Terroristi poveri di sussidi

Terroristi poveri di sussidi

From here on, it was all about spies, bombs and other manly things. "The first priority of the US government is not education, it is not healthcare, it is the defence and protection of US citizens," he said, adding, later: "I'm a teacher married to a nurse - none of that matters today."
But now it turns out that those frivolous social services matter a great deal. What is making the US most vulnerable to terrorism is not a depleted weapons arsenal but its starved, devalued and crumbling public sector. The new battlefields are not just the Pentagon, but also the post office; not just military intelligence, but also training for doctors and nurses; not a sexy new missile defence shield, but the boring old Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
It has become fashionable to wryly observe that the terrorists use the west's technologies as weapons against itself: planes, email, cellphones. But as fears of bioterrorism mount, it could well turn out that their best weapons are the holes in the US public infrastructure.
Is this because there was no time to prepare for the attacks? Hardly. The US administration has openly recognised the threat of biological attacks since the Gulf war. And yet shockingly little has actually been done. The reason is simple: preparing for biological warfare would have required a ceasefire in an older, less dramatic war - the one against the public sphere. It didn't happen. Here are snapshots from the frontlines.
The health system: Half of US states don't have federal experts trained in bioterrorism. The centres for disease control and prevention are buckling under the anthrax fears, their underfunded labs scrambling to keep up with the demand for tests.
Many US doctors have not been trained to identify symptoms of anthrax, botulism or plague. A recent senate panel heard that hospitals and health departments lack basic diagnostic tools, and sharing information is difficult because some departments lack email.
If treatment is a mess, federal inoculation programmes are in even worse shape. The only US laboratory licensed to produce the anthrax vaccine has left the country unprepared. Why? It's a typical privatisation debacle. The lab, located in Lansing, Michigan, used to be state-run. In 1998 it was sold to BioPort, which promised greater efficiency. But the new lab has failed FDA inspections and hasn't supplied a single dose of vaccine.
The water system: The US Environmental Protection Agency is years behind schedule in safeguarding the water supply against bioterrorist attacks. According to an October 4 audit, the EPA was supposed to have identified security vulnerabilities in municipal water supplies by 1999, but it hasn't even completed this first stage.
The food supply: The FDA has proved unable to introduce measures that would better protect the food supply from "agroterrorism" - deadly bacteria introduced into the food supply.
With agriculture increasingly centralised and globalised, the sector is vulnerable to the spread of disease. But the FDA, which inspected only 1% of food imports under its jurisdiction last year, says it is in "desperate need of more inspectors".
After September 11, George Bush created the department of homeland security, designed to evoke a nation steeled for any attack. And yet what homeland security really means is a mad rush to reassemble basic public infrastructure and resurrect heath and safety standards. The frontline troops of America's new war are embattled indeed: the very bureaucracies that have been privatised and vilified for two decades.
"Public health is a national security issue," US secretary of health Tommy Thompson observed earlier this month. No kidding. For years, critics have argued that there are human costs to all the cost-cutting, deregulating and privatising - train crashes in Britain, E coli outbreaks in Walkerton, Ontario. And yet until September 11, "security" was still confined to the machinery of war, a fortress atop a crumbling foundation.
If there is a lesson to be learned from this mess, it is that real security cannot be cordoned off. It is woven into our most basic social fabric, from the post office to the emergency room, from the subway to the water reservoir. Infrastructure - the boring stuff that binds us all - is not irrelevant to the business of fighting terrorism. It is the foundation of our future security.

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