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 |  Subject: Fascist deception continues but States complain about strings tied to U.S. security funds  Mon May 26, 2008 7:55 am | |
| Juliette Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of U.S. funds, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat, improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs.
"IEDs? As in Iraq IEDs?" Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts.
"There was no new intelligence about this," she said. "It just came out of nowhere."
More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the national financing for homeland security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities.
"I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe," said Colonel Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, Rhode Island. "But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods."
The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their concerns are not being heard, and that national officials continue to push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague and undefined.
Some $23 billion in homeland security financing has flowed from the U.S. government to the states since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the authorities in many states and cities say they have seen little or no intelligence that Al Qaeda, or any of its potential homegrown offshoots, has concrete plans for an attack. Local officials do not dismiss the terrorist threat, but many are trying to retool counterterrorism programs so that they focus more directly on combating gun violence, narcotics trafficking and gangs - while arguing that these programs, too, should qualify for U.S. financing, on the theory that terrorists may engage in criminal activity as a precursor to an attack.
Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, said that his department had tried to be flexible to accommodate local needs. "We have not been highly restrictive," he said.
But Chertoff said the department's programs were never meant to assist local law enforcement agencies in carrying out their day-to-day policing. The requirements of the Homeland Security programs had helped strengthen the country against an attack, Chertoff said, expressing concern about shifting money from counterterrorism efforts to other law enforcement problems. "If we drop the barrier and start to lose focus, we will make it easier to have successful attacks here," he said.
Local officials have long groused that Homeland Security grants seemed mismatched with local needs and that the agency's requirements failed to recognize regional differences. After Hurricane Katrina struck Gulf Coast states in 2005, national authorities demanded that cities come up with evacuation plans, even on the West Coast where earthquakes, not hurricanes, are a threat.
Most of the $23 billion in U.S. government grants has being spent shoring up local efforts to prevent, prepare for and ferret out a possible attack. Because official post-Sept. 11 critiques found huge gaps in communication and coordination, billions of dollars have been spent linking federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities to the country's more than 750,000 police officers, sheriffs and highway patrol members. Many Homeland Security-financed "fusion centers," designed to collect and analyze data to deter terror attacks, have evolved into what are known as "all-crimes" or "all-hazards" operations, branching out from terrorism to focus on violent crime and natural disasters.
Intelligence officials continue to assert that Al Qaeda remains intent on striking inside the United States. Seattle's chief of police, Gil Kerlikowske, said, "If the law enforcement focus at the local level is only on counterterrorism, you will be unable as a local entity to sustain it unless you are an all-crimes operation, and you may be missing some very significant issues that could be related to terrorism."
Kerlikowske is president of a group of police chiefs from major cities who said in a report issued last week that local governments were being forced to spend increasingly scarce resources because, they say, Homeland Security does not pay all the costs. "Most local governments move law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence programs down on the priority list because their municipality has not yet been directly affected by an attack," the report said.
Seattle has experienced its own terrorism scares since Sept. 11, after photographs of the Space Needle were recovered in 2002 from what were suspected to be Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan. The city had another jolt last year when the FBI sought the public's help in locating two men on a ferry "exhibiting unusual behavior." But neither episode proved an actual threat.
In the case of this year's focus on improvised explosives, the main killer of U.S. troops in Iraq, Homeland Security officials say the attention to the domestic threat stems from a classified strategy that President George W. Bush approved last year that is designed to help the country to deter and defeat IEDs before terrorists can detonate them here.
The administration is putting the finishing touches on a plan to assign specific training, prevention and response duties to several U.S. government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, the officials said. But they also said that state advisers had misunderstood the financing guidelines, and that states could also meet the requirement by improving their overall preparedness against myriad threats.
State officials say the U.S. government issued the grant requirement without providing any new information pointing to the danger of bomb threats in the United States - an approach they said had only underscored the glaring disconnect between how states and the U.S. government view the terrorist threat.
In the case of Massachusetts, Kayyem regarded a potential grant this year of $20 million in Homeland Security money as too important to pass up, even though technically one-fourth of it had to be spent on IEDs for the state to qualify for the money. So, Massachusetts officials wrote a creative proposal, pledging to upgrade bomb squads in many of the state's 351 cities and towns. It also proposed buying new hazardous-material suits, radios to communicate among law enforcement agencies, and explosive-detection devices.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/26/america/security.php
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“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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