In a morbid and depressing kind of way, this is almost amusing.
Congress and the American public must accept that the government cannot protect every possible target against attack if it wants to avoid fulfilling Al Qaeda’s goal of bankrupting the nation, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate committee Tuesday.
Osama bin Laden, Mr. Chertoff said, has made it clear that scaring the United States into an unsustainable spending spree is one of his aims. In a 2004 video, Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, spoke of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”
“He understood that one tool he had in waging war against the United States was to drive us crazy, into bankruptcy, trying to defend ourselves against every conceivable threat,” Mr. Chertoff said at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We have to be realistic about what we expect and what we do. We do have limits, and we do have choices to make.”
First, for a Bush administration official to talk about staving off “bankruptcy” strikes me as more than a little odd. We are, after all, talking about an administration that has added four trillion to the national debt, run the highest budget deficits in the history of the world, and became the first in U.S. history to cut taxes for the wealthy during a war. The Bush gang took a $250 billion surplus and created a $400 billion deficit — and the Bush gang believes it has credibility on the issue of avoiding bankruptcy?
I don’t doubt that bin Laden would like to “bleed America to the point of bankruptcy”; I’m just not sure if the president and his allies in Congress realize that they’re helping bin Laden’s vision become a reality.
Second, Chertoff’s either/or analysis is wildly misleading.
To hear the Secretary of Homeland Defense tell it, we can have the status quo when it comes to domestic security or we can have bankruptcy. It’s absurd, Chertoff believes, for us to spend recklessly, trying to prevent every imaginable threat. (The one percent doctrine only applies to wars, not homeland security.) I’ll concede that it’s impossible to buy our way to 100% security, but Chertoff failed to acknowledge how much more we could do at a relatively modest price.
The Coast Guard estimated in 2002 that it would cost $5.4 billion over 10 years to implement critical security improvements to the nations’ ports as mandated by the Maritime Transportation Security Act. Last year, Congress appropriated just $175 million to the program. (The Bush Administration asked for $46 million for fiscal year 2005, which was below pre-9/11 levels). Overall, “federal money allocated in the first five rounds of the program — about $708 million — accounted for only about one-fifth of what seaports identified as needs,” a funding gap of over $3 billion. The funding shortfall has forced the Department of Homeland Security to limit “eligibility to top-risk ports,” creating “a class of underprotected ports” that could become a prime target for a terrorist attack. American Progress has recommended a minimum of $500 million a year for the program.
Each year, nine million freight containers arrive at U.S. ports but only six percent of them are physically inspected by customs officials. The biggest security threat associated with ports is the risk that a radiological device — which can be used to make a so-called “dirty bomb” — would be smuggled in a freight container. One way to reduce that risk is to equip each port with devices that scan every container. (Last July, President Bush touted the use of this technology.) Yet, this equipment is not available at all ports. Containers continue to arrive every day that have not been scanned for the presence of radiation.
Chertoff told lawmakers yesterday that “the American public must accept that the government cannot protect every possible target against attack.” Fine. But the American public should have a great deal of trouble accepting the administration’s priorities on domestic security, including neglecting ports, bizarre anti-terrorism grants that deemphasize New York and Washington, and budget priorities that cut funding for explosive-detection technology at airports.
We can’t protect every possible target and we can’t throw caution to the wind when it comes to fiscal sanity. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is doing poorly on both counts.