Bush has stirred up a hornets nest and HAS NOT secured our homeland...
There is NO PROOF that by going to war we will be any more secure...In fact its becoming clearer that we will inspire a whole new wave of terror attacks against The United States and our interests around the world...
Homeland security shell game
By Thomas Oliphant
Columnist
The Boston Globe
2/11/2003
WASHINGTON - THERE IS a revealing disconnect in the latest national terrorism alert -- and an outrageous shell game in the Bush administration's approach to homeland security.
What is being ignored is the impact on police, firefighters, emergency workers, and other security-related people who get the first calls when we see something odd or experience something terrible.
Raising of the alert status to orange -- the second-highest color -- for the second time reflects a judgment that the disparate components of intelligence suggest a greater likelihood of attack. That judgment is far from unanimous; many officials think higher-ups are merely covering their tails.
These officials think we should always be on high alert. Indeed, the one specific in Attorney General John Ashcroft's announcement Friday involved a warning about ''soft or lightly secured'' structures like apartment buildings, hotels, and malls. You couldn't ask for a more chilling reminder of the country's vulnerability.
The announcement led to an obvious question: What are people supposed to do? And that in turn led to the ongoing contradiction in national guidance: Don't change your daily life, and for heaven's sake don't stop shopping, but be alert for people trying to kill you. The new secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, managed one suggestion: Each family should have an emergency plan for contacting relatives in the event of attack.
What was missing was an awareness of the increased pressure on the state and local agencies the Bush administration is short-changing.
For every extra federal border guard watching traffic from Canada over the weekend, there were at least a hundred local and state cops around the country doing extra hours at public facilities or pulled off other assignments. In the language of conservatives, it is the ultimate unfunded federal mandate. Last month Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did a survey of New York's cities and towns and discovered that an astonishing 70 percent had yet to receive one dime in security assistance since the 9/11 attacks.
It gets worse. After examining budget documents, Clinton discovered the shell game -- in this case the diversion of money to pay for homeland security. Most of us who are condemned to read budget material know about the concept of robbing Peter (housing, for example) to pay Paul (Star Wars missile defense). President Bush would rob Peter to pay Peter.
Next year the administration proposes to spend about $41 billion on homeland security.
The $4 billion to $5 billion increase in the Bush budget, though, is largely illusory. For one thing, the numbers take advantage of the fact that there is still no appropriation for the current year that ends in September. Once this year's spending is set by statute, the actual increase will be roughly half that. Then the shell game takes over. What Clinton noticed is that roughly $2 billion has been cut from the budgets of federal programs that beef up ''first responders,'' those local workers who compose the front lines. The FBI will gets its money for strike forces and intelligence, Ridge's new department will get a new building, and he will get a new office and staff, but cops and firefighters will be neglected.
The successful program her husband promoted in the '90s to help localities hire more officers would be all but eliminated. The national program that assists local fire departments would be cut in half. The administration trumpets a ''new'' proposal to combine federal law enforcement assistance money into one of those block grants conservatives love, hiding the fact that the proposed grant contains well over a half-billion dollars less than what's in the programs it would replace. In all, Clinton estimates the cost at some 4,000 cops not hired nationally, plus untold thousands of firefighters. Clinton proposes that all these federal cutbacks be rejected, a minimalist idea that at least avoids harm.
But it also helps to remember that this shell game is being played while the worst fiscal crisis in 60 years is creating a hole that is certain to exceed $100 billion in state and local budgets, for which law enforcement will suffer its share of further cutbacks. And this limited discussion doesn't cover vital matters like poorly guarded ports, the unfunded mandate on state labs because of chemical and biological scares, and the impact on local law enforcement of reserve call-ups for war.
It is as if the administration had announced a greater danger of attack and the president had announced that in response he was reducing our preparedness. There's a word for this -- nuts.
© Copyright 2003 Boston Globe Newspaper Company.
boston.com |
