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March 16, 2005
Deadly scenarios, perhaps
The New York Times picked up on a Department of Homeland Security report today that wasn't intended to be picked up. It turns out to be a rather sobering description of potential terrorist attacks and their possible costs, in both human and economic terms. As the Times soothingly summarizes:
The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack.
They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Specific locations are not named because the events could unfold in many major metropolitan or rural areas, the document says.
The agency's objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned. The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site.
By identifying possible attacks and specifying what government agencies should do to prevent, respond to and recover from them, Homeland Security is trying for the first time to define what "prepared" means, officials said.
I have to admit that I first learned about this story neither from the ink-and-paper Times nor from its web-based proxy. Rather, I caught wind of it via a 30 second filler on cable news, which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. Thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage -- no matter whether real or imagined -- is hot stuff. But I've been puzzling all day about what actual purpose such a sexy report serves. Sure, what started out as a newspaper story became a cable news segment that caught my attention, and presumably the attention of many others, as well. But if we are to believe DHS (and given the behavior of its previous chief, I have as much reason to believe them as I have to not), the report was never intended to be made public, so its attention-garnering potential was merely accidental.
Taking DHS at its word, then, this "doomsday report" must have been intended to serve an internal purpose of some kind. Indeed, its stated goal of honing the parameters of "preparedness" is certainly an important one. DHS has endured a checkered history thus far, from the wavering support for its creation by President Bush to the much-maligned, easily-teased, and color-coded threat advisory system. So if DHS is trying to prove its worth by determining what "preparedness" really means, then I applaud them.
But for some reason I'm skeptical. Perhaps it is tough for me to comprehend why an aerosolized anthrax attack would kill 13,000 (as the report indicates) as opposed to 10,000 or 15,000, and whether such a discrepancy would result in different conclusions. Or maybe its because I don't see why a "toxic industrial chemicals" attack would result in "billions of dollars" of economic damage while a "chlorine tank explosion" would result in "millions of dollars" of damage but a far greater number of deaths. It's as if the report combines just enough specificity with the right amount of vagueness to result in a mish-mash of scenarios that would be amusing in their absurdity if not so frightening in their potential.
I can understand why I have a hard time pulling specific tips from the report -- if it was never intended to be public, it wasn't composed with folks like myself as an audience in mind. And I can understand the explanation for the report offered by DHS -- hypothetical scenarios can guide resource allocation and improve training, especially if the Department follows through with its just-announced "risk-based" approach to homeland security. But for some reason, it just doesn't add up, and I'm not quite sure why. I mean, Tom Clancy predicted with pretty good accuracy the mode of the 11 September attacks, and he didn't need to be on the government payroll to do it. Any number of creative minds -- bored, inventive, or outright malicious -- can scheme potential scenarios for terrorist attacks. It's not hard, and it doesn't cost money. So what is really behind the DHS report, and what can it be reasonably expected to accomplish? If "preparedness" really does become better defined and more realistic as a result, then the report will have more than served its purpose. But what if it's just another endeavor along the same lines as the color-coded alert scheme? What if DHS is hoping that the perception of efficacy -- spiced up here with body counts and dollar signs instead of with colors and shades -- will be mistaken by Americans for real efficacy? More disturbingly, if this assumption is correct, what if such a ploy actually works?
Posted by Daniel Widome at 11:25 PM to U. S. Politics
