrest for being in public
unaccompanied by a male relative.
"It is high time that governments recognized that
violence in the home and community is not a private matter, but
involves state responsibility. International standards clearly
lay down that states have a duty to ensure that no one is
subjected to torture or ill-treatment anywhere or by anyone," the
organization said. "If states neglect this responsibility, they
share the responsibility for the suffering they have failed to
prevent."
Amnesty International's report sets out detailed and
achievable recommendations to governments. They include; public
condemnation of violence against women, criminalizing violence
against women, investigating all allegations, and prosecuting and
punishing the perpetrators.
To register your support for the Campaign Against Torture, visit
www.stoptorture.org
===================================================================
> Mexico's Che brings crusade out of jungle to the masses
>
> By Jan McGirk in Nurio, Michoacan state
>
> 8 March 2001
> Independent
>
> Running late, and sometimes losing its way entirely, a convoy of trucks,
> pick-ups and buses bearing the enigmatic leader of the Zapatista Liberation
> Army and an assortment of camp followers is rumbling steadily towards
Mexico
> city.
>
> By Sunday, the charismatic warrior-poet Subcomandante Marcos will lead his
> ragtag rebels into Mexico's smog-choked capital. Anticipation is rising as
> the Zapatistas emerge from seven years in hiding. On the motorways and in
> tiny hamlets, bystanders gawk and cheer at the green activists and new-age
> revolutionaries along for the ride.
>
> They have used a combination of motorways and country roads to reach
> indigenous backwaters and historic pockets of resistance against Mexico's
> central government. Although the Zapatistas are still technically at war
> with the government,police vehicles escort the revolutionaries all the way.
>
> Subcomandante Marcos, who is seen as a home-grown Che Guevara by radical
> students, left-wing academics, and increasingly, by some 62 impoverished
> tribes in the Lacandon rainforest in Chiapas, is the anti-hero of the hour.
>
> It remains to be seen whether Marcos can collaborate with the new Mexican
> president, Vicente Fox, without compromising his anti-capitalist creed and
> alienating his chief fundraisers. His foreign supporters, most evident in a
> band of 280 Italian anarchists, prefer that he keep the guerrilla war
going.
> Four busloads of the Italian Ya Basta! contingent (it translates as:
"Enough
> already"), all wearing white jumpsuits, provide Marcos's security after
> Zapatistas suspected that a collision along the way, which left one
> policeman dead, was caused by saboteurs opposed to the march.
>
> On Sunday, the defiant band of guerrillas and leftist supporters plan to
> march right up to the doors of Congress, and demand rights and autonomy for
> 10 million marginalised Indians across Mexico. The rebels have
threatened to
> camp out indefinitely in the capital until a peace dialogue, which meets
> pre-stated demands for freeing prisoners and closing military bases, gets
> underway.
>
> Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of the former French President, was another
> early visitor and has pledged to join his march on Mexico City.
>
> Soon after sunrise each day, thousands of well-wishers and curious
onlookers
> line the highways and overpasses just to catch a glimpse of Subcomandante
> Marcos waving from the window of his coach, unaware of its video screen and
> toilet.
>
> They brave drizzle and rain to see guerrillas behind glass. Organisers say
> Marcos considered and rejected five horses before discarding the idea of
> saddling up for the march like his movement's namesake, Emiliano
Zapata, did
> in 1914.
>
> The "Zapatour" vehicles are gaudy with graffiti and banners. Hundreds of
> families crowd the plazas to catch the Marcos's speeches, muffled though
> they are by his knitted balaclava and the pipe clenched in his teeth. The
> chant from the crowd is unrelenting: "Viva Marcos! Viva Zapata!" The lean
> guerrilla is unmistakeable, with his camouflage trousers, ski mask and
> peaked cap kept in place by a headphone and microphone. He speaks with
> passion: "The powerful tried to exterminate us five centuries ago, and they
> called their war of destruction and looting 'civilization.' Now the
same war
> against us has taken another name, 'modernization'. But the powerful forget
> that those who wanted to exterminate us no longer exist, and we are here.
> Indian peoples throughout Mexico are living - no, surviving - in the most
> shocking conditions of poverty."
>
> Subcomandante Marcos is the original postmodern anti-globalist activist and
> continues to inspire veterans of World Bank protests in Seattle and Prague,
> Davos and Cancun. The Zapatista revolt was launched before dawn on 1
January
> 1994, just as the North American Fair Trade Agreement took effect.
