The 700 Club

Art Levine included this scary statistic in his piece on "Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-in-Law" in the latest Washington Monthly.

[EPA] data showed that at least 700 [chemical] sites across the country could potentially kill or injure 100,000 or more people if attacked.

The story explains how the Bush administration has let industry prevent any regulatory attempts to make these plants safe from attack.

3/16/07 Update: I forgot this telling passage from the article:

In January 2005, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) began a series of hearings looking at the subject before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, during which one grim highlight had been the testimony of [Richard] Falkenrath, the former homeland security adviser, who called chemical security the nation’s top domestic vulnerability and admitted that since 9/11, “we have essentially done nothing.”

Gulp. If only someone could do something about this problem.


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Better living despite chemicals?

The Boston Globe headline from yesterday is accurate: "Chemical plants are vulnerable, specialists warn; Former Bush adviser urges law calling for improved security."

Richard Falkenrath, who was Bush's deputy homeland security adviser until May 2004, decried the fact that nearly four years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has yet to pass a law giving the Homeland Security Department the authority to enforce security standards at chemical plants.

''When you look at all of the different targets for a potential attack in the United States and ask yourself which ones present the greatest possibility of mass casualties and are the least well-secured at the present time, one target set flies off the page, and that's chemicals," Falkenrath said. ''This is an absolutely inescapable conclusion. It is one that was very apparent to me in my official capacity, and it remains apparent to me now as a private citizen."

Tens of millions of Americans live near these plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency says 15,000 facilities use enough toxic chemicals to pose a threat to surrounding communities, including 123 where the rupture of a single tank could endanger the lives of at least a million people.

Essentially, the Bush administration has not said anything about this problem since October 2002 when Tom Ridge and Christie Todd Whitman said that voluntary security measures at chemical plants did not provide sufficient security.

Predictably, industry fears government regulation and Republican members of Congress are reluctant to act because of these business concerns.

Terror expert Richard Clarke has been worried about such attacks as well. And I previously blogged about Matthew Brzezinski's devastating critique of US homeland security efforts on this and other problems last fall.

Clarke might ask: What will industry and Congress say after a chemical 9/11?

Clarke's science fiction?

I am blogging about a recent article by Richard Clarke, who was the "national coordinator for security and counterterrorism for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush." So, this post is not about the sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke.

However, Richard Clarke's recent (January/February 2005) piece in The Atlantic (subscription required) may seem like science fiction to a lot of readers.

Clarke's article is fact-based fiction, written from the perspective of a speech delivered on September 11, 2011. In the address, Clarke's protaganist, Professor Roger McBride, outlines a decade of terrorist attacks against the US.

Most are relatively low-technology attacks by al Qaeda or Hizbollah: bombs in casinos, amusement parks, subways, and shopping malls, anti-aircraft missiles against passenger aircraft, viruses and worms against computer systems, etc.

Clarke is hanging out at Harvard these days, so I'm surprised he didn't imagine academic institutions as targets. Clarke discusses a feared nuclear attack that doesn't materialize, but does have terrorists strike US chemical plants (I just received a mailing like this one from the Sierra club with the same concern).

In any case, everyone who reads the piece is likely to experience a bit of anxiety, simply because many of the attacks are quite plausible. Indeed, Clarke includes dozens of footnotes to the piece, typically from news stories, policy shops, and government reports. He's not imagining worst-case scenarios, he's attempting to highlight known risks.

In Clarke's vision of the future, the US implements ever-more restrictive Patriot Act sequels, uses the military for domestic operations, adopts national identity cards, closely monitors visitors to malls, etc. The US also attacks Iran, fails to prevent the Saudi government from falling to extremists, and suffers very high oil prices.

In short, it's not a pleasant future...even if it does bring families closer together (because they stay home out of fear), reduce spam email and help a left-leaning civil libertarian political party capture some seats in Congress and other offices.

Could all this happen?

Maybe.

Is it likely?

I'd argue no. It has been three and a half years since 9/11 and these kinds of attacks have not been occurring on a regular basis in the US.

Perhaps there aren't as many terrorists as authorities fear? Perhaps the US does a good job of keeping likely terrorists out of the US? Perhaps few suicidal terrorists want to kill large numbers of Americans?

In sum, maybe the risk of terrorist attacks really isn't that high?

I agree with Clarke that domestic security should be accorded a higher priority, and that Iraq was a huge distraction of resources from the real war on terror, but I'm not sure opponents of the Bush administration ought to adopt these kinds of fear appeals to win their argument.

Turner's speech

Well, I didn't see Congressman Jim Turner's speech tonight, but as promised, I found a transcript and read it. It's available on the KTRE-TV (Lufkin/Nacogdoches, TX) website.

Frankly, it is short and not especially informative. These are the key paragraphs:

John Kerry knows that in this new war, the front lines are here at home. Americans do not run from a fight, nor will we accept living in fear. As the lead Democrat on the HOuse Committee on Homeland Security, I have seen the work we need to do to protect America from danger.

And I'm here to tell you John Kerry has a plan to make our homeland secure. John Kerry will fix our broken intelligence system to stop terrorists before they strike again. He will bolster security at our borders. He will make our vulnerable targets-our nuclear and chemical plants, our refineries- more secure to keep those who live nearby safe from harm. He will ensure that every cargo container entering our ports is screened for radiation, protecting us from the threat of nuclear terrorism. The cost of securing America is great, but the cost of failing to secure America is even greater.

Given the number of speakers, I guess this was all they could include.