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Graham, Talent Call for Extra Steps in WMD Bill |
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by Mickey McCarter
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Wednesday, 23 September 2009 |
The chair and co-chair of the WMD Commission say the bill or additional bills could do more to set effective security for US biological laboratories
Former Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and Jim Talent (R-Mo.) appeared before the Senate homeland security committee Tuesday to praise a bill that would implement recommendations from their WMD Commission, but they also urged action on additional steps the bill does not cover.
Graham, who noted the commission would issue an interim report card on the government's response to WMD threats in October, endorsed a tiered system for setting up security measures for high-containment laboratories that handle deadly biological pathogens.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who introduced the WMD bill (S. 1649) with Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), likened the bill's security requirements for biological labs to the chemical facility requirements in the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) law.
"That is the kind of approach that we used successfully in our chemical facility law, where we had a tiered approach with greater mandates for security to apply to the most high-risk facilities," Collins explained.
The law would compel biological laboratories to register with a federal high-containment lab database, whereupon analysts would rate how deadly the biological agents they handle are--as recommended by the WMD Commission. The federal government does not have a comprehensive list of all research facilities that must register, and the bill would close that gap, Collins stated.
Graham praised the concept of establishing tiers of classification for materials handled by the labs, which was not covered by the WMD Commission report, titled "World at Risk," released in December 2008. The WMD bill would place the current "select agent list" of the most deadly pathogens that can be weaponized by terrorists into Tier 1, but Graham said the legislation should go further.
"Tier II should include pathogens that are dangerous but cannot feasibly be used as bioweapons. Tier III should include the majority of biological agents that are of lesser security and public health concerns. These agents would require only facility registration.... Our primary objective, again, is to distinguish those pathogens that pose great danger from those that do not," Graham testified.
Graham also underscored that the WMD report recommended congressional reform "structurally and substantively" to address national security issues including homeland security and intelligence oversight.
"Today, in addition to this committee, there are two other committees of Congress holding hearings on this very subject of laboratory security," Graham lamented.
The number of congressional committees with oversight over the Department of Homeland Security has decreased from 86 to 82 since the department's creation, Graham noted, but Congress still must consolidate oversight of DHS into single primary committees in both the Senate and the House.
Lieberman acknowledged that Congress should reorganize itself but has not done so despite putting most other recommendations of the 9/11 Commission into law.
"The one that we suffered a total and embarrassing failure on was the intent to reform us. We are very good at reforming the executive branch but this gets into turf battles here," admitted Lieberman, who expressed hope that Congress would one day take up the issue.
Effective countermeasures
Talent urged the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to rally appropriators and others to protect funding for Project BioShield, the federal fund for the development of vaccines to deadly pathogens, and the Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority (BARDA), an agency at the Department of Health and Human Services.
"The bill addresses the issue of how to distribute medical countermeasures, but we have to have the medical countermeasures to distribute as well," Talent protested.
Without antibiotics to treat infections of biological agents, a system to protect the public from them would be useless, Talent added. BioShield and BARDA represent the government's initiatives for the development of vaccines but federal authorities such as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have been trying to cut their budgets.
"OMB has got it into its institutional head to try to cut those programs," Talent said.
Members of Congress should defend the programs because evidence overwhelming demonstrated that the funding of vaccines by the government and the production of vaccines by private industry is directly linked, Talent declared.
Lieberman and Collins both noted the mark up of the WMD bill was timely due to the recent arrest of a terrorism suspect in Colorado with alleged direct links to al Qaeda.
But while improvements in lab security might prevent a person with terrorist intentions from entering the lab, the most prominent case of biological attack occurred on the heels of 9/11 in 2001, apparently perpetuated by federal scientist Bruce Ivins, who allegedly stole anthrax from his lab at Fort Dietrich, Md., Lieberman noted.
Perimeter security measures are not going to prevent a rogue scientist from carrying out a similar attack, so Lieberman asked the heads of the WMD commission what else could be done.
Graham pointed at that DHS has a screening program targeting rogue scientists, but critics complain that it creates bureaucratic red tape in hiring qualified scientists for biological facilities.
But the WMD bill does initiate comprehensive oversight of the labs, which would help to raise awareness and should lead to constructive proposals to avoid an attack from a rogue scientist, Graham added.
Talent observed that a comprehensive rulemaking in which all agencies were involved, after enactment of the legislation, would create a "culture of cooperation" between the scientific community and federal agencies and thereby discourage rogue scientists.
Such cooperation could create within the scientific community acceptance of a need for security and thus prompt individual scientists to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior from their peers, Talent said.
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Mickey McCarter |
| About the author: |
| eNewsletter Editor/Senior Washington Correspondent,
is a journalist with more than a decade of experience in reporting
on
military affairs and information technology.
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