> Subcomandante Marcos saw neoliberalism as a false promise, one that would
> prolong racism against the exploited Mayas who had lost ancestral lands to
> coffee planters and ranchers in Chiapas. Obtaining communal land rights and
> cultural autonomy were his priorities, not courting outside investment.
>
> Marcos first drew blood fighting for Mexico's southeastern Mayan tribes
in a
> rebellion that lasted as long as the present tour. He quickly changed
> tactics and, from deep in the forest, fired a barrage of poetic propaganda
> by fax and internet postings. University students, infatuated with the
> charismatic laptop revolutionary, would sneak out his floppy disks and
> distribute them by e-mail. A bank account number and instructions for
> sending donations was displayed on webpages that also showed photos of
> bandaged Mayan rebels armed only with wooden replicas of rifles. Smitten
> guerrilla groupies - actresses, journalists, students, politicians' wives
> with his face stamped on their T-shirts - would come miles to hear Marcos's
> philosophy.
>
> Marcos's celebrity has lured many Western pilgrims to his jungle hideout
> over the years. MTV came to film him and Benetton asked him to pose for a
> corporate advert, which he declined. Even the film director Oliver
Stone has
> come to sit at Marcos's feet.
===================================================================
Teen Asylum Seekers Sold As Sex Slaves
Over 40 young UK asylum seekers have disappeared from Sussex
children's homes over the last two years and been sold as prostitutes
in Italy. Organised gangs are behind the smuggling of the African
teenage girls, a BBC documentary has revealed. Many of the girls are
intimidated into travelling to Britain and then Italy by the gangs,
who coerce them with voodoo threats and violence. Sussex police said
their investigation probably only "scratched the surface" of the
trade.
Full story - Brighton and Hove Evening Argus
http://thisisbrighton.co.uk/brighton__hove/news/NEWS0.html
Related story: Asylum call for sex slaves - BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1208000/1208454.stm
Comment: Closing Europe's back door, by Tony Blair - Observer, 4.2.01
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Refugees_in_Britain/Story/0,2763,434184,00.html
Background: Children and human trafficking - Interpol
http://www.interpol.int/Public/THB/default.asp
Factfile: Asylum seekers in the UK - Oxfam
http://oxfam.org.uk/campaign/cutconflict/asylum/intro.htm
Special report: Refugees in Britain - Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Refugees_in_Britain/0,2759,180745,00.html
===================================================================
From: Arms Trade Newswire - March 8, 2001
South America Marked As Promising Niche
By Rob Holzer and Amy Svitak
Defense News - March 5, 2001
The victor in a $600 million systems integration battle between European and
U.S. defense firms stands to gain a significant foothold in the South
American defense market, government officials and industry leaders say.
The winner of the contest between a German industry team comprised of
Blohm+Voss, Hamburg, and Thyssen Rheinstahl Technik, Dusseldorf, and a team
led by Madrid-based Izar that includes a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp.,
Bethesda, Md., would build six warships, including all major combat and
weapon systems, for the Chilean Navy, according to government and defense
industry sources in Europe and the United States.
In addition to the contract for the Chilean ships, known as the Armada de
Chile, the winning team also is expected to receive additional shipbuilding
and systems integration contracts from Argentina, U.S. and European industry
and government officials told Defense News.
Chile and Argentina agreed to work together on procurement of frigates,
though lack of funds for military spending may delay such a procurement by
the Argentine Defense Ministry for some time, U.S. and European officials
said.
Chilean Embassy officials here and Chilean Defense Ministry officials in
Santiago failed to respond to repeated telephone calls from Defense News.
Officials at the Argentine Embassy were unable to comment on the prospective
purchase of ships by their government.
Brazil also is interested in acquiring ships and aircraft, and is likely to
look to Argentina and Chile as the model for such procurements, according to
a Brazilian official.
However, while Brazil keeps close watch on procurement methods of other
countries in the region, the government generally makes acquisition
decisions independent of Chile and Argentina, Luis Santos, a spokes-man at
the Brazilian Embassy here, said Feb. 23.
Government and industry sources agree the winner of the Chilean frigate
contract could gain a significant share of South America's market.
