MONDAY
E-mail a friendJudith Miller
airdate May 4, 2004
Author and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller writes about the Middle East, national security issues, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. She's covered the Arab world for more than twenty years. Miller began her career in 1977 when she joined the paper's Washington Bureau. She was also part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for 'explanatory journalism' for her 2001 series on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Judith Miller
Tavis: Judith Miller is an author and Pulitzer prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times. She covers issues related to national security and terrorism. Her most recent book is called 'Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War.' She joins us tonight from New York. Judith, nice to have you on the program.
Judith Miller: Nice to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: I want to give you a break from the doom-and-gloom beat. Come on and talk about it on television for a few minutes at least. Let me start by asking where, these days, bioterror, in fact, falls on the spectrum of national security concerns.
Miller: I think it's a very, very important priority for this administration. In fact, in the kind of crib sheet that was distributed with the president's announcement last week, President Bush called it 'a unique problem, a unique challenge,' and I think that's the way the administration views it.
In terms of money, which is always a very good barometer as opposed to talk, which is cheap in Washington, it's also a huge concern. Right now, we're spending close to $7 billion...'B' as in boy--a year on biodefense alone, and that's just in the area of research, for example, a 30-fold increase over what this country was spending before 9/11 and before the anthrax attacks that followed a month later, so this is big-time.
Tavis: For those who don't read the New York Times every day as I try to do and to cover your beat in particular, what's been happening? Aside from what President Bush had to say last week--and I want to come back to that in just a second--what news might folk have missed over the last 6 months, last year related to bioterror that we can talk about right now?
Miller: I think what we've continued to see, Tavis, is a series of kind of small but very troubling incidents. For example, there was some ricin found in one of the Senate offices. No one knows how it got there or how it was delivered. It was assumed that it was delivered in a letter, but it was real ricin, and ricin can kill you pretty quickly if you're exposed to it, if you ingest it, or if you get it inside your system.
We still don't have after, you know, more than 2 years an answer to the 'who mailed those anthrax letters?' We know who did 9/11, but we have no idea to this day who sent the letters with just a tiny, tiny amount of anthrax that killed 5 people, infected 17, and put more than 30,000 Americans on antibiotics.
So we continue to see a series of small, isolated events that are really troubling, and we continue to see that groups like Al Qaeda are out there actively hunting for biological weapons capability. And all of these things, I think, really account for the administration's concern and intent focus on the biological problem.
Tavis: Let me ask you a real silly question, Judith. Why is it that we do seem to have some idea, we seem to know who and what was behind 9/11, but we don't know who or what was behind the anthrax scare? Why do we know one and not the other?
Miller: Well, I think Al Qaeda was very intent on claiming credit for its exploit, and we also were able to determine from the manifests of the planes very quickly who was on board, after the fact, unfortunately. But with anthrax, and with those letters, and in general with biological terrorism, it's just very difficult to trace the perpetrator.
In this case, no one announced that he or she or they had done this thing. Nobody actually took credit or blame for this atrocious act, and it's very difficult, it turns out, to find out the origin of the anthrax that was mailed in these separate letters. And that's one of the reasons that makes biological weapons so attractive to a would-be terrorist, is that this is the kind of weapon you can use and hide and then live to fight and kill another day.
Tavis: So did we learn anything from the anthrax scare?
Miller: Yeah. We learned we were way underprepared for that kind of attack, and as a result, we have seen this enormous explosion of spending in both biological research and defensive measures, in new vaccines. We've now put together a vaccine and antibiotics national stockpile in this country that would be enough to take care of all of us in the event of an outbreak of, say, anthrax or plague. The president tried to get all of the first responders in this country vaccinated against smallpox. That turned out to be a tremendous failure for his administration. They were not able to get people to take the vaccine. But there is across-the-board activity in this area. All I can tell you is I'm very, very busy.
Tavis: Let me ask you why the administration did in fact fail in trying to get people to take the vaccine?
