HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, in announcing his resignation Friday, said there’s one fear that keeps him up at night.
Thompson had said he worries “every single night” about a possible terror attack on the food supply, and despite dramatic increases in inspections of food imports, only “a very minute amount” of food is tested at ports and airports.
“For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do,” Thompson said. “We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that.”
This was, of course, an odd thing for the cabinet secretary to say. If this has him in a near-paniced state, why hasn’t Thompson been emphaszing this vulnerability for the last four years?
But far more troubling was the reaction from Thompson’s boss.
President Bush expressed no alarm Saturday about a warning from his outgoing top health official that the U.S. food supply is vulnerable to terror attacks but would not deny the assessment and assert that the nation’s food is safe.
Bush was questioned, after an Oval Office meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, about comments by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson about the vulnerability of the U.S. food supply. Thompson spoke Friday as he announced his coming departure from the Bush administration.
“We’re a large country with all kinds of avenues where somebody can inflict harm,” Bush said. “We’re doing everything we can to protect the American people. There’s a lot of work to be done.”
In other words, Bush’s response was effectively a shoulder-shrug. This reaction sounds like the equivalent of Bush’s reaction to an intelligence briefing in August 2001 that told him bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States — which prompted the president to take a month-long vacation.
I feel safer already.