1 COMMUNITY SHIELDING AND THE POLITICAL SYSTEM MICHAEL BARKUN PUBLISHED IN: What Is To Be Done?

Emerging Perspectives on Public Response to Bioterrorism, Charlottesville, VA: Critical Incident Response Group, University of Virginia School of Medicine, 2002. REPRINTED IN: International Journal of Emergency Mental Health 4 (Fall 2002), 265-70. A possible bioterrorist attack raises different problems than those confronted in other terrorism scenarios, a function of the nature of the threat, the manner in which the public perceives it, and the coercive nature of some available public health strategies, notably compulsory quarantine. As noted elsewhere, the search should be driven not only by considerations of efficacy but by the legal criterion of least restrictive means.

The Nature of Bioterrorism Since the universe of actual bioterrorist incidents is tiny, a consideration of the problems they pose might profitably begin with a different kind of crisis the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear reactor, outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in March 1979. This case has the advantage of also involving an insidious, invisible threat radiation and of having been extensively studied by social scientists. Two areas of interest emerge from the TMI research: the communitys search for information and the evacuation behavior of its members.. Concern about the accident generated numerous rumors, alleging serious health effects, such as increased cancer rates, stillborn children, and emotional problems.

2 Eighteen months later, all of these beliefs had been shown to be false or unverified, yet nearly one-third of respondents within five miles of the plant believed them to be true. The rumors were even more likely to be believed by those farther away. The quest for information generated frustrations that were still evident a year and a half after the accident. Half of all respondents were dissatisfied with the information provided by the media during the crisis.1 Evacuation behavior presents a more complex picture. No evacuation order was ever given, even though it was recommended by some staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC did recommend that individuals within ten miles of the plant stay indoors. Governor Richard Thornburgh recommended that pregnant women and preschool children within five miles leave the area. In two-thirds of the households within this radius at least one member eventually left. Half of those traveled at least 90 miles and stayed away at least five days. Researchers reported that 80%cited confusing information as a reason for leaving and almost as many reported that they left the area to avoid forced evacuation.2 This behavior differed considerably from that found in natural disasters, where residents often fail to heed official recommendations about evacuation because they believe their own judgment is better than that of the experts.3 This often leads, as in the case of hurricanes, to individuals staying rather than leaving. Such noncompliance exists because areas prone to natural disasters develop regional disaster cultures compounded of memory, tradition, and folk wisdom. As a result, residents often leave or stay more on
1

This and other TMI findings are drawn from Peter S. Houts, Paul D. Cleary, and T-W Hu, The Three Mile Island Crisis: Psychological, Social, and Economic Impacts on the Surrounding Population, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press (1988), pp. 78, 80. 2 Houts, Cleary, and Wu, p. 13. 3 Houts, Cleary, and Wu, p. 14.

3 the basis of their own judgments as on those of authorities, since they regard their personal judgments as more soundly based on experience. In the case of Three Mile Island, however, most residents had little or no personal knowledge base. The same is true of bioterrorism. Natural disasters occur frequently enough, over long enough periods of time, so that personal and communal data bases develop. This cumulative growth of information has not occurred for terrorism using weapons of mass destruction, with significant implications: The consequences of such attacks are particularly frightening both because little is known about them and because the agents are invisible pathogens, gases, and radiation. In addition, the absence of independently grounded knowledge makes the population not only far more dependent on outside information, but makes individuals vulnerable to conflicting or inconsistent messages from governmental and scientific authorities. This may lead to a special vulnerability, in which the direct effects of the attack are amplified by the anxiety produced by mixed messages. There is, however, another feature to bioterrorism: it is not a manmade disaster in the same way as, for example, Aum Shinrikyos sarin gas attack in 1995. The difference lies in the ambiguity that may characterize the onset of a bioterrorist incident. It is possible that a bioterrorist attack will be clearly identifiable as such from the moment it begins if, for example, a terrorist is discovered just as the pathogens are released, or if a group makes a claim of responsibility, or if the disease no longer occurs naturally (e.g., smallpox). However, it is quite possible that none of these conditions will be met, in which case the outbreak will initially be indistinguishable from that of a naturally occurring disease. It may only be identified as bioterrorism if direct evidence is

