Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Come Out of the Containment Unit

Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Come Out of the Containment Unit

Gary Anderson

There has been a lot of alarm spread about Ebola and the past weeks, and I am loathe to add fuel to the fire, but I am concerned about the possible weaponizing of Ebola by Islamic extremists. I was the Chief of Staff of The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in the late 90s, and we examined the problem; at the time we concluded that it is too hard to turn Ebola into a weapon due to the difficulty of transmission. However, what we did not consider at the time was deliberate transmission by a human being to other people effectively becoming, an Ebola Suicide Device (ESD). If that sounds far-fetched, consider the fact that Yemeni terrorists developed the shoe bomb and have been reportedly working on an undetectable toothpaste bomb. These efforts require a certain amount of technological sophistication; the ESD would require none. Now also consider the fact that the Islamic State has used chemical weapons in Iraq and has actively recruited American school girls as “useful idiots”.

Both the Yemenis and they Syrian-based Khorason Group are well financed and have American passport holders in their ranks. Buying people airplane tickets to an infected African country and allowing these volunteers to wallow among the victims for a few days before heading for the US would not be hard since there are no travel restrictions in place and the infiltrators would not yet show symptoms; it would be fairly easy to have the human time bombs ill and infecting many victims before they themselves become too sick to move.

Our current precautions at the five American international airports designated to screen incoming passengers for Ebola assume that the passengers involved are unaware that they may be infected and have nothing to hide. Even a passenger who suspects that he or she may be infected and is trying to get to the United States in the chance of getting better treatment is not likely to be deliberately trying to infect other people. Consequently, we may have created a critical vulnerability through lack of anticipation. An American doctor recently tested positive for Ebola, and has been loose in New York for several weeks.

A reasonable precaution would be to check the passports of those passengers coming into the country from the affected nations to see if the holder has recently been in Turkey, Yemen, or other nations used as terror transit points so they can receive special attention. It would be considered to be politically incorrect to profile military age Muslim men and women who fit that travel footprint, but then again, we are much better at closing the barn door after the horse has gone AWOL than we are at anticipating asymmetric attacks.

Another potential danger is a home grown terrorist, such as the afore-mentioned school girls, making a quick trip from a place like Minneapolis to Liberia or Sierra Leone. Again, neither of these places is a tourist magnet. I’m not suggesting a McCarthy-like persecution for anyone visiting those countries, but with the exception of health care professionals and reporters, I’d be a little suspicious of any Americans junketing in a hot zone.

Our government policy makers have ruled out flight restrictions for reasons that probably have more to do with progressive sensibilities than national security concerns, but they could at least allow border officials who are doing the screening to use common sense in evaluating the profiles of incoming travelers and the latitude to temporarily quarantine folks whose stories, “just don’t seem right”.

To date, a lack of prudence and anticipation of what could possibly go wrong among people who get paid to know better, allowed Ebola to spread beyond what should have been seen as acceptable bounds. The problem with big government is that it is necessarily specialized and it is not well prepared to deal with problems that cross organizational boundaries.

Our opponents in the community that makes up international terrorism are very competitive and reward innovation; thinking outside the box is encouraged among jihadists as actively as it is discouraged among the bureaucrats of the CDC and Customs and Immigration bureaucrats. There is a notable lack of thinking ahead and anticipating in the way we are approaching this crisis. The “Czar” appointed to coordinate the response is a venture capitalist and not a public health official, and perhaps that is good. Venture capitalists are trained to think holistically, not just in terms of narrow scientific problem boundaries.

We have a very bad habit in this country in underestimating the imagination of our enemies. In writing this, I realize that I will be criticized for potentially giving the bad guys ideas that they may not have had. My greatest fear is that they have already had such ideas, and may be acting on them already.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who teaches Red Teaming at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.