Legion of Angels News Archive

SAN FRANCISCO – “Weapons of mass destruction multi-agency exercise.”

If I’ve ever covered an event with a more stark title, I can’t think of it.

But there I was Saturday morning, along with several hundred firefighters, police officers, Army National Guard personnel, and members of other local, state, and federal agencies for a large-scale exercise designed to help train all these emergency responders how to deal with a major terrorist attack involving suspected chemical weapons or other bio-hazards.

As a bulletin announcing the exercise put it, the goal was for the agencies’ personnel to “identify the emergency and work as one large team to protect and save lives and mitigate the hazards.”

Practically speaking, this was quite the undertaking. Upon arriving in the middle of San Francisco’s usually crowded financial district, I encountered no traffic, but a wide variety of emergency vehicles and dozens upon dozens of people in almost every official uniform you can imagine.

This is not the first time San Francisco has run an exercise like this. Last year, the city ran another such scenario at the famous pyramid-shaped Transamerica building. This time, the owners of 555 California St., one of the city’s largest office buildings, had asked the city to prepare an exercise in their building. And so for the last year, the city and the owner of that building and another nearby had been planning this day.

The scenario was this: a terrorist with a backpack full of sodium cyanide–a chemical used in gold mines that quickly attacks and shuts down the human respiratory system–unleashed it inside 555 California.

The attack instantly kills a number of people and injures others.

Because of the victims, the fire department is the first to arrive on the scene, and when the firefighters discover what’s happened, they isolate the building’s lobby and deny entry into the building by anyone else, and then quickly set up a mass decontamination system nearby. And then they call in the specialists.

This is, of course, the whole point: to bring in the many different types of specialists to deal with the variety of complexities a situation like this creates.

But to make it even more complicated, the scenario had more to it: emergency personnel also discover an improvised explosive device inside 555 California, and just when they’re dealing with everything going on there, there’s also a shooting in another office building nearby.

By the time the press was allowed into the scene, all this was under way. We got a quick briefing from SFFD public information officer Mindy Talmadge, who explained that the exercise, which cost about a quarter million dollars, was paid for with federal grant money.

One of the elements of the scenario was that no one actually knows at first what the terrorist has attacked with. It seems obvious it is some form of chemical weapon, but the specifics are still a mystery. Finding out and then disseminating that information is one of the goals of the exercise.

“They knew it was a CBRN (chemical, biological, radioactive or nuclear) event,” said Talmadge, “and that it was a terrorist event. They don’t know what the chemical is. They have to decide based on what they find and what they heard.”

In the scenario, the attack has happened on a busy weekday, but of course, it’s actually a quiet Saturday and downtown is rather empty. There are some random pedestrians walking through the scene–which is closed to automobiles, but not foot traffic, since many local businesses were open–and it is sort of odd to see them passing through what is otherwise an extremely unusual and macabre scene.

“I doubt people would be walking calmly around” during a real emergency, Talmadge admits.

But of course, shutting down several blocks of the city’s financial district on a weekday would be a pretty significant thing.

At a press briefing later involving the chiefs of both the fire and police department, I asked if there was any possibility of ever running this kind of exercise during a workday, since it would seem that it would be helpful for these emergency personnel to learn how to handle such a situation with countless people and vehicles around.

“It would be a challenge, but if the community wanted it, we would plan and find the resources to do it” and deal with the inconveniences, said SFPD Chief Heather Fong.

Another interesting part of all this is just how slow everything and everyone seems to be moving.

Even as the exercise was in full swing, everywhere you looked, emergency personnel were standing around in groups, talking, sitting on overturned newspaper boxes, and otherwise waiting for something to do.

One man from the 95th Civil Support Team–a federal agency that specializes in WMD situations–in a blue hazmat suit that was pulled about halfway up his body, was intently looking at a device in his hands that had an orange antenna and looked a little bit like a Wi-Fi router. He said it was an air monitor and was used to measure what was in the air nearby.

At the same time, a fireman in a bright yellow hazmat suit was brandishing another device, this one looking like a circa 1984 cell phone. He said it was a gas detector used to determine what gases might be in the area.

All in all though, most of the people milling around, many in hazmat suits, others in a variety of official uniforms, were looking bored and like they wanted something to do.

But this is according to plan. That’s because one thing that seems very important to everyone in charge here is that in the course of trying to help out the victims of the attack, the emergency responders don’t themselves become victims.

And that means moving slowly and methodically.

According to SFFD Chief Joanne Hayes-White, one of the main goals of this scenario is to the members of all the various agencies that would be involved in the response to a real attack together so that they begin to know each other.

“It’s difficult to have the level of seriousness (you would have) in a real situation” in an exercise, Hayes-White acknowledged, “but it’s a good lesson for us.”

She said that prior to September 11, emergency personnel were trained to charge right into buildings where something had gone seriously wrong. But the lessons of the post-September 11 world is that it is important to know exactly what the situation is before sending vital personnel in unprepared.