4 eventually found or if the dynamics of the outbreak provide circumstantial support for terrorist origins. This may not make much difference medically, but it will make a great difference to the actual and potential victims, who will respond differently to a manmade than to a natural disaster. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and the like are no longer viewed as divine punishment for sins or in any other way considered causally linked to their victims. But manmade disasters particularly those that result from intention rather than accident or negligence challenge our conception of a morally ordered world. We wish to live, as one social psychologist has put it, in a just world characterized by deservingness rather than random advantages and deprivations.4 After the first shock has passed, there is a drive to extract meaning from the event, so that the suffering no longer appears to have been arbitrary or pointless. This need to psychologically adjust to the tragedy of September 11th explains why some people outside the United States were willing to suggest that the attacks had been brought on by American foreign policy, making the victims partially responsible for their fate. The callousness and implausibility of this position seems to have done nothing to reduce its attraction. In the United States, the problem of restoring conceptions of moral order was addressed by emphasizing the malevolence of the enemy, the need to defeat an evil force, and emphasis upon the heroism of emergency personnel and the passengers on flight 93.

Melvin J. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, New York: Plenum (1980), p. 11.

5 The Information Problem Problems of information during times of crisis are not new, but they have changed over time. Reports of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, took four full days to reach all of France, spread by mail coaches that could travel no faster than ten or twelve kilometres an hour.5 The news came slowly and discontinuously, penetrating different localities at different times. Technological changes over the subsequent two centuries radically changed news accounts, which became national, then global, continuous, and often available in real time rather than on a delayed basis. One artifact of this change has been the creation in some crisis situations of vicarious victimization. This is evident in the widespread incidence of stress disorders after 9/11, discussed elsewhere in this monograph. Much the same response pattern was found after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.6 In both cases, continuous, saturation television coverage of an ongoing crisis appears to have been a critical catalyst of mental health problems. Such coverage can also produce public concern that appears disproportionate to the actual casualties or damage. Even though the anthrax letters resulted in only 23 cases and five deaths, the level of general anxiety was extraordinarily high. This was in part due to the fact that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks had already produced a national population of victims. People profoundly unsettled by the September 11th events required only a small manifestation of a particularly fearsome new danger bioterrorism -- to be brought to an even higher level of anxiety. The fear was thus less a function of
Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, New York: Vintage (1973), p. 67. 6 Bradley S. Green and Edwin B. Parker, Summary: Social Research on the Assassination, in Greenberg and Parker (eds.), The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public: Social Communication in Crisis, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1965), pp. 361-84.
5

6 the casualties produced than of the means used to produce them. The 9/11 attacks had accomplished what Bertram S. Brown and Stephen D. Prior have called raising of the terrorism threshold, in which each calamity makes it necessary for the next one to be accomplished in a still more shocking manner.7 As has been said elsewhere in this monograph, when anxious people demand information, they will accept reports of dubious credibility. One of the less remarked upon byproducts of September 11th was the rapid growth of urban legends about the attacks, which spread rapidly on the Internet. These included reports that a UFO had passed by the World Trade Center during the attacks, that no Jews went to work at the Trade Center that day, that terrorists had rented trucks in order to plant bombs near shopping centers, and that biohazards had been mailed in blue packages by the Klingerman Foundation.8 The rapidity of spread made possible by the Internet allowed such stories to proliferate faster than the truth could overtake them. This suggests that even a government policy of greatly increased candor will face unaccustomed challenges. Other problems of perception and information processing exist when communicating to particular subcultures. For example, Hispanics and AfricanAmericans are far more likely than whites to believe in conspiracy theories about crises and public policy.9 African-Americans are especially likely to believe legends about government-sponsored research on pathogens for the purpose of killing nonwhites. Such

Bertram S. Brown and Stephen D. Prior, The Rise of the Fourth Horseman? October 1, 2001 (unpublished paper). 8 These and other legends are summarized on the following web pages:Current Netlore: Terrorist Attacks on the U.S., wysiwyg://144/http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blxterror.html CSICOP Tracks Misinformation and Hoaxes in Wake of the Terrorist Attacks, http://www.csicop.org/hoaxwatch 9 Ted Goertzel, Belief in Conspiracy Theories, Political Psychology 15 (1994), pp. 731-42.