"It seems clear the frigate decision by Chile will be very important for
similar contracts in the region, as Chile takes the lead on the frigate
platform," a U.S. government official familiar with the deal told Defense
News Feb. 22. "That decision will have implications well beyond Chile in
terms of procurement in the region."
Miguel Martinez, communications director for Izar in Madrid, said the
Chilean frigate competition is important to future market share in South
America.
"This is an important competition because it will lead the trend in what
frigates are sold in the future in South America," Martinez told Defense
News March 2. Europe already plays a strong role in the South American
military shipbuilding market, though the future of other defense markets
remains in question, experts say.
Europe has a keen interest in gaining ground in South America's small but
growing aerospace market, said Siemon Wezeman, a researcher in the arms
transfers division of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute,
Stockholm, a European arms control group. That interest is primarily due to
the removal in 1997 by the United States of a moratorium on American combat
aircraft sales to the region, Wezeman told Defense News Feb. 22.
"When it comes to combat aircraft, it's a battle between U.S. and European
industry," Wezeman said. "If the U.S. had not wanted to sell aircraft there,
South America would have bought them anyway, from Europe, and possibly
Russia."
Chile is currently considering the Lockheed Martin F-16 to meet its fighter
aircraft requirement. The planes would replace the Chilean Air Force's aging
U.S. F-5 and French Mirage 5 aircraft.
Given the Chilean need for sensors and weapon systems to equip aircraft,
vehicles and other platforms, European and U.S. companies are primed to
advance in the South American systems integration market, he added.
Martinez said Spain has a strong history of sales to the region,
particularly in shipbuilding.
"South America is what you would call one of our natural markets," Martinez
said.
"We have built many ships there, and we keep a close eye on other programs
arising in that area," he added.
Mark Gaspar, international business development manager for Lockheed Martin,
Moorestown, N.J., said the company would like to tap into the South American
defense market. He added that the capability Lockheed Martin would like to
provide to Chile is a defensive system for naval vessels.
"The product that we provide is a defensive system used to protect ships at
sea and to provide the ship's commander with an excellent situational
awareness," Gaspar told Defense News on Feb. 28.
The U.S. government official noted that "U.S. human rights interests are
better served by establishing a U.S.-Latin American bond now.
"If we are talking about how to advocate for human rights in South America,
improving the standing of the United States in the region better serves
issues such as human rights," the official said.
"The United States has played a much stronger role in human rights than
Europe. Buying aircraft from France isn't going to help South America at all
in terms of human rights advocacy," according to the official.
The value of the market share in South America remains unclear, though
Chile, Argentina and Brazil are the most likely industry targets in terms of
military spending, said Philip Finnegan, senior analyst with the Teal Group,
a defense consulting firm here.
===================================================================
A Conservative Convert To Socialized Medicine
<http://www.iht.com/articles/12871.htm>
David Burgess International Herald Tribune
Friday, March 9, 2001
PARIS - What's the old joke? A conservative is a liberal who has just been
mugged? Well, I am a conservative who has just been "mugged" by the
socialized French health system, and, to my astonishment, I'm a believer.
I have lived in France for nearly 19 years. Until about two years ago I was
very cross about the amount I had to pay in taxes and in "social charges,"
which finance the medical system, in which a pauper gets about the same
medical care as a millionaire.
Let me take you quickly through my experience of being gravely ill in France.
For 20 years or so I had been a gobbler of antacids in one form or another,
and in October 1998 I began to have trouble swallowing. I assumed it was
an ulcer and took the appropriate medicine, but it didn't go away.
At the end of the year I was referred to a doctor who performed an
endoscopy, in which, under anesthetic, a tube is inserted in the throat,
allowing the doctor to have a look around and do a biopsy. He found that I
had a malignant tumor at the base of my esophagus, where it meets the
stomach, that had virtually closed the passage.
The doctor lost no time. He called my local hospital, which fortunately was
one of the four in the Paris area that could do the operation that I
needed, and reserved me a bed for the next day.
At the hospital, within an hour or two of my arrival, my surgeon, who has
the title of professor, as he is head of the department of digestive
surgery, paid me a visit. He outlined the operation I would have, and, in
answer to my question, said the mortality rate for the kind of cancer that
I had was about 85 percent within the first three years. But, he said,
"Don't worry, we're going to beat it."
Foolishly, I suppose, I believed him. Now, more than two years later, I
still do; he has lots of charisma.
