Depending on who you ask, the Obama administration's controversial pick to be the Department of Homeland Security's geek-in-chief is either a leading authority on the deadliest terror threats -- or a biowar chicken little, dangerously out of touch with reality.
At first glance, Dr. Tara O'Toole is a dream candidate to take over the position of DHS under secretary for science and technology. She's a doctor, the CEO of the University of Pittburgh's Center for Biosecurity, the former chairwoman of the Federation of American Scientists, and the brains behind a series of influential disaster response exercises that woke Washington up to the threat of terrorists with weapons of massive destruction. Who better to take over DHS' nearly billion-dollar research portfolio -- about 45 percent of which goes towards chemical and biological defense?
But the outcry over O'Toole's nomination began just moments after the White House announced its intent late Tuesday to name her to the job. To her critics, O'Toole has dangerously overhyped the bioterror threat -- leading to a huge increase of the number of research labs and researchers handling deadly agents. Ironically, it's these very facilities that are now these most likely sources for a deadly outbreak or bioattack; the 2001 anthrax strikes, for instance, were an inside job.
"This is a disastrous nomination. O'Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration," Rutgers University microbiologist and homeland security policy critic Richard Ebright tells Danger Room. "O'Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position."
"She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security," he adds. "She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane."
O'Toole rose to prominence in biodefense circles after producing Dark Winter, a June 2001 exercise that explored how a single smallpox outbreak could threaten millions of lives in 15 countries. An Army War College report later found that the exercise tripled the normal transmission rate for smallpox -- "mak[ing] it next to impossible for the game players to do very much to contain the outbreak, and assur[ing] a disastrous outcome irrespective of whatever control measures the players may attempt to carry out." Atlantic Storm, a 2005 exercise also produced by O'Toole, had similar issues. According to the report, it made “grossly misleading assumptions” about the ease of creation and dispersion of the same biological agent -- assuming bioterrorists would enjoy a capability that neither the Americans nor Soviets could achieve at the heights of the Cold War.
To George Smith, a protein chemist and senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, these exercsies show O'Toole to be "the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived. [She's] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying. [And she] has never obviously appeared to examine what current terrorist capabilities have been... in favor of extrapolating how easy it would be to launch bioterror attacks if one had potentially unlimited resources and scientific know-how."It's a "superb appointment if you're in the biodefense industry and interested in further opportunity and growth," he tells Danger Room. "Alternatively, a disaster if threat assessment and prevention ought to have some basis in reality." If confirmed, O'Toole would succeed the widely-respected Jay Cohen, a retired admiral.
[Photo: Federation of American Scientists]
