WHILE THE FBI CONTINUED THEIR POST 9/11 CAMPAIGN AGAINST SO CALLED
ECO TERRORISTS ON THE WEST COAST ECO ACTIVISTS BY ANY OTHER NAME
LET'S NOT FORGET THAT THE CIA CLAIMED ALL WAS CALM ALL WAS RIGHT WITH IRAN A MONTH BEFORE THE REVOLUTION OF '79
LET'S NOT FORGET THAT THE CIA CLAIMED ALL WAS CALM ALL WAS RIGHT WITH IRAN A MONTH BEFORE THE REVOLUTION OF '79
Alexander Nazaryan National Correspondent, Yahoo News•April 13, 2020
WASHINGTON — The warning was written in clear, plain language. There was no ambiguity, nothing left to the imagination. A pandemic was coming, and the world was not ready.
“Infectious disease pathogens have the upper hand,” that warning went, “because they constantly evolve new mechanisms that can exploit weak links in human defenses.” There would be a global pandemic soon enough, and it would include “embargoes and boycotts,” not to mention “trade frictions and controversy over culpability.”
Only rigorous testing could stop the spread of an outbreak. And if the outbreak were not contained, untold lives and dollars would be lost.
That warning, delivered to the national security establishment in August 2003, is reminiscent of a famous admonition that had been issued two years before, in the spring of 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Both would go unheeded, to disastrous effect. And though the current pandemic that has paralyzed the country is not marked by a singularly horrific moment like the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan, COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed nearly eight times more Americans than the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
WASHINGTON — The warning was written in clear, plain language. There was no ambiguity, nothing left to the imagination. A pandemic was coming, and the world was not ready.
“Infectious disease pathogens have the upper hand,” that warning went, “because they constantly evolve new mechanisms that can exploit weak links in human defenses.” There would be a global pandemic soon enough, and it would include “embargoes and boycotts,” not to mention “trade frictions and controversy over culpability.”
Only rigorous testing could stop the spread of an outbreak. And if the outbreak were not contained, untold lives and dollars would be lost.
That warning, delivered to the national security establishment in August 2003, is reminiscent of a famous admonition that had been issued two years before, in the spring of 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Both would go unheeded, to disastrous effect. And though the current pandemic that has paralyzed the country is not marked by a singularly horrific moment like the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan, COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed nearly eight times more Americans than the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Karen Monaghan at the 2009 Milken Institute Global Conference
in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Phil McCarten/Reuters)
Karen J. Monaghan was the acting national intelligence officer for economics and global issues at the National Intelligence Council — a think tank that draws on expertise from across the entire intelligence community — when she wrote her prescient report, “SARS: Down but Still a Threat.” The report is among the clearest evidence that, contrary to what President Trump has said, the coronavirus pandemic was not only predictable but was, in fact, predicted.
“After 9/11, as a country, we weren’t about building resilience,” Monaghan told Yahoo News. “We were about whacking moles. We were about destroying the enemy.”
The report was commissioned by Tommy Thompson, then the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Jack Chow, then a State Department deputy focused on global health. “Even after SARS and subsequent epidemics — MERS, H1N1, Ebola — leading countries chose not to invest in global health preparedness,” Chow told Yahoo News, “because among leaders, health ranked low on their strategic priorities, beneath hard power issues such as defense and trade. To them, insuring against a likely epidemic seemed more costly than attending to the pressing issues at hand. As a result of this neglect, the world is now paying a collective price from COVID-19 that is accelerating into trillions of dollars and countless lives.”
Monaghan is a 32-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who retired in 2017 as a senior intelligence officer. She laments that many of her colleagues in the national security establishment dismissed her initial briefs on SARS. “It’s over there, not here,” she was told by dismissive peers in the intelligence and defense sectors. “This isn’t really worth our attention."
“SARS” is an acronym for “severe acute respiratory syndrome.” It is a type of coronavirus, a class of pathogen known for the spiky glycoproteins that protrude from its surface. “There are seven coronavirus that infect humans,” explains Ashita Batavia, an infectious disease specialist in New York City. “SARS, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), and four others that cause the common cold. They’re all in the same viral family.”
Karen J. Monaghan was the acting national intelligence officer for economics and global issues at the National Intelligence Council — a think tank that draws on expertise from across the entire intelligence community — when she wrote her prescient report, “SARS: Down but Still a Threat.” The report is among the clearest evidence that, contrary to what President Trump has said, the coronavirus pandemic was not only predictable but was, in fact, predicted.
