Cattle ranches orchestrate similar movements of "product" through sale barns to large stockyards. A million head will go through sale barns to market in a span of three months. Dairy "farms," as they are still called, are no different. Comparing today's dairy industry to his roots growing up on a small dairy farm, Dr. Huxsoll says, "You wouldn't recognize a single similarity — except maybe the presence of a cow." Several thousand cows are milked mechanically twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, on a mere forty acres of land. It's not really a farm anymore. Their milk goes directly to a six-thousand-gallon tanker truck; when the tanker's full, it pulls away and goes to the dairy processing plant to cool for a while. This is where the vulnerabilities arise. Sixty vehicles drive in and out of those dairy operations every day, bringing in feed, hauling off milk, driving workers to work, you name it. And germs travel extremely well when suspended in milk. Many of the sale barns are wide open places, and only a few have even token security, says Todd. "These operations claim to have real biosecurity, but it's superficial." Infiltrating these facilities, then, is not all that difficult.
But Todd has a far easier target for you: a cattle truck. There's not much biosecurity to a cattle truck sitting at a rest stop, on its way to a contract farm or a sale barn. Your compact rental car can pull right alongside the truck loaded full of animals after the driver steps into the Waffle House for a plate of eggs and cup of coffee. You can walk up to the side of the long open-corral trailer with your test tube of — insert virus of your choice here, say foot-and-mouth disease virus, held in liquid slurry form — uncork it, and swat its contents inside, like a priest anointing his congregation with holy water. On roughly the seventh day, results should materialize.
Your macabre blessing, unleashed on a truckload of cattle, just created a wide-scale food shortage and in so doing, proceeds to tank over one-tenth of America's total economic output.[54] You've sent America a brutal reminder of where its abundant food comes from, and created national mass hysteria in the process. Says Dr. Huxsoll, "If you had a major agricultural catastrophe, you'd see the disappearance of a lot of family farms and the disappearance of a lot of small rural communities."
Attacking the American food supply is the simplest form of biological warfare available to a terrorist. United States agriculture is vertically integrated, accessible, and concentrated. The fact that American livestock has been fortunate enough to be disease-free has a downside. Not being needed, vaccines aren't widely used, making herds extremely susceptible to infectious foreign germs. And because of the high level of animal intermingling and herd combination, recombination, and consolidation, there's no way an infection can be limited to an isolated occurrence, and there's no way it can be traced. "We're such a wide-open target, it's just unbelievable," Todd laments. "Because we're so damn incredibly efficient. Agribusinesses move pigs like Wal-Mart moves toilet paper and motor oil." There's significantly less bioprotection in place for animals than there is for humans; and there's no expensive research and development, mass production, or bomb delivery device prerequisites either. A kitchen laboratory and chemistry textbook would suffice. If left unguarded, we won't know what hit us until that animal truck strewn with disease begets millions of hungry and panicked Americans scouring empty supermarket shelves coast to coast.
The worst part of this scenario is that it pales in comparison to what the al Qaeda terrorist network or a well-trained scientist-cum-terrorist already has in mind, waiting for the right moment to unleash upon an unsuspecting — and strikingly vulnerable — America.
In August 2002, CNN broadcast excerpts from al Qaeda videotapes showing three tests of a white oozing liquid being unleashed on Labradors, romping around in a closed test room. On film, the trapped dogs quickly turn dour. They begin to yelp and writhe in pain and go on to suffer agonizing deaths from these mysterious chemical or biological agents. Made available to a CNN reporter outside of Kabul, Afghanistan (home of Bashiruddin Mahmood's "charity"), the disturbing tapes show "meticulous planning and attention to the tradecraft of terror," in the words of terrorist expert Magnus Ranstorp. Recently, an Algerian terrorist cooperating with U.S. authorities testified he was taught by al Qaeda how to smear biological toxins on doorknobs. The techniques are similar to those used by German terrorists who smeared glanders bacteria on the gums of horses in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York during World War I.
If you don't think agro- or bioterrorism could be coming soon to an American town near you, you need to think again.
A former military intelligence commando, Gary Stubblefield runs a consulting firm that specializes in ultra-high security. Four years ago he was writing a report on the national security threats of radiological emission devices (REDs) and national food security, warning of possible terrorist threats. "All the national labs just looked at us and laughed," he recalls, when they read his report. "Said it was ridiculous." Today, no one is laughing, and the hulky Stubblefield is spending seventy-five hours a week flying all over the world for the Pentagon to stymie the threat of REDs, or "dirty bombs." Yet with all his time spent confronting the dirty bomb threat, he hasn't forgotten about the food security issues he also once raised. "They laughed us out of the room back then on that one, too," he recalls. But people are starting to realize that our food supply may be the next target.
"Here's one of the scary things," Stubblefield says. "Those guys watch CNN just like we do, they see what happened economically to us, and how we reacted to that small anthrax situation — and I only say small because it didn't spread widely. They recognize this, and it has been written in their intercepted literature that 'We can bring down the giant economically, and that too will kill him.' If they can find a way to stop our food supply, they believe they will bring America to a halt." Stubblefield says that since its inception, al Qaeda's modus operandi involves simultaneously attacking multiple targets, which can include planned attacks on our food.
The state of Montana decided to get serious. After September 11, 2001, officials asked Stubblefield to come up with a plan to protect the agriculturally rich state from agroterrorism. Among other defense options, Stub-blefield proposed fiber-optic detection cables, run along fence lines. "If anything gets inside," he says, "an alarm will go off and tell you exactly where it was set off." Though Stubblefield's fiber-optic security solution is effective and easy to install, the cable is fairly expensive, and no one is stepping forward to pick up the tab. "The rancher doesn't feel he has to pay because he says it isn't his problem. His mission in life is to raise stock and sell it — they don't understand this. I don't think they have a clue." What about the USDA? "The feds are saying they can't do it because it's not their responsibility either. Everybody is sidestepping the issue." Montana hasn't implemented a full agroterrorism program, and no other state has either. Is the food supply close to being protected? "We are quite far away," he says. "I think we are still at the discussion level, and that is shortsighted. We should be more proactive."
54
The American livestock industry makes up 13.3 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product, accounting for $100 billion in sales every year.