Still, Hayes-White admitted that it is hard for highly trained responders to just stand around and wait for as much as two hours–which is what was happening Saturday.

“They might be feeling a little frustrated and a little awkward about standing around,” she told me. “But we want to keep everybody safe. And it’s sometimes difficult to simulate that.”

After awhile, we went back inside the lobby of 555 California where the man from the 95th CST and another from the police department, both in serious hazmat suits, were investigating what was clearly supposed to be the chemical agent causing all the ruckus.

With the “victims” still lying prone on the floor nearby, the two methodically worked on the chemical in an attempt to identify it.

The idea here is that until now, no one knew what the chemical was, and therefore how to respond to it. Soon enough, however, word came that they had identified it as sodium cyanide, and quickly the word went out over the radios.

The men take three samples of the chemical, one that is put away, never to be opened, one to be tested and a third for a re-test, if that’s necessary.

And it’s tricky work, largely because the men are trying to work with cotton swabs and other small items while wearing thick gloves. Indeed, as they work, they drop their swabs on the floor at least once.

They are also working with a small computer that a member of the 95th CST tells me is called an Ouera, and is used to analyze the chemicals found at the scene.

“It tests whatever the substance is,” said Sgt. Maj. Daniel Morales of the 95th CST. “We take the sample over to our mobile laboratory. And if they’re not able to determine what it is, they’ll take it over to Lawrence Livermore” National Lab.

Eventually, the two men in hazmat suits are done, and they leave. They walk across the street where they are put through what is called technical decontamination. This is a process involving a careful and thorough scrubbing down of their suits, and then each part of the multiple layers they are wearing. The idea is to ensure that nothing touches their skin until they are completely clean.

The exercise will continue for several hours, but the major activity is over now.

Since this wasn’t the first time San Francisco has had an exercise like this, it’s natural to wonder what the city learned from doing it again.

Hayes-White said that, among other things, she felt that the various agencies had found some improvements in the way they were communicating with each other during the exercise. And of course, such communications are vital since with several hundred emergency personnel on the scene, it’s crucial that everyone know what is going on and what they should be doing.

But Hayes-White also stressed that much about the day would only be known afterwards at a series of reviews of the exercise

For me, it was very interesting to watch this evolve.

Given that such an attack would almost certainly happen during a busy weekday, it’s hard to feel like this exercise, held on a quiet weekday is anything like what the real thing would be like.

I think, ultimately, the real point of this is what Hayes-White alluded to: the need for the various agencies to learn how to work together and to build a collective command structure in the event something horrible like a WMD attack actually happened.

And to be honest, anything that these agencies can learn about how to proceed during what Fong called an “inevitable” attack is worthwhile. Let’s just hope these agencies have the time to carry out a few more of these scenarios and learn a few more lessons before that happens.

Source — Yahoo!

For 41 hours, he stood on the sidewalk.

He was just 17 years old, a freshman at Boston University, and he didn’t know what else to do. A jury in New York had just acquitted the four police officers whose 41 bullets had killed an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo.

So Joshua DuBois wrote “NO MORE” on a placard, planted himself on an expanse of pavement along Commonwealth Avenue, in front of a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., and stood there - 41 hours for 41 shots.

“I was completely disconnected from social activism, or the world around me - I was almost devoid of a social consciousness before then,” DuBois said. “But I was struck by the injustice. So I stood in the middle of Marsh Plaza with a sign and tried to talk to whoever came by.”

That vigil - which the politic DuBois now says he thinks of as a listening session and not a protest - marked the beginning of a journey for DuBois that has now taken him, at the age of 25, to the post of religious affairs director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

DuBois, who says he found his religious and political voice while a student in Boston, heads what has become the most intensive outreach effort by a Democratic candidate to people of faith in a nation where the most frequent worshipers also tend to be Republican. He oversees a staff of four, as well as six interns, who have organized about 200 town hall meetings about faith and now are launching a series of smaller house parties to discuss values and the campaign.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of folks who have never voted for a Democrat before really give Senator Obama a hard look,” DuBois said. “We don’t expect to outright win the evangelical vote - for some his positions are a nonstarter, and we respect that - but there are a whole bunch of others who may disagree with him on some tough issues, but agree on others and say, ‘I’m going to vote for him.’ ”

Dubois has had a hand in numerous efforts to reach out to the faith community - he pulled together Obama’s recent meeting with conservative evangelical leaders, for example. His shop also oversees a faith portion of the Obama website where staff members blog about faith-related developments, and provides resources for a large number of faith-oriented campaign groups such as Utah Catholics for Obama. And, DuBois said, his group also counsels church officials on how to comply with tax regulations limiting their political activities.