“After 9/11, as a country, we weren’t about building resilience,” Monaghan told Yahoo News. “We were about whacking moles. We were about destroying the enemy.”
The report was commissioned by Tommy Thompson, then the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Jack Chow, then a State Department deputy focused on global health. “Even after SARS and subsequent epidemics — MERS, H1N1, Ebola — leading countries chose not to invest in global health preparedness,” Chow told Yahoo News, “because among leaders, health ranked low on their strategic priorities, beneath hard power issues such as defense and trade. To them, insuring against a likely epidemic seemed more costly than attending to the pressing issues at hand. As a result of this neglect, the world is now paying a collective price from COVID-19 that is accelerating into trillions of dollars and countless lives.”
Monaghan is a 32-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who retired in 2017 as a senior intelligence officer. She laments that many of her colleagues in the national security establishment dismissed her initial briefs on SARS. “It’s over there, not here,” she was told by dismissive peers in the intelligence and defense sectors. “This isn’t really worth our attention."
“SARS” is an acronym for “severe acute respiratory syndrome.” It is a type of coronavirus, a class of pathogen known for the spiky glycoproteins that protrude from its surface. “There are seven coronavirus that infect humans,” explains Ashita Batavia, an infectious disease specialist in New York City. “SARS, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), and four others that cause the common cold. They’re all in the same viral family.”
Mourners wear surgical masks to protect against SARS at a funeral
in Hong Kong in 2003. (Lo Sai Hung/AP)
No two disease outbreaks could be identical. But given the similarities between SARS and SARS-CoV-2, a coronavirus outbreak was bound to resemble an outbreak of SARS to a high degree.
Monaghan began following the SARS epidemic after it originated in China in late 2002 and spread throughout Asia in the ensuing months. She tracked the disease as it took the same path the coronavirus would take 17 years later, spreading through China before spreading west. As the seriousness of the outbreak came into focus, she and a deputy at the National Intelligence Council began to produce two-to-three-page briefs on SARS.
Still, they believed that a pandemic outbreak was coming, if not of SARS then of another disease, and that the United States was not prepared for that inevitability, especially with the nation focused on combating terrorism.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years at the CIA, agrees with Monaghan that getting the intelligence community to focus on any nonterrorism issue was impossible at that time. “It is clearly a national security threat,” says Sipher of pandemics.
But despite warnings like Monaghan’s, many of Sipher’s colleagues across the intelligence community deemed that threat a secondary concern. That may be, in part, because pandemics cut across the usual lines of responsibility. “This is a complicated subject that involves weaknesses of a bureaucracy, the sinews of connection between intelligence and policymakers and how a government prioritizes things,” Sipher explains.
The comprehensive SARS report that Monaghan and her staff compiled throughout the spring and summer of 2003 was meant to make the case for a more coherent pandemic response. “If the intelligence community writes these things, it helps us,” Monaghan says public health and medical professionals told her in endorsing the effort.
If no one had direct ownership of pandemic preparedness, no one would be directly responsible for a government-wide plan for what to do when the pandemic comes. President Barack Obama did install a pandemic response team within the National Security Council, but the group was eliminated by Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton. Bolton also fired Tom Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser. That position was subsequently downgraded, depriving the White House of yet another potential site of coronavirus coordination.
Once the SARS report was completed, Monaghan asked three medical experts to review the work. Among them was a 62-year-old National Institutes of Health epidemiologist who had gained renown in the battle against HIV/AIDS that had consumed the previous two decades: Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become one of the most public faces in the coronavirus outbreak.
No two disease outbreaks could be identical. But given the similarities between SARS and SARS-CoV-2, a coronavirus outbreak was bound to resemble an outbreak of SARS to a high degree.
Monaghan began following the SARS epidemic after it originated in China in late 2002 and spread throughout Asia in the ensuing months. She tracked the disease as it took the same path the coronavirus would take 17 years later, spreading through China before spreading west. As the seriousness of the outbreak came into focus, she and a deputy at the National Intelligence Council began to produce two-to-three-page briefs on SARS.
Still, they believed that a pandemic outbreak was coming, if not of SARS then of another disease, and that the United States was not prepared for that inevitability, especially with the nation focused on combating terrorism.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years at the CIA, agrees with Monaghan that getting the intelligence community to focus on any nonterrorism issue was impossible at that time. “It is clearly a national security threat,” says Sipher of pandemics.
