The NY Times looks at security in what it calls “the most dangerous two miles in America” in Newark / Port Elizabeth, NJ. One chemical plant “poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius.”

“… Yet on a recent Friday afternoon, it remained loosely guarded and accessible. Dozens of trucks and cars drove by within 100 feet of the tanks. A reporter and photographer drove back and forth for five minutes, snapping photos with a camera the size of a large sidearm, then left without being approached.

… A Congressional study in 2000 by a former Coast Guard commander deemed (the area) the nation’s most enticing environment for terrorists, providing a convenient way to cripple the economy by disrupting major portions of the country’s rail lines, oil storage tanks and refineries, pipelines, air traffic, communications networks and highway system.

… After distributing tens of billions to state and local governments since 9/11, the federal Department of Homeland Security cut New Jersey’s financing this year to about $60 million from $99 million last year. Many security experts have complained that the formula - which provides Montana with three times as much money per capita as New Jersey - is guided more by politics than by the likelihood of an attack.”

… Even watchdog groups like Taxpayers for Common Sense say that places like New Jersey, Houston and Long Beach, Calif., deserve a larger portion of federal dollars.

As for the ports, the federal Homeland Security Department’s inspector general’s office recently criticized the agency for directing much of its $517 million in port security money to relatively low-risk sites in places like Kentucky and Tennessee, and not giving enough to busy, vulnerable facilities like Port Newark. Although the Port of New York and New Jersey recently received an additional $42 million for counterterrorism efforts, Port Newark lacks the up-to-date equipment now used to search cargo at ports like Hong Kong.”

In the same vein, the Jan/Feb 2005 Atlantic had a provocative article (subscription required) by James Fallows questioning how the U.S. is deploying its Homeland Security resources. The gist was that the U.S. has never truly resolved what the actual threats are, their likelihood, the costs of successful attacks, and the resources it would take to mitigate those risks to acceptable levels. Instead money has been thrown at the visible — like the airline passenger security — instead of problems that can be far more damaging, like weak port security. The former gets 5x the budget of the latter, even though most worst case scenarios involve a dirty bomb or nuclear weapon snuck in through a port.

Several forces are at work:

1) we always prepare for the last war — in this case, 9/11
2) Airline security is highly visible, reducing the pressure to “do something”
3) There’s no constituency for preventing low-probability events that may never happen, such as terrorists blowing open chlorine tanks in New Jersey.

In combination, these mean that with the airline security issue “resolved,” resource allocations will now be made based not on actual threats and costs, but on log-rolling and relative political pull.

Is the mainstream media looking for a mission? Pursue the mismatch between terror threats and our defenses. That’ll get people reading the paper again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 8th, 2005 at 10:06 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.