After my operation, which lasted more than 10 hours, I was in the hospital
another three weeks, then home, where a nurse came by each day to give me
the shots I needed, check and dress my surgical wounds and make sure that I
wasn't losing weight. Then back to the hospital for three days of
chemotherapy every three weeks - four treatments in all.
I was operated on in mid-January 1999, went back to work part-time in
mid-May, and returned to work full-time in September. (For those of you who
are less than enthusiastic at the prospect of going to work in the morning,
there is nothing like a serious illness to adjust your outlook.)
Why does socialized medicine seem to work in some places and be a disaster
elsewhere? Anyone who reads the British press is assaulted daily with tales
of how cancer patients have to wait months for an appointment with an
oncologist, or a candidate for a hip or knee replacement has to wait years.
In France, such delays can be measured in days or, at most, weeks.
Why the difference? Take a deep breath. These are the numbers, provided by
the French and British health ministries and translated into dollars (bear
in mind that Britain and France have roughly the same populations). French
total expenditure on health in 1999 was $109.5 billion. In Britain it was
about $78.02 billion. Per capita, it was $1,800 in France and $1,312 in
Britain. As a percentage of the gross domestic product, it was 8.5 percent
in France and 5.9 percent in Britain.
I should mention that I am not yet out of the woods. My markers, blood
tests that indicate the presence of cancer, started to rise last summer,
and since the end of September I have again been in chemotherapy. The
markers have dropped consistently, showing that the therapy is working. The
treatment is debilitating. I expect to resume work part-time from April or
May until the summer vacation, and full-time thereafter.
Last summer, I asked a friend of mine, a dean at a medical school in New
England, what the cost of my care would have been in the United States.
"About $700,000," she said. I haven't seen a bill. Well, that is not quite
true. I got a bill for 43 francs (about $6.50).
I'm not sure what it was for, but I paid it.
I no longer complain about my taxes.
===================================================================
The Center for Defense Information
The Weekly Defense Monitor
1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW * Washington, DC 20036
(202)332-0600 * Fax (202)462-4559 * www.cdi.org
VOLUME 5, ISSUE #10
March 8, 2001
Dangers of Biological Weapons
by Oscar Lurie, Research Associate, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Biological weapons are not new. Throwing carrion into water wells was a
not uncommon practice even before the Roman empire. In the 14th century,
Tartars catapulted bodies of bubonic disease victims over the walls of
Kaffa on the Black Sea. As residents escaped the city by ship, the fleas
they carried jumped to the rats aboard the vessels, thus spreading the
plague to wherever the ships made port.
In the 19th century, the biological scientists Koch, Pasteur, and Lister
succeeded in isolating the common anthrax bacterium and developing a
vaccine against it for animals. But anthrax is also fatal to humans if
sufficient spores are inhaled. Given its natural occurrence worldwide,
relatively easy preparation, long shelf life, and suitability for
dispersal in aerosol form, anthrax became the biological weapon of choice.
It is relatively safe for the attacker because its spores are killed by
sunlight as they fall to the ground, and a well-established vaccine can
protect the attacker in advance. (Of course, the effectiveness of an
anthrax weapon would be reduced when its spores are exposed to sunlight,
if the target population already is protected by the vaccine, or if
treatment is administered quickly after an attack.)
In reaction to the horrors of World War I, the Geneva Protocol of 1925
outlawed the use of gas and bioweapons in war -- but not their development
or production. The United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany
secretly developed bioweapons before World War II. None were used in
battle, probably because of imperfections in technology for dissemination.
After 1945, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union spent years experimenting
to develop effective means of stabilizing and distributing deadly agents.
The principles of these delivery devices are highly classified.
In 1969 and 1970 President Nixon terminated deployment of biowepons and
ordered destruction of all stockpiles. The 1972 Biological and Toxic
Weapons Convention (BWC), which now has 160 signers and 143 ratifications,
bans development, production, stockpiling, or use of bioweapons in armed
conflict. But it has no provision allowing for investigation of suspicious
activities.
Although the Soviets ratified the treaty, they continued a massive
bioweapons program right up to the collapse of the USSR. Objective
evidence of their activities came to light in 1979 near a microbiological
facility run by the Soviet military. Approximately 100 people and
uncounted livestock suddenly died from inhalation of anthrax spores. More
recently, a Pentagon representative was able to visit a Kazakh institute
where he found samples of anthrax, tularemia, and plague agents -- all
alive and virtually unsecured.