Miller: It's like a lot of what this administration does. The program was unveiled without a lot of the important pieces being in place. For example, people who were being asked to take the smallpox vaccine said, 'If I'm one of those few people who may have side effects from this vaccine, who's going to cover me if I have to miss work? Who will pay my medical bills if I have health problems that are related to the vaccination?' And in fact, the administration hadn't really thought these issues through at the time that it unveiled this program, and so, as a result, only 40,000 people in America actually voluntarily took the vaccine. Now, anybody who went to Iraq, as I did, embedded with the military forces, automatically got this vaccine whether or not you wanted it. It's very important. If we have a smallpox attack in this country, which I hope we never do--smallpox is an eradicated disease--but if there is one, it'll be very important that the men and women who are able to vaccinate us are protected themselves against the disease.
Tavis: Let me ask you what President Bush has said of late, then, about our bio-defense, as it were, for the 21st century. Tell me something good he said that'll make me sleep a little better tonight.
Miller: I think one thing that he and his officials indicated is that we are a lot better prepared today than we were in September of 2001 for this kind of an event. And I think that by anyone's objective standard, that really has to be true because if you spend more than $10 billion building up your defenses, there are all kinds of things that have been done that did not exist before. For example, in Los Angeles, in New York, and in some 10 other cities around the country, we now have biological detectors which sniff the air and measure the presence of things that shouldn't be there. Now, that's not perfect technology, but we're spending about $118 million a year on it. The detectors are getting better. It's things like that that make us better prepared, though not totally prepared for such an event.
Tavis: I'm glad--I referenced earlier the doom-and-gloom beat that you cover. I'm glad that you're on this beat, Judith, because you educate and enlighten me every day with your stories about what I ought to be aware of, but let me get personal for just a quick second. I've only got a couple minutes left. Why are you interested in this field? I'm just curious as to how you got into this and why you want to cover something that is so scary every day?
Miller: Well, you know, when I first started covering biological weapons, even I couldn't sleep at night. I found it very troubling, precisely because this was one of what I call the 21st century threats, that is, new kinds of challenges for our country that really didn't exist in a serious way. And I guess that's what got me interested in it because I know that human nature doesn't change, and there are always people looking for ways to hurt and to kill, and people remain aggressive. And the weapons to inflict this kind of pain and suffering on societies, those weapons just keep getting better and better. And so I guess I've been interested in nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and there was something about biology, living weapons, weapons that don't die and that can spread from person to person, that I really felt was very important.
The more my colleagues and I looked into it, the more we realized they were cheap, they were easily transportable, people hadn't really erected defenses against them, and therefore, we were ill-prepared for that kind of a threat. So I don't know whether or not we're ever going to get hit again, but I can remember that people are no longer dismissing the notion of biological weapons as a real threat, which, by the way, they were when my colleagues and I started writing about this.
Tavis: So the biological weapons haven't gone anywhere, number one. Number 2--one could argue that the U.S., after 9/11, may have more enemies now than we had before 9/11, so you combine those 2 things. Tell me how you're sleeping better at night with that information?
Miller: I guess because I've come to know in the course of my reporting a lot of the men and women out there--the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, people who are all, quote, first responders in the biological area--who are working day and night, very hard to keep us all safe. And the good news, Tavis, about defending yourself against a biological weapons attack is that if we build up the nation's public health services in this country, which have really been neglected sadly over the past 10, 20 years, if we do that, we'll be better prepared for a biological event, whether it's the endemic flu, pandemic flu, or SARS or whatever comes along, whether it's naturally or unnaturally inspired.
Tavis: Well, somebody's gotta do it, and I'm glad you're doing it. You do it awfully well. That's for coming on and talking to us about it. We'll check with you again soon.
Miller: Good to be here.
Tavis: Thanks, Judith.
Miller: Bye.
Tavis: Judith Miller from the New York Times. Up next on this program, the Emmy-winning series '24' stars as you know, Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer. Up next, a conversation with the brother president. Stay with us.
Back to May 4, 2004