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U.S. Response I: Pentagon Trying to Profile Potential WMD Users By Bryan Bender The study into “the understanding of decision-making strategies of potential users of unconventional weapons of mass destruction (UWMD)” is utilizing a proprietary profiling method called Biocom, a July 2 summary of the project says. The Evolutionary Services Institute, a Bethesda, Md., consulting firm specializing in organizational change and information systems design, developed the method, according to the summary. The Pentagon is tapping the institute and its founder and director Lawrence Debivort to use psychological and social analysis to help pinpoint the most likely technologies for unconventional attacks. Debivort, who has a doctorate in international relations and teaches at the University of Maryland, is also the president of the International Society of Panetics, a term that combines the Greek word for “all” (pan) with “ethics.” The society describes itself as dedicated to studying and helping “reduce the infliction of suffering by humans against other humans.” The society’s founder, Ralph Siu, believed that to successfully address global problems, a “unified scheme” was needed to take into account the “physical,” “chemical,” “animate” and “human” manifestations of the international community. “Some of the basic elements of our suggestion may be novel, controversial, and even a priori unacceptable for various good reasons to the leading and most respected authorities of the day,” he wrote in 1987. Project officials including Debivort, the leader, declined to discuss with Global Security Newswire details of the classified study such as the Biocom technology or the specific population to be profiled. “It is fundamentally classified,” a Pentagon official involved in the effort said. “It would be preferred that this work receive no more attention than that which is already provided.” While the details and method of the terrorist profiling project are being closely guarded, the International Society of Panetics said that the war on terrorism is a “clash of ideology, not cultures.” “Although the events of Sept. 11 have had their most direct impact on the United States, they have had an impact on all those, throughout the world, who saw the television image of the planes flying into the World Trade Center,” says a statement on the society’s Web site. “To be sure, terrorists have been nonstate sources of egregious suffering in quite a number of countries for quite some time. What was unusual about the attack on Sept. 11 were the number of casualties brought about by a single incident and the spectacular way in which the terrorists struck. But even if the tragic events of Sept. 11 had not occurred, the time would have been ripe to rethink the question of how the international community can intervene to prevent groups with or without state authorization from inflicting egregious suffering on innocent bystanders.”
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