“We’re very upfront - we’re a campaign, and we want you to vote for Senator Obama - but we’re not going to try to co-opt religion, we’re not going to try to use religion to divide folks, we’re not going to steal church directories to call people to vote,” he said.

DuBois was born in Bar Harbor, Maine, and spent his first few years in Cambridge, but was raised in Nashville, which he considers his hometown, and then in Xenia, Ohio, where he attended high school. His stepfather is an itinerant minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He chose BU, he said, because “I wanted to see the world - to go to a bigger city - and BU stuck out as a cosmopolitan campus in the middle of a downtown area.”

During his vigil on the plaza, among those who stopped by to talk was Eugene Schneeberg, a fellow student at BU, who invited DuBois to church. “Initially, I was not interested in reintegrating myself in a Christian community, because I figured I knew it all, growing up in the church,” DuBois said. “But what I didn’t really know was how to have a personal relationship with Jesus.”

DuBois wound up joining Schneeberg’s congregation, Calvary Praise & Worship Center, a tiny evangelical congregation in Cambridge affiliated with the United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God, a small, predominantly African-American denomination. DuBois, although just a teenager, started preaching when the pastor was away and was named an associate pastor. He and Schneeberg also led Bible study at a halfway house, and some days they would walk along Massachusetts Avenue, offering pizza and conversation to homeless folks along the way.

“He was just 18 or 19, but his wisdom belied his age,” said the Rev. Warren F. Collins, pastor of the church.

DuBois graduated cum laude from BU in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. From BU, he went to Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and National Affairs, where he earned a master’s degree in public affairs in 2005. He then enrolled in the part-time program at Georgetown University Law School, but he left for the campaign.

At the same time, he was quickly garnering experience in politics, as an aide to Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, and then as a fellow in the office of Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York.

He first encountered Obama on television - DuBois was at a restaurant in Washington when he saw Obama’s keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston - and he was struck in particular by one Obama line, “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States.”

“I had been struggling with whether I should go into ministry or politics, and I felt that God was leading me to find a way to do both, but I didn’t know any politician that got that intersection right,” DuBois said. “That phrase jarred me.”

DuBois decided he wanted to work for Obama, then a candidate for the US Senate. He wrote to Obama’s campaign manager and got a form rejection. After Obama arrived in Washington, DuBois twice drove to his office but failed to get a job interview. After a third appeal, Obama hired him as a Senate aide. Part of his job was addressing faith issues.

Adam Taylor, the senior political director at Sojourners, an evangelical antipoverty organization, said DuBois became “part of a loose network of progressive-minded Christians” who have been meeting in Washington for the past few years.

Taylor said that although DuBois grew up in the black church, whose adherents have traditionally voted for Democrats, he has proved deft at reaching out to “parts of the electorate that were almost written off by Democrats for decades, particularly white evangelicals and white Catholics.”

DuBois’s counterpart in the Hillary Clinton campaign, Burns Strider, said DuBois has done well communicating with religious voters for the Obama campaign.

“He’s a young guy, but folks should not be fooled by that,” Strider said. “After the Kerry-Bush race, when a handful of us were taking up the cause of expanding the faith conversation in the Democratic Party, Joshua was one of those with us. He has a lot of knowledge and toughness, is really focused on his job, and does it quite well.”

Source — The Boston Globe

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) – A suicide attacker killed at least eight people Sunday, including Pakistani police officers who were stationed near a rally protesting last year’s raid at the Red Mosque, Pakistan’s acting interior minister said.

A police official said earlier that the blast killed 10 police officers.

Video showed the bodies of policemen lying on the side of the road, while other seriously injured police officers and civilians were loaded onto stretchers and taken to waiting ambulances.

The attacker struck the police position on a roundabout around 8 p.m., near the rally and a marketplace.

The police were stationed at the outermost security perimeter, part of a protection cordon set up by the government for Sunday’s rally, according to Islamabad police Inspector General Asghar Gardezi.

It’s unclear if the suicide attacker was on foot or in a vehicle.

Pakistan’s acting Interior Minister Rehman Malik said about 12,000 people attended Sunday’s rally, which marked the first anniversary of government forces storming Islamabad’s Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid.

Malik, who went to the blast site shortly after the attack, said there were no lapses in security at Sunday’s rally. He said eight people were killed and 22 were wounded.

Last year’s July 10 raid — ordered by President Pervez Musharraf, who was Pakistan’s army chief at the time — ended a weeklong bloody standoff between military forces and Islamic extremists.

Nearly 100 people died when the security forces stormed the mosque. Most were radical students holed up inside, but the deaths included some women and children as well.

The raid was intended to rout Islamic extremists who hoped to establish a Taliban-style rule across the capital.

In retaliation, suicide bombers launched several strikes targeting civilians, police and security forces.

The raid led to the collapse of a cease-fire between Musharraf’s government and tribal leaders in the lawless territories along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The 2006 truce was blamed for establishing a safe haven for Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

Source — CNN