On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, JC Helary wrote:
> Any chance this firing will become another scandal a la FEMA but the other
> way round or no ?
No. For the American people, this is a matter of ignorance wrapped in indifference and shrouded in inside baseball. Not a chance.
But speaking of Brown/FEMA scandal and Amtrak, this could possibly be a little one: the Bushits just appointed a sycophantic crony with no medical experience to head up the anti-Pandemic program. (Who just coincidentally used to be drawing his stipend at Amtrak.)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051128/scahill
Germ Boys and Yes Men
by JEREMY SCAHILL
[from the November 28, 2005 issue]
In early November George W. Bush, struggling to claw his way upward in
polls that had acquired the consistency of quicksand after two months
of blunders and disasters, launched a new PR blitz. The Administration
declared it was taking charge of the nation's health and security with
an all-out war on the flu (to be conducted with vaccines provided by
well-connected pharmaceutical companies). "Our country has been given
fair warning of this danger to our homeland," Bush declared. "It's my
responsibility as President to take measures now to protect the
American people."
But if Bush hoped to wipe away the stain of Katrina--and the memory of
a hapless Michael Brown steering FEMA in circles while New Orleans
drowned--he should have thought twice about bringing up the specter of
a public health emergency, because the man responsible for
coordinating the federal response to a flu pandemic or bioterror
attack could well be the next Michael Brown.
Meet Stewart Simonson. He's the official charged by Bush with "the
protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and
other public health emergencies"--a well-connected, ideological,
ambitious Republican with zero public health management or medical
expertise, whose previous job was as a corporate lawyer for Amtrak.
When Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of
State Colin Powell, recently speculated, "If something comes along
that is truly serious...like a major pandemic, you are going to see
the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to
the Declaration of Independence," many of those professionally
concerned with such scenarios couldn't help thinking of Simonson. They
recalled his own unsettling words at a recent Homeland Security
subcommittee hearing on government response to a chemical or
biological attack: "We're learning as we go."
"Great. What we need in the middle of a crisis is somebody learning on
the job at that high level of government," says Jerry Hauer,
Simonson's immediate predecessor at the Office of Public Health
Emergency Preparedness (OPHEP) and a veteran public health expert who
served as Rudy Giuliani's director of emergency management from 1996
to 2000.
"If I was in charge, he wouldn't be in that position," says Dr. Irwin
Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at
Columbia University. "We don't have the best and brightest in the key
positions, and this leaves us in a very, very precarious situation."
So how is it that Simonson ended up in a position that could impact
the lives and health of millions? Simonson's qualifications can be
summed up in two words: Tommy Thompson. Simonson was a protégé of the
former Health and Human Services secretary and longtime Republican
governor of Wisconsin. Thompson hired him out of the University of
Wisconsin Law School in 1995 and put him on the political fast track,
eventually naming him as his legal counsel. Thompson then used his
influence as chair of Amtrak's board to place Simonson as the rail
service's corporate counsel. When Bush named Thompson as HHS
secretary, Simonson again went with him, and he has been rising
through the ranks of the Administration and the Republican Party ever
since. "He's a political hack, a sycophant," says Ed Garvey, a
prominent Wisconsin attorney and the state's former deputy attorney
general. "People just laughed when he was appointed to Amtrak, but
when the word came out that he was in charge of bioterrorism, it
turned to alarm. When you realize that people's lives are at stake,
it's frightening. It's just one of those moments when you say, Oh, my
God."
Rest at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051128/scahill
Michael