Don't worry, folks, we can all rest easy. Thanks to Tom Ridge, Condi Rice and the rest of President Bush's national security crew, Ludington, Michigan is now officially safe from terrorist attack.
Where and what is Ludington, you may ask? Ludington is a maritime town on Lake Michigan with a population of approximately 8,000. A recent audit has taken the Department of Homeland Security to task for showering localities like Ludington; Martha's Vineyard, Mass; and St. Croix, U.S Virgin Islands with federal grant money to update their port security. The department's inspector general found that none of these areas met grant qualifications and that the department \had no assurance that the [grant] program is protecting the nation's most critical and vulnerable port infrastructure and assets.""
Port security is no joke. Some 600,000 cargo containers enter the United States every day through 361 ports. Eighty percent of the cargo comes through 10 ports, and most of that comes through Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland and New York City. With just three to 5 percent of containers inspected before offloading, it would be all too easy for terrorists to get a biological agent or radioactive ""dirty bomb"" into the country. Think of it this way: If current port security standards were applied to commercial airline flights, fewer than a dozen people on each flight would be required to put their baggage through X-ray machines.
So what has the administration done about this gaping hole in our national defense?
Well, from mid-2002 through the end of 2003, DHS distributed the relatively stingy sum of $517 million in port security grants, of which only one-fourth has been spent over a year later, according to the audit. In addition to Ludington and Martha's Vineyard, other grants were given out to areas in New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Tennessee, as well as six areas in Arkansas. Due to mandatory minimum levels of security funding per state, Wyoming now gets four times as much homeland security money per capita than New York.
Needless to say, since Yellowstone National Park is not likely to be high on Osama bin Laden's hit list, the explanation for why these areas are receiving such disproportionate antiterrorism money can only be old-fashioned, pork-barrel spending.
Ignoring threats and misallocating money aren't the only ways in which the Bush administration has been incompetent in dealing with homeland security. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are 125 chemical facilities in range of 1 million people which lack the security to prevent a terrorist attack. According to another DHS audit, there have been 753 incidents of U.S. air marshals being given excessive cash travel advances and being suspended with pay despite misplacing weapons, falling asleep, and being under the influence of drugs and alcohol while on duty.
There are yet two aspects of this administration's security record that I find more galling still.
The first is that the aforementioned $517 million in federal port security grants comprises a microscopic 0.26 percent of the $200 billion we've spent in Iraq, supposedly stomping out terrorism. Apparently Bush and congressional Republicans think we can stop more al-Qaida attacks by spending billions destroying and rebuilding a country that had nothing to do with al-Qaida than we can by spending billions to make sure biological weapons aren't coming into the United States. In April 2003, Senate Republicans even defeated an amendment by then-Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., that would have tacked on another $1 billion to port security funding. Now, just two weeks ago, we hear CIA Director Porter Goss tell the Senate Intelligence Committee that, ""Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists ... It may only be a matter of time before al-Qaida or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons."" But for some reason, we are still unwilling to devote half of 1 percent of what we're spending in Iraq to shore up our own harbors.
The second is that the administration feels no obligation at all to respond to critics. In response to the latest audit, a DHS administrator simply stated that, ""[the grant program] continues to enhance security and address real or potential vulnerabilities in our nation's ports and waterways.""
Of course, the administration doesn't need to respond to critics because it was just returned to office by a majority of voters whose primary concern was national security. Too bad no other candidates felt like exposing Bush's national security record for what it was and is: a color-coded system and a lot of empty rhetoric. Oh, and the security of Ludington.
Nick Barbash is a sophomore majoring in political science and international relations. He can be reached at opinion@dailycardinal.com. His column runs every Thursday in The Daily Cardinal.