But despite warnings like Monaghan’s, many of Sipher’s colleagues across the intelligence community deemed that threat a secondary concern. That may be, in part, because pandemics cut across the usual lines of responsibility. “This is a complicated subject that involves weaknesses of a bureaucracy, the sinews of connection between intelligence and policymakers and how a government prioritizes things,” Sipher explains.
The comprehensive SARS report that Monaghan and her staff compiled throughout the spring and summer of 2003 was meant to make the case for a more coherent pandemic response. “If the intelligence community writes these things, it helps us,” Monaghan says public health and medical professionals told her in endorsing the effort.
If no one had direct ownership of pandemic preparedness, no one would be directly responsible for a government-wide plan for what to do when the pandemic comes. President Barack Obama did install a pandemic response team within the National Security Council, but the group was eliminated by Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton. Bolton also fired Tom Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser. That position was subsequently downgraded, depriving the White House of yet another potential site of coronavirus coordination.
Once the SARS report was completed, Monaghan asked three medical experts to review the work. Among them was a 62-year-old National Institutes of Health epidemiologist who had gained renown in the battle against HIV/AIDS that had consumed the previous two decades: Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become one of the most public faces in the coronavirus outbreak.
Dr. Anthony Fauci at the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the
White House on Wednesday. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Today, the report Monaghan’s team prepared for the National Intelligence Council as the SARS epidemic wound down in the summer of 2003 seems like a near perfect description of how events have unspooled in recent months, leading to questions about why her warnings weren’t heeded.
Nor was hers the first such warning. In 2000, David F. Gordon — who preceded Monaghan at the National Intelligence Council — produced a report on the danger of a devastating pandemic. “The dramatic increase in drug-resistant microbes, combined with the lag in development of new antibiotics, the rise of megacities with severe health care deficiencies, environmental degradation, and the growing ease and frequency of cross-border movements of people and produce have greatly facilitated the spread of infectious diseases,” Gordon wrote.
Three years after that, Monaghan’s own brief makes clear that not only was an eventual pandemic all but a certainty, the course of that future pandemic could be charted with remarkable — and discomfiting — accuracy.
She noted, for one, that such a pandemic was more likely than before because population growth and economic development “are bringing more people into contact with non-domesticated animals, introducing new diseases more frequently into the human population.” SARS is believed to have originated in a civet, while the 2019 coronavirus may have jumped to humans from a pangolin that had been infected by a bat.
Both epidemics brought attention to China’s “wet markets,” where exotic animals are sold. “China lifted the ban on the sale and consumption of exotic animals” almost right after the SARS epidemic had quelled, Monaghan writes. Today, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and others are pushing for China to close its wet markets, something that is unlikely to happen.
Monaghan describes how as SARS bore down on the United States, “suspicion of Asians as carriers of the disease reduced patronage of Asian businesses and communities in the United States and sparked travel bans against Asian tourist groups and conference participants worldwide.”
The coronavirus has similarly led to anti-Asian prejudice, only to a vastly more severe degree than 17 years ago, with both verbal and physical assaults of Asian-Americans widely reported.
Today, the report Monaghan’s team prepared for the National Intelligence Council as the SARS epidemic wound down in the summer of 2003 seems like a near perfect description of how events have unspooled in recent months, leading to questions about why her warnings weren’t heeded.
Nor was hers the first such warning. In 2000, David F. Gordon — who preceded Monaghan at the National Intelligence Council — produced a report on the danger of a devastating pandemic. “The dramatic increase in drug-resistant microbes, combined with the lag in development of new antibiotics, the rise of megacities with severe health care deficiencies, environmental degradation, and the growing ease and frequency of cross-border movements of people and produce have greatly facilitated the spread of infectious diseases,” Gordon wrote.
Three years after that, Monaghan’s own brief makes clear that not only was an eventual pandemic all but a certainty, the course of that future pandemic could be charted with remarkable — and discomfiting — accuracy.
She noted, for one, that such a pandemic was more likely than before because population growth and economic development “are bringing more people into contact with non-domesticated animals, introducing new diseases more frequently into the human population.” SARS is believed to have originated in a civet, while the 2019 coronavirus may have jumped to humans from a pangolin that had been infected by a bat.
Both epidemics brought attention to China’s “wet markets,” where exotic animals are sold. “China lifted the ban on the sale and consumption of exotic animals” almost right after the SARS epidemic had quelled, Monaghan writes. Today, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and others are pushing for China to close its wet markets, something that is unlikely to happen.
