At Lehigh, role-playing students plan terrorist strikes against
U.S.
Prof assigns research on attacks and defense. Work was in
whispers.
By Sarah Cubbage
Of The Morning Call
May 20, 2002
Five Lehigh University students take a podium before a silent
audience and explain their plan to use a biological weapon to cause mass
vomiting, diarrhea, fever and death in the United States.
They've decided on staphylococcal enterotoxin B, a deadly toxin
produced naturally in unrefrigerated meats. The use of it will kill or
make violently ill thousands of Americans.
At the podium, sophomore Courtney Ford talks about the deadly
substances her group studied. ''This is by far the easiest to
distribute,'' she said.
Instead of writing papers or studying for finals the last weeks of
classes, students of ''Society, Technology and War'' were planning or
anticipating terrorist attacks against the United States.
After eight years of teaching this international relations course,
professor Chaim Kaufmann changed the final project because of Sept. 11.
''It seemed the obvious thing to do,'' he said. ''For this course, the
obvious question is: How do you do it?''
Kaufmann's class is designed to allow students to assess U.S.
susceptibility to and preparedness for terrorist attacks and to consider
means of prevention. Students also should conclude whether Americans
should be concerned and do more to prevent attacks.
Kaufmann separated the class into 12 groups, six to plan the attacks
and six to defend against them.
As Kaufmann expected, interest in the class greatly increased this
spring. About 60 students tried to cram into one tiny classroom on the
first day of class. Kaufmann moved the class to Sinclair Auditorium to
accommodate more than double the normal number of students.
Sophomore David Hauptmann hoped the class would help him understand
the events of last fall. ''I was definitely worried about further
attacks,'' he said.
From outlining their terrorist group's political motives to
training and identifying a target, each group compiled a 20-page paper
and presented its plan in class.
Kaufmann often uses role-playing projects in his classes to provide
a deeper understanding than students can get by just reading a text or
listening to a lecture. ''Things are much easier to wrap your mind around
if you put yourself in the shoes of people who might actually do it,'' he
said.
Ford's group plan was to wait for the staphylococcal enterotoxin B
to grow in putrefying meat, extract it using a kit bought on the
Internet, grow the toxin in a petri dish and make it airborne.
Another group planned to hijack oil tankers that bring Saudi Arabian
oil to the United States and crash them off the coastline.
Planning in detail what were their worst fears a few months ago
proved an eerie task for some.
''As long as you have the manpower and funds, it doesn't seem like
it would be that hard,'' Ford said about her group's plan to unleash
staphylococcal enterotoxin B. ''Anybody with a biology degree could
theoretically do it, and that's kind of scary.''
Kaufmann's students, who met outside the class to plan their final
projects, caused some jitters around them.
Sophomore Timothy Sorensen, whose group's project was bombing malls,
remembers getting some disapproving looks as he and other group members
huddled around a computer in Fairchild Martindale Library discussing
their attack on the economy.
''You didn't want to speak too loudly,'' Sorensen said. ''It's not
that great a subject to talk about.''
Even though asking students to plan a terrorist attack is a
sensitive assignment, Kaufman said he believes the knowledge the students
gain from getting so close to the subject is worth it.
''If the students in this class really wanted to blow up this
building, they could,'' Kaufmann said. ''I'm not explaining to them
anything that's not already out there.''
Joshua B. Spero, who teaches political science at Merrimack College
in Massachusetts and spent 15 years as a strategic planner in the
Pentagon, said many colleges use that type of role-playing.
''But the bottom line is that teaching such scenarios and simulation
games needs to be handled with great care and informed by a great
appreciation of the U.S. and other governments,'' he said.
Henri Barkey, chairman of the international relations department at
Lehigh, said Kaufmann's course teaches students to realize the
vulnerability of their society to terrorist attacks.
''No one before Sept. 11 would have imagined that someone would
crash airplanes into the World Trade Center,'' he said. ''We need to
think broadly to anticipate these things.''
While the final project focused on planning a terrorist act, the
course covered six centuries of international relations and put terrorism
and the weapons it uses into that perspective, he said.
''The course goes from the discovery of gunpowder to today,'' Barkey
said. ''All of these things have changed international relations in a
very fundamental way. In the 1950s, would you say it was irresponsible to
teach about nuclear weapons when we had a threat from the Soviet
Union?''
Senior Amy Boyle was surprised when she learned about the final
project. ''It was very weird,'' she said. ''It's a real possibility for
these things to happen.''
After Ford's group presented its idea for a bioterrorist attack, the
opposing team argued it wouldn't be effective because the toxin wasn't
always deadly.
Students' hands shot up with questions.
''Is it easier to kill people with chemical or biological weapons?
What's more deadly?'' one student asked.
Kaufmann let the dialogue unfold. He wanted them to develop their
own questions.
Hauptmann's mind, for one, was racing.
''I'm thinking Well, you know, a lot of this is very plausible. Are
we really doing enough to prevent this sort of thing?''' he said. ''You
wonder, Could this really happen? Is it really this easy?'''
But behind his lingering fears, Hauptmann said, Kaufmann's class has
allowed him to see terrorism as he never would have. ''I've found myself
agreeing with him logically that terrorism makes sense for a weak group
of people.''
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Edward ><+>
If you have fifty problems and one of them is government, you have only one problem.
http://www.global-connector.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/reality_pump/
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