[Infowarrior] - States Chafing at U.S. Focus on Terrorism

[Richard Forno]

May 26, 2008
States Chafing at U.S. Focus on Terrorism
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/us/26terror.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was  
in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling  
news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money,  
Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an  
almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as  
I.E.D.’s.

“I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview,  
recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside  
bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There  
was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of  
nowhere.”

More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and  
local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing  
for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential  
terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent  
priorities.

“I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the  
importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the  
police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a  
police chief in an American city where violence every day is not  
foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the  
neighborhoods.”

The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being  
cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their  
concerns are not being heard, and that federal officials continue to  
push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague.  
Some $23 billion in domestic security financing has flowed to the  
states from the federal government since the Sept. 11 attacks, but  
authorities in many states and cities say they have seen little or no  
intelligence that Al Qaeda, or any of its potential homegrown  
offshoots, has concrete plans for an attack. Local officials do not  
dismiss the terrorist threat, but many are trying to retool  
counterterrorism programs so that they focus more directly on  
combating gun violence, narcotics trafficking and gangs — while  
arguing that these programs, too, should qualify for federal  
financing, on the theory that terrorists may engage in criminal  
activity as a precursor to an attack.

Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, said in an  
interview that his department had tried to be flexible to accommodate  
local needs.

“We have not been highly restrictive,” Mr. Chertoff said. But he said  
the department’s programs were never meant to assist local law  
enforcement agencies in their day-to-day policing. The requirements of  
the Homeland Security programs had helped strengthen the country  
against an attack, Mr. Chertoff said, expressing concern about  
shifting money to other law enforcement problems from  
counterterrorism. “If we drop the barrier and start to lose focus,” he  
said, “we will make it easier to have successful attacks here.”

Local officials have long groused that Homeland Security grants seemed  
mismatched with local needs and that the agency’s requirements failed  
to recognize regional differences. After Hurricane Katrina struck Gulf  
Coast states in 2005, federal authorities demanded that cities come up  
with evacuation plans, even on the West Coast where earthquakes, not  
hurricanes, are a threat.

Most of the $23 billion in federal grants has been spent shoring up  
local efforts to prevent, prepare for and ferret out a possible  
attack. Because official post-9/11 critiques found huge gaps in  
communication and coordination, billions of dollars have been spent  
linking federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities to the  
country’s more than 750,000 police officers, sheriffs and highway  
patrol officers. Many Homeland Security-financed “fusion centers,”  
designed to collect and analyze data to deter terrorist attacks, have  
evolved into what are known as “all-crimes” or “all-hazards”  
operations, branching out from terrorism to focus on violent crime and  
natural disasters.

Intelligence officials assert that Al Qaeda remains intent on striking  
inside the United States. The Seattle chief of police, R. Gil  
Kerlikowske, said, “If the law enforcement focus at the local level is  
only on counterterrorism, you will be unable as a local entity to  
sustain it unless you are an all-crimes operation, and you may be  
missing some very significant issues that could be related to  
terrorism.”

Chief Kerlikowske is president of a group of police chiefs from major  
cities who said in a report last week that local governments were  
being forced to spend increasingly scarce resources because, they say,  
Homeland Security did not pay for all the costs. “Most local  
governments move law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence  
programs down on the priority list because their municipality has not  
yet been directly affected by an attack,” the report said.

Seattle has experienced its own terrorism scares since 9/11, after  
photographs of the Space Needle were recovered in 2002 from suspected  
Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan. The city had another jolt last year  
when the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought the public’s help in  
locating two men “exhibiting unusual behavior” on a ferry. Neither  
episode proved an actual threat.

In the case of this year’s focus on improvised explosives, the main  
killer of American troops in Iraq, Homeland Security officials say the  
attention to the domestic threat stems from a classified strategy that  
President Bush approved last year that is designed to help the country  
to deter and defeat I.E.D.’s before terrorists can detonate them here.

The administration is completing a plan to assign specific training,  
prevention and response duties to several federal agencies, including  
the F.B.I. and Homeland Security, the officials said. But they also  
said that state advisers misunderstood the financing guidelines, and  
that states could also meet the requirement by improving their overall  
preparedness against a range of undefined terrorist threats.

State officials say the federal government issued the grant  
requirement without providing any new information pointing to the  
danger of bomb threats in the United States — an approach they said  
underscored the glaring disconnect between how states and the federal  
government view the terrorist threat.

“I.E.D. detection, protection, and prevention is an important issue,  
and we all need to be looking at that,” Matthew Bettenhausen,  
California’s homeland security director, said in a telephone  
interview. But, he said of the grant requirement: “It’s another thing  
to be so prescriptive; that came as a surprise to many of us states.”

Maj. Gen. Tod M. Bunting, the homeland security director for Kansas,  
said Washington ran the risk of raising undue public alarm by  
prescribing such a large part of the grant to bomb prevention.

“A federal cookie-cutter mandate doesn’t work on every state,” said  
General Bunting, who is also the state’s adjutant general.

Leesa Berens Morrison, Arizona’s homeland security director, said the  
new federal guidance “absolutely surprised us,” and said state  
officials were scrambling to comply.

In Massachusetts, Ms. Kayyem regarded a potential grant this year of  
$20 million in federal homeland security money as too important to  
pass up, even though she said that technically one-quarter of it had  
to be spent on I.E.D.’s to qualify for the money. So, Massachusetts  
officials wrote a creative proposal, pledging to upgrade bomb squads  
in many of the state’s 351 cities and towns. It also proposed buying  
new hazardous-material suits, radios to communicate between law  
enforcement agencies and explosive-detection devices.

But Ms. Kayyem acknowledged that much of the equipment was chosen to  
serve double duty. Hazmat suits could be useful in the event of a  
bombing, but would be even more help with accidents that state  
officials regarded as much more probable, like chemical spills on the  
Massachusetts Turnpike.

The grant was approved by federal authorities, but Mr. Chertoff  
warned: “There are times when you get so far away from the core  
purpose that it’s hard to justify the grant money.”

In one effort to crack down on what Mr. Chertoff referred to as  
“mission creep,” Homeland Security officials last year imposed  
restrictions on use of a heavy truck by the police in Providence, R.I.

The truck had been bought with federal counterterrorism money, based  
on a plan that it be used to haul a patrol boat used for port  
security. But when the Police Department began to use the truck  
instead to pull a horse trailer, federal authorities sought to draw  
the line, relenting only after local officials protested in a phone  
call with Washington, said local and federal officials.

Eric Schmitt reported from Boston, Phoenix and Topeka, Kan.; and David  
Johnston from Washington.