| Sunday,
October 19, 2003 More on the Nanny State
THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/18/national/18AMIS.html
Foes of Idle Hands, Amish Contest a Child
Labor Law
IN New York Times, 18 October, 2003
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa., Oct. 14 -- Over the din of
a buzzing band saw, the Amish furniture maker complained that Uncle Sam
was out to get owners of woodworking shops like his simply for trying to
teach Amish youths a trade.
The Amish just want to be let alone, he said,
but the federal government is meddling in their lives and livelihoods by
fining Amish sawmills and woodworking shops that employ teenagers, in
violation of child labor law.
Why not? We have done so very well civilizing all the children of our
cities. Let's go teach others how to live! Mind someone else's
business, quick. Bureaucrats count the day as wasted in which they
have not, in the name of adherence to rules, blighted a life.
======================================
Feeling safer already:
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/butlerindictedplague.html
http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2003/sep/prof1_030922.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/national/19PLAG.html?
ex=1067140800&en=9582c2e74694e54
e&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
And tonight's 60 Minutes.
The Secret Federal Police have apparently decided we can win the war on
terrorism by "sending a message" to the US scientific community.
The message I received was:
If you talk to any agent of the US government without a lawyer present
you deserve what will happen to you, and it probably will.
The victors of Waco are still in the business of making it clear who is
on top and who is subordinate to them. And we can win the war on terrorism
without any willing cooperation from any stinking scientists: we can
intimidate them into telling us what we need to know. This seems to be the
new strategy of dealing with intellectuals.
Tom Butler should be in the lead in our battle to prevent Plague and
other biowar agents from being used against us. Instead, he is being used
to "send a message".
In August, the presidents of the
National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine warned the
Unites States Attorney General by letter "about the impact that
Butler's case may have on other scientists who may be discouraged from
embarking upon or continuing crucial bioterrorism-related scientific
research ...." The National Academies' Committee on Human Rights
followed suit, protesting government treatment of a US researcher for only
the second time in its 27 years. The first time was its defense of Wen Ho
Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory two years ago.
Donald Henderson, director of the
Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University,
predicts the FBI's conduct in Butler's case will create a schism:
"... Anybody in the scientific community [will be] very reluctant to
talk to the FBI on any number of issues."
======
The case began when Butler, a
decorated Vietnam War veteran and tenured professor in infectious
diseases, alerted his supervisors that he could not find some of the
plague specimens he had brought back. Colleagues say Butler expected an
internal investigation, but campus police instead alerted federal
authorities. Butler was arrested and taken away in handcuffs. Butler, who
had waived his right to an attorney, was interrogated alone throughout
that night and into the next day, according to court records.
"Doctor Butler felt he was on the same team, so he didn't bother to
get a lawyer -- big mistake," said his friend William Bates Greenough
III, a professor of international medicine at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg
School of Public Health.
Butler was kept under house arrest for months and is prohibited from
returning to Texas Tech. Greenough, arguing that Butler's research is
critical to homeland defense, is lobbying the scientific journal Lancet to
publish Butler's findings on possible new plague treatments.
Many scientists see a bitter irony in the Butler case, arguing that the
war on terrorism appears to be targeting a man thought to be one of the
leading warriors.
==============
We should all feel much safer now.
Of course this all sounds like paranoid ravings, but then Waco sounds
like a nightmare that couldn't possibly have happened.
The fact is that when you build a secret police, you build an
instrument that can protect you, but it is an institution, and like all
such, protects itself first and you second. I don't mean that individual
agents won't sacrifice their lives for the public; I mean that the
institution considers itself so important that no individual is more so,
and it is worth a very great deal to avoid embarrassing -- and thus
harming the effectiveness 0f -- the secret police.
This seems to be what is happening here. The FBI and the Homeland
Security people simply cannot comprehend the life of the scientific
community, and certainly cannot comprehend that anything is more important
than their work. After all, here were 30 vials of plague! Plague! This
must be important, panic ensued, alarm bells were wrung; when it all
turned out to be messy paperwork, sloppiness, absentmindedness on the part
of an intellectual, well, that would be terribly embarrassing.
So it was cooked up that something bad had really happened, and this
crazy professor was induced to sign some papers, and now it can sort of
all be smoothed over. Only the higher ups in the Homeland Security
Department heard about it. Plague! Thirty vials of Plague! BLACK DEATH!
Someone must be responsible, this must not happen again, it is well to
sacrifice one individual who has already signed his doom warrant without
knowing it.
By the time sanity had crept in it was a bit late. The man was charged.
And when hushup deals were proposed, just go off to a little jail time,
the professor was furious and said no. Now the INTEGRITY OF THE
INSTITUTION is at stake. RUIN HIM. HOW DARE HE question our INTEGRITY! We
are the protectors of the nation.
And since rule of law has long since gone, and there are few enough of
us who cannot be convicted of something, we'll just pile the charges on
this schlubb so that a jury will see that his word is no good.
That's one interpretation of the events.
Another is that Butler really is a dirty vicious liar (after all these
years of the scientific community believing otherwise) and he really
deserves years and years in jail over some paper work errors, and possible
misallocation of grant funds.
I doubt much of this will be put to the jury, but we'll see. An
American jury may yet see this for what it is. And may not. After all the
victims of Waco remain in jail, and everyone conveniently forgets about
the dead.
But Butler is no Hatfill. Hatfill isn't particularly likable, and
although he seems to have his champions and his claims to expertise, he's
not the world-renowned figure Tom Butler is.
And declaring war on the scientists is not always intelligent.
There must be some adults somewhere in Washington DC. It's not quite
too late to do justice here. But I doubt anyone cares. The integrity of
the secret police is at stake now.
The message has been sent; but to me the message to the scientific
community is one of warning and danger.
===================
Subject: The historically preferred antibiotic against the plague,
streptomycin, is no longer manufactured in the United States
Did you see THIS little gem
in one of the articles on the Butler case you linked? :
Plague bacteria
could be an attractive weapon for terrorists. If the bacteria could be
dispersed through the air, thousands of people might become sick within
days. The historically preferred antibiotic against the plague,
streptomycin, is no longer manufactured in the United States, and there is
concern that if an outbreak did occur, not enough drugs would be
available.
Kim
===
No, I didn't see it. Doubtless if we have any kind of outbreak they will
give Professor Butler release time to let him work on doing something
about it. I might even be able to do a good novel about that, prisoner,
infected with AIDS in prison, now needed desperately to save the
nation... I doubt I have the heart to do that book.
In a democracy the people get the government they deserve, and they get
it good and hard, said Mencken. Is that what's happening here? The people
really want to see some intellectuals punished for loosing these horrors?
The thin grey-flannel line stands between us and terror.
Continued next week.
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