ON SEPTEMBER 14, the Department of Defense published a press release on its website saying “Tuesday’s tragedies provided an all-too-real test for one of the National Guard’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams.” It was a little feel-good statement publicizing the “first operational employment of a certified civil support team.” Everything about the press release was straightforward and standard issue except for one sentence: “The team was in New York City sampling air at the request of the Environmental Protection Agency by 8:30 p.m. Tuesday.” Thus came to life the story that this costly and “elite” National Guard unit was “8 hours late” (or more) to Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. The tale of the team’s tardiness was then published in the Albany Times Union on September 23 under the heading “Anti-Terrorism Unit Under Fire.” Recycled in the article were Government Accounting Office findings on the strikingly high number of federal organizations with some counter-terrorism responsibilities. More interesting, the piece quoted Amy E. Smithson of the Henry L. Stimson Center, who is the outspoken co-author of “Ataxia,” a massive report on chemical and biological attacks and emergency response published last year. (The word Ataxia, incidentally, means “1: lack of order: CONFUSION 2: an inability to coordinate voluntary muscular movements . . .”) Smithson told the Times Union that there was little point in the federal government funding such groups as the National Guard’s Civil Support Teams. “The CSTs are a political placebo. . . . They let politicians get a warm and fuzzy feeling because they have done something to address the problem of terrorism when in fact they have not.” Such was the tenor of recent comments by Smithson to Congress as well. On October 5, she told the House Committee on Government Reform that the National Guard’s New York-based CST had arrived twelve hours after planes hit the World Trade Center and that it sent out a press release bragging about air tests that had already been performed by city and federal officials. On October 17, Smithson told the Senate Committee on Government Affairs that the National Guard’s CSTs “have minuscule, if not negative, utility.” The CST in New York “were called to duty,” she said, and “arrived at the scene roughly twelve hours later.” Scott Sandman, a spokesman for the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, absolutely denies that the CST was at all late. “Within an hour,” Sandman says, “the team was assembled for deployment from their home station. And they deployed to a staging area in New York City where they awaited an official request.” The National Guard must be called upon by the state before it can enter an emergency scene. Once that request came, says Sandman, the 22-member team was at Ground Zero in under an hour. Their first task at Ground Zero came from the New York City command, as did all their orders. It was to take air samples to test for evidence of biological or chemical warfare. The National Guardsmen of course quickly discovered there was no such evidence. So they moved on to address other needs. Sandman says that “most of what [the team] did was related to communications,” providing much needed equipment and assistance to the FBI, the FAA, the police, and other emergency services. The team remained deployed at Ground Zero for another two and a half weeks to monitor air quality in the debris-filled disaster area. Such work, Sandman points out, does not fall strictly in the purview of the Civil Support Team, but they had the capacity to do it, so they did. The World Trade Center terrorist attack was not the kind of biological or chemical incident for which the CST was designed. But that clearly didn’t stop the CST from making its wide array of technical and personnel resources available to the command at Ground Zero in a flexible manner and on a timely basis. The National Guard is mercilessly drubbed in “Ataxia,” the report on biological and chemical emergencies co-written by Smithson. The report quotes several hostile local emergency officials heaping abuse on the National Guard’s disaster relief teams. “They’re helping me?” one fire chief asked incredulously. “The locals,” the report states, “viewed the resources being poured into the [National Guard] teams as nothing short of scandalous, characterizing this effort as a job employment program.” That larger point may or may not be true, but it’s certainly not buttressed by the actual performance of New York’s National Guard on September 11 and after. David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
