4/24/01

By JOHN FULTON LEWIS

On Friday, March 2, The London Mirror’s Whitehall Editor, Paul Gilfeather mentioned what, until then, had been generally viewed as something unmentionable. He led off his column: “Animal rights terrorists could be behind the foot and mouth crisis. Ministry of Agriculture investigators are probing the idea that activists planted the disease in an attempt to discredit farming practices.”
On April 8, the London Sunday Express finally reported what had for several months been suspected but was mentioned only in hushed tones of secrecy around Scotland Yard: During a routine audit of the U.K.’s secret government laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire, two months before the outbreak was first identified on a sheep farm in Wales, Feb. 20 , a container of foot-and-mouth virus was found to be missing. The sensitive lab unit also houses smallpox, TB, anthrax and Ebola virus samples for research. The newspaper said: “Ministry officials were informed immediately and an investigation was launched initially by Special Branch and then by MI5, who are interested in the activities of animal rights protesters.”
For some months now, Scotland Yard, America’s FBI and Central Intelligence Agency and, more recently, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have all been alert to the possibility that the purposeful spread of diseases harmful to agriculture or human beings is a possible threat. Such is known to be in the arsenal of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and in the possession of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq intelligence specialists. The FBI, in listing ELF, the Earth Liberation Front as a prime eco-terrorist organization in the United States, has indicated it would not be surprised if the use of toxic or contaminating substances were attempted by some domestic elements engaged in anarchy or animal rights extremism.
Animal rights groups in the U.K. have dramatically stepped up the level of violence in their assaults in the past year. Letter bombs to scientists, the burning of laboratory buildings and equipment and even “goon squad” beatings of research scientists employed in using animals for drug testing or, engaged in genetically modifying crops, have been occurring increasingly. The six-year-old daughter of a research lab executive was seriously injured recently when she opened what turned out to be a nail-bomb package to her father.
Gilfeather wrote that British Agriculture Ministry authorities “believe terrorists could have copied the twisted scheme from the James Bond thriller ‘In Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ in which evil Blofeld threatens to contaminate the world with the foot-and-mouth virus. Many people in the Ministry think it is no coincidence that farming has suffered swine fever and foot-and-mouth outbreaks within nine months after years and years of healthy herds.”
At a March 27 Delaware Agriculture Department meeting to discuss foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) concerns, the state’s Secretary of Agriculture Jack Tarburton declared that while no cases have yet been reported in the United States, he believed it was only a matter of time until the disease arrives on our shores. He did not suggest it would be brought here intentionally but he is a realist who was clearly anxious to prepare his department for the eventuality.
Then in early April, as British farmers counted over a million animals (sheep, cattle, goats and hogs) slaughtered, a survey by United Press International on the worst disaster to hit British agriculture in modern times, reported a growing belief in the rural community and among terrorism experts that “respected authorities take very seriously the possibility that the epidemic could be the deliberate result of a bio-terrorist attack on the U.K.and that such an attack could be a ‘dry run’ for an even more devastating future bio-terrorist assault on the one trillion dollar U.S. agriculture industry.”
UPI quoted Peter Probst, vice president and director of programs for the Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence in England: “I take this extremely seriously. If you have a conspiratorial mind-set you might think the U.K. is being used as a test.” He added that agro-terrorism is not science fiction and it’s a lot closer to reality than many may realize.Then he warned: “I would call the American agriculture base the soft underbelly of the American economy. It generates one trillion dollars a year in export revenue, and an attack against beef or swine would be incredibly costly. It would be disastrous,” Probst said.
Dr. Peter Chalk, a Rand policy analyst in the U.S. said of such possible terrorist activity: “It’s incredibly easy to do it, and it requires no sophistication. As a weapon, it’s less expensive. It’s also very good in so-called asymmetrical warfare, where you hit a very powerful country at its most vulnerable point: the economy.”
Chalk and Probst said there was no clear evidence that (1) FMD was the work of terrorists; (2) that if it was, there was not yet any clear evidence that the animal rights movement was responsible; and, (3) that Iraq would be more of a likely suspect than bin Laden in using germ or disease warfare methods.
A further worry for officials is that hostile elements, be they international political terrorists or domestic eco-animal rights extremists in the U.K., the U.S. or any agriculturally advanced nation, could use an attack on food to destabilize governments and panic the public, especially if, as Chalk put it, “you actually had a disease that was transmittable from animal to human.”
Such was suspected for a time, it has been learned from Washington, D.C., intelligence sources, when the West Nile virus — the mosquito- borne disease from the Middle East — suddenly infected birds and humans in the New York area two years ago and now has spread north to Boston and south to Richmond. The FBI, U.S. Army, Centers for Disease Control of the U.S. Public Health Service, and others have been jointly monitoring the outbreaks of West Nile virus ever since.
Just a year ago, UPI reports, Brazil blamed sabotage for an outbreak of FMD which, fortunately, it was able to quickly control. About the same time, Saudi Arabia, often at odds with some of its Arab and non-Arab Islamic neighbors, had to combat an outbreak of Rift Valley fever which started among some animals and spread to a few human receptors.
New Scientist magazine in Britain declared editorially that “the U.S. is so worried about bio-terrorist attacks on its livestock industry that it has just spent $40 million on upgrading its secure research facilities for animal disease (import inspection) on Plum Island, NY.”
Jane’s Security, an arm of the private British intelligence research organization, long known best for its annual publication of an updated assessment on the world’s navies, Jane’s Fighting Ships, noted that the U.S. anti-terrorism budget for the current fiscal year has grown to approximately $1.5 billion, double what it was in 1998. And $39.8 million has been apportioned for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “a federal body that has not in the past received much attention in U.S. national security contingencies.”
Jane’s Security observes that there are 22 lethal and highly contagious diseases that can infect animals and many of them are able to exist in a quasi-dormant state for long periods of time in and on organic matter or waste.
What is more, excessive use of antibiotics in agriculture, as with human beings, has weakened livestock resistance to many diseases. Also, the concentration of vulnerable animals in large dairy operations and beef feedlots enables any disease, bacterial or viral, to spread far more rapidly than might have been the case when smaller herds grazed over larger acreage far removed from other centers where contagion could so easily spread.
The militancy and rhetoric of animals rights activists adds to the tension. The willing advocacy of submitting domesticated animals to suffering and death by such organizations as People for the Ethical (sic!) Treatment of Animals (PETA) was blatantly manifested when PETA leader, Ingrid Newkirk, said she welcomed foot-and-mouth disease as the best thing going for advancing the vegetarian movement. She even recommended that the United States and Canada should bar the entry of any meat-eaters, farmers, butchers or abattoir (slaughterhouse) workers.
Her remarks, since disavowed and downplayed by many in the animal rights movement, came in response to word that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Canada’s Customs officers have been put on special alert to watch for and possibly apprehend, animal rights activists and eco-terrorists. RCMP believes it already has some evidence that animal rights groups may try spreading FMD to Canada’s livestock farms. For U.S. farmers, who have not had to cope with FMD since a 1929 outbreak, these are tense times indeed, whether they raise livestock or plant GM (genetically modified) crops. At the risk of yielding to paranoia, farm security has to be the foremost concern for all producers today.