Federal Judiciary

It?s little surprise that Larsen has such trouble getting shuteye. As executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, Larsen spends his days and many nights visualizing mushroom clouds over U.S. cities and emergency rooms clogged with victims of biological attacks. Among his many solutions to America?s WMD challenges, this may be the easiest: Let Americans get immunized against smallpox and anthrax.

?Smallpox and anthrax are our two biggest biological threats,? Larsen tells journalists gathered here on November 16 by the Heritage Foundation at the El Pomar Foundation?s Penrose House. Addressing the topic ?Overview of Armageddon,? Larsen adds: ?Smallpox and anthrax are the only biological threats for which we have FDA-approved vaccines. We have enough smallpox vaccines for every American, but not enough anthrax vaccines even for 10 percent of our population. Once we increase that supply, we can take these two risks off the table. I would give those vaccines to my grandchildren.?

Voluntarily immunizing Americans against these two diseases would deter terrorists from plotting such biological attacks. ?Terrorists never would attack Americans with polio or measles,? Larsen says, ?because we vaccinate our kids against those diseases.? Even vaccinating some Americans would create ?herd immunity,? whereby those who stay healthy would impede an epidemic?s progress, much as firebreaks retard advancing infernos.

?People who are immune could help respond, since they would not need to worry about getting infected,? explains Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. ?That is part of the reason why priority groups include health-care workers. They would be in contact with the infected, and their services would be needed.?

Larsen?s commission offered this sobering conclusion last December: ?Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.?

In an October 21 progress report, this bipartisan board added: ?In recent years, the United States has received strategic warnings of biological weapons use from dozens of government reports and expert panels.? It cautioned that ?a one- to two-kilogram release of anthrax spores from a crop duster plane could kill more Americans than died in World War II,? specifically, 380,000. ?Clean up and other economic costs could exceed $1.8 trillion.? ?Dark Winter,? a June 2001 high-level simulation exercise, assumed that a covert smallpox attack would infect 3.3 million Americans, one-third fatally.

A biological attack?s psychological impact would be incalculable, especially if healthy Americans saw their smallpox-infected neighbors as contagious ?enemies? to be shunned, rather than as compatriots struggling through a September 11-style onslaught. 

America?s Islamofascist enemies have stayed busy in this sphere.

?I was directly in charge#...#of managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others,? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told a Guantanamo military tribunal on March 10, 2007. KSM was the chief architect of the 9/11 massacre and al-Qaeda?s ?Military Operational Commander,? as he describes himself on page 17 of the transcript.

The Commission?s crop-duster scenario was conceived after Americans discovered two Afghan anthrax laboratories. Larsen says, ?This was a response to the capability they could have had if we had not gone into Afghanistan, killed or captured those people, and shut down those facilities.? Page 151 of the 9/11 Commission Report says Jemaah Islamiah agent Yazid Sufaat ?would spend several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he helped set up near the Kandahar airport.?

Interestingly enough, Sufaat was captured thanks to information that American interrogators gleaned after waterboarding KSM. Had America not dampened KSM?s nose, U.S. soldiers or civilians already might have had Sufaat?s anthrax up their nostrils.

Kuwaiti professor and terrorist sympathizer Abdallah Fahd Abd Al-Aziz Al-Nafisi gleefully discussed bioterrorism in a speech broadcast February 2 on Al-Jazeera and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

Four pounds of anthrax -- in a suitcase this big -- carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the US, are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour, if it is properly spread in population centers there. What a horrifying idea. 9/11 will be small change in comparison. Am I right? There is no need for airplanes, conspiracies, timings, and so on. One person, with the courage to carry four pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this "confetti" all over them, and then will do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real "celebration." . . .

The Americans are afraid that the WMDs might fall into the hands of "terrorist" organizations, like al-Qaeda and others. There is good reason for the Americans' fears, because al-Qaeda used to have in the Herat region . . . it had laboratories in north Afghanistan. They have scientists, chemists, and nuclear physicists. They are nothing like they are portrayed by these mercenary journalists -- backward Bedouins living in caves. No, no. By no means. This kind of talk can fool only naïve people. People who follow such things know that al-Qaeda has laboratories, just like Hezbollah. . . .

If they call someone a terrorist, say: "He's a friend of mine." Why? Because these "terrorists" are the world's most God-fearing people. They are the most honorable people in the world, the best people in the world.

Today?s dilatory federal rollout of swine-flu shots offers little confidence that government can deliver smallpox and anthrax inoculations with speed and tranquility, especially after a shocking attack turbocharged public anxiety.

Instead, these vaccines should reach thousands of hospitals, clinics, and doctors? offices now. Americans calmly could request them during routine medical visits, rather than overwhelm government agencies amid widespread panic after thousands of citizens have fallen ill -- or worse.

Al-Qaeda and other vicious killers surely have a ?To Do? list of horrors they would love to hurl at us infidels. Let?s deny them at least these two potential murder weapons.

? Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on December 03, 2009 (boomark / email).