Security cuts for New York and Washington underline fraud of war on terror

There were also substantial reductions in other large cities, such as Boston and Phoenix, while smaller cities with less visible threats, such as Louisville, Kentucky and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, significantly increased their funding under the program. New Orleans’s share of the funding declined from $9.3 million to $4. 6 million.

The allocations were proposed by a secret panel of 100 law-enforcement officials from around the country that met at the National Fire Academy in March in Emmetsberg, Maryland. Funding levels are supposedly determined by a number of factors, but especially by a risk assessment. The Department of Homeland Security, though, had the final say on the amount of funding each city received.

The cuts have brought forth a stream of accusations from politicians in New York and Washington, who have pointed out the of absurdity of risk assessments that result in cutting funds to the only two US cities that have experienced recent major terrorist attacks.

It is painfully obvious that the distribution of the funds were worked out on an entirely different basis, with money funneled in larger quantities to areas where Republican incumbents are facing tight races in the 2006 midterm elections. New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a Republican, acknowledged as much. “We tried to do some analysis of some of the moneys and whether or not they were given out for political reasons, and in fact in many of the places where they got money - but arguable there’s not threat - there are close elections either at the Senate level or at the House level,” he said.

Rep. Joseph Cowley, a Queens Democrat, voiced the sense of betrayal felt by local politicians toward Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who had worked under then Manhattan US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani: “When he got the job, we thought, here’s a guy from the region, and he’s gonna understand what we face. Quite frankly, it’s the opposite. It’s a slap in the face.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/dhs-j06.shtml