U.S. Antiterror Funds Spent Unwisely, Experts Say

Some experts believe that the U.S. government is not making wise use of funds meant to protect the country against a terrorist attack, the Salt Lake Tribune reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 5).

Money is too often directed toward “the threat of the month” rather than areas that would provide a wider defense blanket, said Cindy Williams, a security studies scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Williams spoke in the wake of the apparent discovery last week of ricin at a Las Vegas hotel (see related GSN story, today).  The U.S. Army has funneled millions of dollars toward development of a vaccine for the lethal toxin, which has been identified as a possible bioterror agent. 

However, there have been no ricin-related deaths in the two decades the Army has spent working on the vaccine.  The $1.5 billion potentially needed for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of the treatment would cover homeland security funding for Utah and six nearby states for 15 years, the Tribune reported.

“We’d be much better off beefing up our public health system,” Williams said.

There is “a lot of money being focused on worst-case scenarios — for massive smallpox epidemics or massive use of anthrax — and you obviously have to prepare for those,” said biological and chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, “but you also have to prepare for the most likely events, including small-scale attacks, because those are the ones that are likely to occur and have occurred in the past.”

The hijackers of the aircraft used in the Sept. 11 attacks were armed with box cutters, while the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City involved detonation of a truck filled with fertilizer.

Salt Lake City uses an “all hazards” approaching in determining how to spend its equipment and training funds, said emergency management director Michael Stever.  That means ensuring money helps prepare responders for a wide variety of emergencies, from a terrorist attack to a natural disaster.

“You can’t throw a dollar at everything,” said national security expert Amos Guiora, a lecturer at the University of Utah law school (Matthew LaPlante, Salt Lake Tribune, March 3).

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.