Monaghan describes how as SARS bore down on the United States, “suspicion of Asians as carriers of the disease reduced patronage of Asian businesses and communities in the United States and sparked travel bans against Asian tourist groups and conference participants worldwide.”
The coronavirus has similarly led to anti-Asian prejudice, only to a vastly more severe degree than 17 years ago, with both verbal and physical assaults of Asian-Americans widely reported.
A worker in a protective suit at the closed seafood market in Wuhan,
Hubei province, China, on Jan. 10. (Reuters)
And even in 2003, before the rise of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the distinction between sound information, fearmongering and outright untruth was already a concern. “Intense media attention and uncertainty about the disease fueled wide-spread fear, even in some areas without any cases, exacerbating economic disruptions,” Monaghan wrote in describing coverage of the SARS outbreak.
One conspiracy theory from that earlier outbreak held that SARS was produced by Russian scientists. Coronavirus conspiracy theories have flourished online, where extremists have blamed Asians and Jews.
Monaghan accurately predicted how a global pandemic would test the capacities of individual countries to contain the disease. She describes how, during the SARS epidemic, some governments “resorted to strong steps, such as closing schools,” while also noting that “open societies seemed to have trouble enforcing quarantine orders.” Indeed, elected officials have railed against crowds gathering in New York City parks and thronging to see the famous cherry blossoms of Washington, D.C.
Then as now, Hong Kong and Singapore stood out for their effective responses. Hong Kong “employed software to track the spread of the disease,” a method of contact tracing that was relatively new at that time. As for Singapore, Monaghan writes how the city-state, long known for its strict civic codes, “issued over a million SARS toolkits with thermometers and facemasks to every residence in the country. Residents were regularly stopped at office buildings, schools, and other public places for temperature checks.” It has used similar measures to great effect in combating the coronavirus.
And even in 2003, before the rise of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the distinction between sound information, fearmongering and outright untruth was already a concern. “Intense media attention and uncertainty about the disease fueled wide-spread fear, even in some areas without any cases, exacerbating economic disruptions,” Monaghan wrote in describing coverage of the SARS outbreak.
One conspiracy theory from that earlier outbreak held that SARS was produced by Russian scientists. Coronavirus conspiracy theories have flourished online, where extremists have blamed Asians and Jews.
Monaghan accurately predicted how a global pandemic would test the capacities of individual countries to contain the disease. She describes how, during the SARS epidemic, some governments “resorted to strong steps, such as closing schools,” while also noting that “open societies seemed to have trouble enforcing quarantine orders.” Indeed, elected officials have railed against crowds gathering in New York City parks and thronging to see the famous cherry blossoms of Washington, D.C.
Then as now, Hong Kong and Singapore stood out for their effective responses. Hong Kong “employed software to track the spread of the disease,” a method of contact tracing that was relatively new at that time. As for Singapore, Monaghan writes how the city-state, long known for its strict civic codes, “issued over a million SARS toolkits with thermometers and facemasks to every residence in the country. Residents were regularly stopped at office buildings, schools, and other public places for temperature checks.” It has used similar measures to great effect in combating the coronavirus.
Students line up to have their temperature checked as a SARS
precaution in 2003. (David Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
Many other countries, however, were left unprepared for a pandemic. “The cost of basic diagnostic and protective equipment is relatively modest yet still unaffordable for many countries,” Monaghan wrote. “SARS highlighted a widespread shortage of ventilators to support patients with pneumonia. The lack of adequate sterilization equipment raises the risk of spreading disease when medical instruments are reused.”
She also predicted that the “highest priority for many countries is likely to be diagnostic tests to determine which patients need to be isolated,” but also that “even many hospitals in affluent countries are not likely to have enough rooms to handle a serious outbreak.”
This time around, among the countries caught flat-footed has been the United States, which has found itself lacking in many of the ways that Monaghan outlined.
She wishes that the paper she wrote in 2003 had been more than “a sideshow” and that the federal government took pandemic response as seriously as it took terrorism. Preparing for disease outbreaks is “not sexy,” she says.
Efforts at pandemic response received a boost in 2005, after President George W. Bush read John M. Barry’s about-to-be-published “The Great Influenza,” about the 1918 pandemic that killed millions. He instructed his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to put together a pandemic response plan. Within days, however, a disaster of another kind would bear down on New Orleans in the form of Hurricane Katrina. Bush faced intense criticism for his handling of the disaster in the months that followed. Other concerns, like pandemics, understandably receded in the collective consciousness.
