Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, April 22, 2003

According to the New York Times, for about a month now a team of specially trained National Guard soldiers has been testing for biological agents in hotels, tourist sites, government buildings — including City Hall — office buildings such as the World Financial Center and other places on a list of possible targets, primarily in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. The team has made nearly daily visits to as many as 30 sites.

"Our job is to give the local authorities quick, preliminary information so they can save lives," Maj. Kaarlo J. Hietala, commander of the 22-member National Guard unit, told the Times. "We help provide the preliminary information they need to make decisions about whether to restrict access or quarantine an area, and how to handle patients."

The unit, based in Scotia, N.Y., is one of 32 Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams located across around the country, but the only one now testing for unconventional weapons in urban areas. The Pentagon began forming the full-time guard teams in 1998 to help assess the scope and severity of a possible terrorist attack by testing for unconventional weapons and then advising civilian agencies on how best to deal with them.

The New York unit works with list of potential targets supplied by the city police department

They go about their jobs in an almost nondescript fashion, clad in unidentifiable blue uniforms, which are actually low-level chemical protection suits, and drive mostly in unmarked vehicles with the New York Police Department officers with whom they work.

The Times described the team at work, citing a recent visit to the World Financial Center, where Maj. Hietala and Master Sgt. Michael Hartzel, both wearing their blue uniforms, went into a cinder-block fan room in a subbasement, put on latex gloves and climbed through a small access panel where Hietala took a wooden-stemmed cotton swab from a kit in a black knapsack and drew it across a filter that cleans the air pumped into a garage beneath the building.

The swab was sealed inside a small vial and placed in a larger specimen bottle and then into a heavy zippered plastic bag. On the previous, soldiers from the unit checked the ventilation system that filters the air that office workers breathe in the tower above, the major explained.

The swabs were tested for a wide range of biological agents, including smallpox and anthrax, he said. As they have each day since the team arrived in New York City on March 19, the results came back negative.

The Guardsmen, working with the police department, have also been monitoring for chemical agents and radiological contamination, supplementing open-air testing done in several areas by the city health department and, under a new nationwide program, by the federal Department of Homeland Security.

They use sensitive equipment, have a mobile laboratory for preliminary analysis, and can forward samples to more sophisticated city, state or federal labs. They are equipped carry small radiation detectors, similar to those used by some police officers and firefighters, chemical agent detectors and other detection and testing gear.

Made up of full-time National Guard soldiers who are each trained in a particular specialty, the New York unit also has a sophisticated communications truck that can send encrypted data to laboratories such as the one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta over a secure satellite link.

Their work underscores the growing concerns among local and federal authorities about a terrorist attack using unconventional weapons, concerns that heightened when United States and British forces invaded Iraq.

Al-Qaeda, according to intelligence agencies and testimony in federal terrorism trials, has long sought chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, including a so-called dirty bomb: a conventional explosive jacketed in radioactive material that would send out a plume over a limited area. The Guard units and police officials have a computer programs that allows them to track a hypothetical plume across the city and calculate its full effect.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Al-Qaeda
Bioterrorism
Bush Administration
Homeland/Civil Defense
War on Terrorism
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