It’s a pleasure for me to appear before you today, and quite encouraging to me personally that you are holding a hearing on this subject. Congress cannot pay too much attention to the fact that we live in an era of information technology which has, unfortunately, greatly increased the danger to the United States and the world of asymmetric weapons: weapons which have a destructive potential that is highly disproportionate to the power and resources it requires to develop and deploy them. Of the asymmetric dangers we face, the threat of a bio-attack is, in my judgment, one of the greatest and gravest.
I will address that subject later in my testimony. First I want to describe how I came to be familiar with this issue.
One of the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission was that Congress focus on the danger of weapons of mass destruction proliferating to terrorist groups. So in 2007 Congress created a Commission to study the danger and report on measures that could be taken to minimize it. I was asked to co-chair the Commission with Senator Bob Graham of Florida. There were a total of nine members on our bi-partisan Commission.
Shortly after our Commission was formed, we met with Senator Harry Reid at his request. Senator Reid explained his interest in the subject of our work, and encouraged us to highlight clearly those aspects of the WMD terrorism threat which we believed were the most significant; he urged us in the strongest terms to tell us what we thought Congress most needed to know about the danger. We did so in a Report released at the end of 2008 called “World at Risk.”
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