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Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I cannot support the nomination of Dr. Tara O'Toole to be the Under Secretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security.
By its nature, this position requires a disinterested scientific approach to issues affecting homeland security. It is a position which the Department of Homeland Security and its policymakers must rely on for objective advice and counsel.
Dr. O'Toole fell short of the strict adherence to scientific principles when she was the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. Dr. O'Toole was one of the principal designers and authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter exercise that simulated a covert attack on the United States by bioterrorists.
The Dark Winter exercise had a deadly serious purpose: to assess the vulnerability of the United States to a biological weapons attack and our ability to deal with such an attack.
But many top scientists have said that the Dark Winter exercise was based on faulty and exaggerated assumptions about the transmission rate of smallpox.
Dr. James Koopman of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan, an expert at modeling the transmission rates of infectious diseases who participated in the smallpox eradication program, has said that Dr. O'Toole ``has not sought balanced scientific input in her thinking, that she shows a lack of analytic orientation to scientific issues, and that she has generated hype about bioterrorism that she will feel obligated to defend rather than pursue a balanced approach.''
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me that the conclusions of the Dark Winter exercise were ``dramatically affected'' by the assumptions that were used, and that these assumptions were ``much, much worse than would have been the case'' in real life.
Dr. Michael Lane, the former Director of the Centers For Disease Control Smallpox Eradication Program--who has had extensive and first-hand experience with the disease--found the assumptions about smallpox transmission rates in the Dark Winter exercise ``improbable'' and even ``absurd.''
The transmission rate of smallpox was not the only area where Dr. O'Toole exaggerated the facts. On February 19, 2002, she wrote that ``Many experts believe that the smallpox virus is not confined to these 2 official repositories [1 in the United States and 1 in Russia] and may be in the possession of states or subnational groups pursuing active biological weapons programs.'' This statement referenced a New York Times article of June 13, 1999, for support of that very startling statement about ``subnational groups.'' But the article she cited made no reference to any subnational or terrorist or nonstate group possessing active biological weapons programs.
Bioterrorism poses a serious threat to our national security. But it is one of many threats we face. All threats to our security must be addressed objectively and scientifically so that we spend our resources in the most effective way possible to address the most likely and most dangerous threats. Exaggerations for the purpose of influencing policy makers do a disservice and result in the misallocation of limited resources that must be utilized wisely and objectively in order to enhance our security.
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