Monaghan acknowledges that President Obama did take significant steps to prepare the nation for a pandemic. He was generally praised for his response to the outbreak of Ebola in 2014. Speaking at the National Institutes of Health headquarters in Maryland that year, he warned that greater funding would be necessary to forfend a future epidemic, which he said was all but inevitable.
“It is preposterous to say that no one saw this coming,” says Lisa Monaco, who served as Obama’s homeland security adviser. “Not only did people see it coming, people warned about it.” Monaco also warned about a pandemic, 14 years after Monaghan had done the same. In her case, it was to the incoming Trump administration.
“Frankly, a pandemic was the thing that was most concerning,” Monaco told Yahoo News. She described a “respiratory illness that is transmissible through droplets” as a “nightmare scenario” that would keep her up at night.
Many other countries, however, were left unprepared for a pandemic. “The cost of basic diagnostic and protective equipment is relatively modest yet still unaffordable for many countries,” Monaghan wrote. “SARS highlighted a widespread shortage of ventilators to support patients with pneumonia. The lack of adequate sterilization equipment raises the risk of spreading disease when medical instruments are reused.”
She also predicted that the “highest priority for many countries is likely to be diagnostic tests to determine which patients need to be isolated,” but also that “even many hospitals in affluent countries are not likely to have enough rooms to handle a serious outbreak.”
This time around, among the countries caught flat-footed has been the United States, which has found itself lacking in many of the ways that Monaghan outlined.
She wishes that the paper she wrote in 2003 had been more than “a sideshow” and that the federal government took pandemic response as seriously as it took terrorism. Preparing for disease outbreaks is “not sexy,” she says.
Efforts at pandemic response received a boost in 2005, after President George W. Bush read John M. Barry’s about-to-be-published “The Great Influenza,” about the 1918 pandemic that killed millions. He instructed his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to put together a pandemic response plan. Within days, however, a disaster of another kind would bear down on New Orleans in the form of Hurricane Katrina. Bush faced intense criticism for his handling of the disaster in the months that followed. Other concerns, like pandemics, understandably receded in the collective consciousness.
Monaghan acknowledges that President Obama did take significant steps to prepare the nation for a pandemic. He was generally praised for his response to the outbreak of Ebola in 2014. Speaking at the National Institutes of Health headquarters in Maryland that year, he warned that greater funding would be necessary to forfend a future epidemic, which he said was all but inevitable.
“It is preposterous to say that no one saw this coming,” says Lisa Monaco, who served as Obama’s homeland security adviser. “Not only did people see it coming, people warned about it.” Monaco also warned about a pandemic, 14 years after Monaghan had done the same. In her case, it was to the incoming Trump administration.
“Frankly, a pandemic was the thing that was most concerning,” Monaco told Yahoo News. She described a “respiratory illness that is transmissible through droplets” as a “nightmare scenario” that would keep her up at night.
Lisa Monaco sits beside President Barack Obama after a briefing
on Hurricane Matthew in 2016. (Chris Kleponis/Pool/Getty Images)
Monaco says that Obama told her to provide the incoming Trump administration with a thorough homeland security briefing, much as Obama had been briefed in 2008 by outgoing Bush officials.
“I specifically added a pandemic scenario,” Monaco says. She remembers that her replacement, Bossert, took the briefing “exceptionally seriously” and “did not need to be convinced.” But whatever lessons were learned that day have been undone by the administrative chaos and churn that have marked the executive branch under Trump.
“A very large number of the people who were in that room are no longer in the job that they assumed in 2017,” Monaco says. Some of them have been replaced by officials serving in acting capacities. Other positions have simply been left empty.
Monaco says that Obama told her to provide the incoming Trump administration with a thorough homeland security briefing, much as Obama had been briefed in 2008 by outgoing Bush officials.
“I specifically added a pandemic scenario,” Monaco says. She remembers that her replacement, Bossert, took the briefing “exceptionally seriously” and “did not need to be convinced.” But whatever lessons were learned that day have been undone by the administrative chaos and churn that have marked the executive branch under Trump.
“A very large number of the people who were in that room are no longer in the job that they assumed in 2017,” Monaco says. Some of them have been replaced by officials serving in acting capacities. Other positions have simply been left empty.
---30---
No comments:
Post a Comment