7 stories linking CIA plots with AIDS have spread widely in the Black community.10 Therefore, what may appear valid medical evidence and advice to some segments of American society may be regarded by others as suspect. Indeed, those who claim to represent the solution to bioterrorist attacks may well be identified as the culprits by nonwhites. Automatic assumptions of what might be considered a credible source cannot therefore be made, and traditional credentials cannot always adequately legitimate authority. Quite a different complex of beliefs about crisis response circulates among members of militias, racist organizations, tax resistance groups, and other militantly antigovernment circles. They insist that the real function of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is not disaster relief but is instead the implementation of dictatorship. FEMA is alleged to be preparing a network of concentration camps in remote areas to house gunowners and political dissenters, so that martial law can be declared with minimum resistance. The concentration camp myth, which has circulated since the late 1970s, is now a virtual article of faith on the extreme right.11 These ideas will inevitably distort perceptions of any counter-terrorism proposals that give a significant role to FEMA, especially those that deal with evacuation. It seems unlikely that the demonization of FEMA can be eradicated, for it is far too deepseated. Its existence must, therefore, be taken into account in formulating bioterrorism contingency plans.
For an unusually full ethnographic study of this complex of folklore, see Patricia A. Turner, I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (1993). 11 Michael Barkun, Religion, Militias and Oklahoma City: The Mind of Conspiratorialists, Terrorism and Political Violence 8 (1996), pp. 50-64. I also examine this complex of legends in A Culture of Conspiracy: Understanding the Rise of Improvisational Millennialism in America, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (forthcoming, 2003).
10

What is to be done? Response to bioterrorism is usually associated with one of two models of emergency response. One might be termed the social control model, in which the states coercive organizations are pressed into service to ensure citizen compliance with governmental and public health requirements. These might be law enforcement agencies but might also include the armed forces (as they do, with chilling effect, in the film Outbreak). As noted elsewhere in the monograph, legal authority to impose measures such as forced quarantine exists principally at the state level and is of uncertain constitutionality. The quasi-militarization of public policy can occur both by the uncritical application of the war metaphor (war of poverty, war on drugs) and the equally uncritical assumption that the armed forces are the best resource in a crisis, including a public health crisis. These legal ambiguities are compounded by the uncertainties surrounding military involvement in law enforcement. Although many people believe military involvement in law enforcement to be flatly prohibited, any prohibition is statutory, not constitutional, and the Posse Comitatus Act has already been subject to numerous exceptions (e.g., civil disturbance and anti-drug activities).12 Since September 11th, there have been signals that the administration intends to propose additional exceptions to allow greater military participation in domestic counter-terrorism, although the breadth of any additional loosening is still unclear.

12

During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for example, neither civilian nor military authorities appear to have fully understood either the powers or limitations of military personnel during civil disturbances.

9 A second possible model might be termed the disaster relief model, in which government intervention takes the form of providing individuals with necessities of life that they would normally provide for themselves. This might involve alternate living arrangements of the sort afforded in shelters for evacuees from storms, floods, and forest fires. Such dislocation is bound to appear both more disturbing and less benign in a bioterrorist situation, when the physical conditions of life, such as home and belongings, have remained intact. Some northern European countries, notably Sweden, have fused the two models by instituting a single crisis management regime capable of handling a broad range of emergencies: public health crises, terrorism, industrial accidents, invasion, and so forth.13 This may make sense for a small, homogeneous state with few population centers, a unified political system, and armed forces which lack traditional military missions. However, its application to the United States would raise serious problems, including unnecessary restriction of liberties and disruption of the federal system.14 The rapid national adoption of either or both of these models without thinking through their implications risks worsening rather than alleviating the problem. As Colin Gray put it in an important recent essay, The temptation to do something, for the sake of being seen to be doing something even something strategically stupid can be politically irresistible.15

13

Paul t Hart, Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius, Crisis Management: An Agenda for Research and Training in Europe, Cooperation and Conflict 33 (1998), pp. 207-24. 14 I address some of these problems in Defending Against the Apocalypse: The Limits of Homeland Security, in Governance and Public Security, Syracuse, NY: Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Syracuse University (2002), pp. 17-28. Also available on the web at www.campbellinstitute.org 15 Colin S. Gray, Thinking Asymmetrically in Times of Terror, Parameters Spring 2002, pp. 5-14, http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02spring/gray.htm

