The American Spectator

The Nation's Pulse

(Page 2 of 2)

There's also a complaint that the SUV came back from the concert containing several Marlboro Light butts and clear evidence of a tailgate party, i.e., some traces of charcoal and barbecue -- a complaint that the mayor didn't get out his Dirt Devil at 1 in the morning. But that's how you catch shoe-bombers: by tossing a burger on the grill, blending in, and checking the tennies of passersby for fuses.

The real issue here has nothing to do with the mayor. The van shouldn't even be in Pittsburgh, not when there's not enough money in the budget to train agents in Islamic languages and the radiation detection equipment deployed to screen cargo containers can't tell the difference between highly enriched uranium and Comet cleanser.

The real problem is the massive misallocation of the nation's limited anti-terrorism resources, a federal bureaucracy that's passing out free SUVs and treating billions in anti-terrorism spending as just so much more pork to be politically distributed, regardless of any meaningful risk assessments or cost-benefit analysis.

In "What Does Homeland Security Spending Buy?" -- published in 2005 by the American Enterprise Institute -- Veronique de Rugy provides clear evidence of how the nation's security resources have been squandered. For example:

* $500,000 spent by Outagamie, Wis. -- population 165,000 and hardly a top al-Qaeda target -- to buy chemical suits, generators, rescue saws, disaster-response trailers, emergency lighting, escape hoods and a bomb-disposal vehicle.

* $30,000 used by officials in Lake County, Tenn., to help a high school buy a defibrillator to have on hand for a baseball tournament.

* $557,400 awarded to North Pole, a town in Alaska with a population of 1,570, for homeland security rescue and communication equipment.

* $98,000 spent on a training course in incident management by the Tecumseh Fire Department in Lenawee County, Mo., that no one attended.

* $63,000 spent on a decontamination unit that ended up in storage in a warehouse in rural Washington because the state didn't have a hazmat team to use it.

* $58,000 for a rescue vehicle capable of boring through concrete in Colchester, a Vermont town with a population of 18,000 and little concrete.

There's also anti-terrorism money for D.C.'s summer jobs program and port protection in Martha's Vineyard. "At Christmas, the Department of Homeland Security handed out about $153 million for programs offering food and shelter for the poor, to be spent in 2004," reports Rugy. Maybe our security bureaucrats saw the homeless as potential al Qaeda recruits.

We're lucky these guys weren't running World War II.

topics:
Islam, Environment, Movies, Alaska