The U.S. maintains an active bioweapons research program, but states that
the program is entirely for "defensive" purposes.
The Russians have not been alone in disregarding the BWC. Despite Iraq's
ratification of the BWC, Saddam Hussein's scientists have worked on at
least eight bio-agents. The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM),
which was charged with finding and destroying Iraq's nuclear, chemical,
and biological weapons programs, found 500,000 liters of bio-agents before
Saddam blocked their searches.
Recognizing the weakness of the BWC, an "Ad Hoc Group" of diplomats has
been trying since 1995 to reach an agreement on verification measures to
monitor BWC compliance. The United States, rather than using its
leadership to achieve a strong agreement, has objected to a number of
inspection provisions in the draft document even though they are analogous
to inspection provisions in the Chemical Weapons Convention which the U.S.
has ratified.
Anthrax is not the only disease that is causing concern. The last recorded
case of smallpox occurred in 1977 after a long global eradication campaign
by the World Health Organization. Consequently, routine vaccination has
ceased and few Americans retain immunity today. Samples of the virus are
still maintained by the U.S. and Russian governments. There is concern
that terrorists might be able to penetrate Russian security and seize some
of the virus. Present stocks of vaccine are meager, which means an
outbreak from any source, intentional or accidental, could be devastating.
To be better prepared, the U.S. government has contracted for a
40-million-dose stockpile with the first batches to be ready by 2004.
Others are looking ahead. In 1997 a group of academic scientists (named
JASON) studied the range of "improved" pathogens that the rapid advances
of biotechnology might make possible in the near future. Adapted for
hostile purposes, these agents could result in bioweapons that are safer
to handle, have increased virulence, are easier to target, are more
difficult to detect, and are easier to distribute.
How do we try to mitigate the possibility that the U.S. might be attacked
with bioweapons?
Counteracting such a possibility is a function for law enforcement more
than it is for the U.S. military. Should bioweapons be concealed aboard
ships that routinely visit our seaports or lake ports, there is little the
Pentagon can do other than provide information it may glean from its many
sources and assist in post-incident mitigation of effects. In particular,
the proposed multi-billion dollar anti-ballistic shield would not be of
any use.
But the United States, which has the resources (financial and scientific)
to be able to attempt a missile shield, should be able to defend its
citizens against bioweapons. What is required is the wisdom and the will
to transfer the resources from planes, tanks, and warships to research and
follow-through activities to develop and deploy vaccines against
bioweapons.
To start with, use of bioweapons by terrorists is not as easy as some have
argued. Before resorting to poisonous sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, the
Aum Shinriko doomsday cult had attacked civilians at least nine times with
a variety of bioweapons. None were successful, either because the wrong
strain of agent was used or because the dispersion mechanism was not
effective.
Solutions to part of the challenge are already at hand. The government's
order for 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine can be increased to
280 million. The plan to protect military personnel from anthrax can be
given much wider scope by extending it to the entire civilian population.
The administration of these protections would be voluntary for each
individual, conducted by civilian employees of federal, state, and local
agencies, and paid for entirely out of the defense budget.
Presently, facilities for manufacturing these vaccines are extremely
limited or non-existent. And in our litigious society, manufacturers would
be reluctant to produce the vaccines for civilian use. Since this program
would be for the defense of all our citizens, it is appropriate for the
federal government to finance it and to remove the legal liability problem.
The fiscal 2000 budget provided $1.4 billion to combat biological and
chemical terrorism -- a paltry allowance compared to the more than
$4 billion cost of a single Seawolf submarine. Much more money can sensibly
be devoted to research on improving our capability against bioweapons.
Such research programs will also have spin-off effects of benefit to
civilian society. Research to develop new types of sensitive detectors
and monitors for biowarfare agents would likely result in improved
diagnostics for disease. Creating innovative surveillance approaches for
detecting biowarfare attacks should improve medical epidemiology. Money
spent on stockpiling smallpox vaccine could add more to the security of
the American people than does a whole fleet of F-22 fighter planes.
Briefly put, our military leaders must cool their love affair with
offensive hardware and allow some of these resources to be used for softer
defense of the American people.
===================================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
======================================================
"The world is my country, all mankind my brethren,
and to do good is my religion."
-Thomas Paine
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But if you do nothing, there will be no results."
-Gandhi
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