Countermeasures Quotes
Dr. Fauci was the Department’s Chief Bioterrorism Officer. This was part of his Congressional Testimony on the same date.
The Bush administration were busy making their appointments and setting some domestic priorities. In 4 months 9-11 would make them wish that they had taken these warnings more seriously. See {637530}.
While the President had total faith in American scientists, at the time the state of American physics was not world class in several key areas. Oppenheimer, was for example, the ONLY senior American theoretical physicist at the outbreak of the war, and he had been trained in Germany. What the President did not quite realize was how many of the key scientific positions on the Manhattan Project were foreign refugees who had fled the Nazis in Europe. Many American scientists and engineers did not want to go to Los Alamos where they could not leave for the duration of the war, had to give up their own personal research, and whose relatives who did not accompany them would never know where they were or what they were doing. But there were enough great American scientists who Oppenheimer recruited that combined with the Europeans formed the greatest and most effective concentration of scientific manpower working in history.
If there is a group from whom a constant supply of volunteer suicide bombers is drawn, and who honestly believe that death while fighting for Islam is desirable, then deterrence will not be an effective strategy. This is a very hard reality for us to face because the vast majority of our historical experience has been with people who were moved by deterrence techniques.