10 Centralization of functions and decision-making in the national government may also be poor counter-terrorism policy. Populations are better protected by redundancy than by centralization, since redundancy permits most units to continue functioning even after some are damaged or destroyed.16 The duplication of functions allows relatively normal life to continue even when lines of communication have been severed or when shared institutions can no longer operate. While the dispersion of power to states and localities is far less than it once was, services likely to be engaged by a bioterrorist attack -- such as medical care and law enforcement are already largely housed and controlled locally. Self-shielding takes this redundancy a step further by recognizing that nongovernmental units such as households also constitute social systems that perform essential functions: they normally house, feed, and clothe their members, take care of minor medical problems, and otherwise relieve the larger community of potential burdens on its personnel and resources. Self-shielding suggests both a layered model of response to terrorism and a model that inverts traditional hierarchical relationships. The multiple layers consist of households, local communities, states, and the federal government. Conventionally, the federal government, as the national authority, is at the top of a presumed chain of command, with the individual households at the bottom. The shielding model, however, retains the layers but reverses their relationship. It places the households at the top, i.e., they become the fundamental units in the event of a bioterrorist attack, continuing to manage the lives of their members, with responsibilities devolving to larger units only to the extent absolutely required.
16

George Terwilliger, et al, The War on Terrorism: Law Enforcement or National Security? National Security White Papers, The Federalist Society, http://www.fedsoc.org/Publications/Terrorism/militarytribunals.htm

11 It remains to examine what other resources beyond the household also exist below the threshold of governmental organization. For example, a household may well constitute a social system of its own, but its members are linked to other persons and groups outside the households boundaries in work settings, religious organizations, and neighborhood networks. These formal and informal organizations have roles to play, both in providing psychological support and in facilitating the pooling of resources under conditions of extreme collective stress. Self-shielding takes advantage of the human desire to seek the comfort of familiar surroundings during periods of danger, but it can also take advantage of the propensity of individuals under stress to connect with others. Many have noted the intense social interactions, often with strangers, that occurred on and immediately after September 11th, creating a sense of instant community (a phenomenon, by the way, also observed after the Kennedy assassination). This is a manifestation of what early disaster researchers called the disaster utopia.17 While the phrase may appear to be an oxymoron, it refers to the intense, albeit temporary, social cohesion that can arise in collective stress situations. These sentiments need to be recognized and used, as they were on the homefront during World War II.18 They suggest group responses that are functional rather than disruptive. It is clear that the implementation of the self-shielding model depends, like other bioterrorism strategies, on the provision of adequate, authoritative information. This entails both a positive and negative aspect: credible information needs to be made

17 18

E.g., Martha Wolfenstein, Disaster: A Psychological Essay, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press (1957), p. 189. This type of response (too complex to do more than touch on here) involved such institutions as civil defense patrols and victory gardens.

12 available fully and rapidly; and as many false reports as possible need to be extinguished. The experience after September 11th and the anthrax letters suggest both will be difficult. Purging the system of false reports, such as the urban legends referred to earlier, has been made especially daunting by the Internet. However, in retrospect part of the problem with the legends lay in the apparent disinterest of authorities in confronting them. Indeed, the only group to have displayed much sustained interest have been professional folklorists. While it is easy to dismiss such stories as too fanciful to be considered seriously by public officials, just such misplaced disdain can permit the proliferation of a dangerous undergrowth of falsehood and half-truth. Interestingly, the most significant steps taken in this area have been in the context of civil disorders, where rumors were quickly recognized as potential catalysts for violence. During the urban unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, rumor control centers were activated in many cities. Under conditions of potential bioterrorism, this mechanism might be expanded and reinvented, for example, in televised and/or web-based form. The positive provision of information poses problems of its own, for ideally the messages should be full, accurate, and consistent. Where bioterrorism is concerned, this will require political leaders to cede some (perhaps many) of their public roles to scientific and medical experts, at some political cost. It is difficult to imagine any elected official functioning in a bioterrorism situation as effectively as Mayor Giuliani did after the World Trade Center attacks. At another level, even experts may have problems, for they may well have to provide public guidance under conditions of uncertainty. As the TMI case demonstrated, conflicting information can be as serious a problem as insufficient information. There is

13 the danger as well of manufactured consent, in which public spokespersons, whether experts or officials, suppress dissent in their ranks in order to provide consistent messages, even at the price of being wrong. The great challenge to leadership is that of maintaining public calm and confidence in an environment of uncertainty. Since uncertainty can be reduced but not eliminated, self-shielding has an essential supportive role to play. Even an ideal public information program will still leave doubts and fears. The more aggressively the state intervenes in the lives of citizens, the more intense these doubts and fears will become, a product of a sense of powerlessness. This loss of control makes those affected feel less safe rather than more secure, even if their basic needs are attended to the more so in a democracy, where citizens are socialized to a sense of personal efficacy. The preservation of a sphere of personal autonomy, as the shielding model recommends, increases tolerance for uncertainty in a manner that still accommodates the larger communitys security needs.