Bush Downplays Warning on Food Supply

President Bush on Saturday played down an unexpected warning from his outgoing health chief that the U.S. food supply was an easy target for terrorists.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, after announcing Friday that he would leave Bush’s Cabinet early next year, said his biggest worries were a possible global influenza pandemic and a terrorist attack on the food supply.

Thompson said he worried “every single night” that someone would poison the food supply.

“I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not ... attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do. And we are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that,” Thompson said at a news conference.

But Bush said Thompson “was commenting on the fact that we’re a large country, with all kinds of avenues where somebody can inflict harm.”

“We’re doing everything we can to protect the American people,” the president said at the White House in response to a question about Thompson’s remarks.

Bush urged the Senate to quickly confirm his nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security, former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.

“There’s a lot of work to be done. We’ve made a lot of progress in protecting our country, and there’s more work to be done,” he said at a news conference with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf seated next to him. The two had earlier discussed the fight against global terrorism at an Oval Office meeting.

Thompson said steps had been taken during his tenure to keep the U.S. food supply safe from poisoning. When he took over as health chief in February 2001, the government was performing about 12,000 inspections of imported food annually.

The government bolstered efforts to protect the food supply after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Inspections now amount to 98,000 annually, Thompson said.

“We’ve increased the number and the percentage [of inspections], but it still is a very minute amount that we’re doing,” he said.