Terrorist plans foiled in NYC - but does that justify carte blanche?

I worked for the Jersey City Police Department in 2001, and was in Jersey City on 9/11. I used to ride the PATH train into NYC all the time, usually going to the WTC as my starting point for Manhattan excursions. I toured the ravaged WTC site just over two months after 9/11, seeing rubble, an office building partially standing with intact offices visible from outside, a viewing platform with parting words from survivors etched in with ink pens. "We will always love you", read one. It was wrenching. And one of my best friends still lives in Jersey City and takes that very PATH train daily to work. I'm very much in favor of our current military efforts, and in favor of protecting other Americans from similar attacks.

All this made it very personal when I read today that the US intelligence community has foiled an effort to attack the PATH train system, specifically the line that goes into the WTC station, which has reopened (another line branches off into Hoboken and then ends at 32nd Street in Manhattan, close to Macy's). That's my line, and every PATH train that goes there first travels through Jersey City, stopping at a station only two blocks from where I used to work. It gives me a chill, and a sense of urgency about stopping future attacks.

Yet despite that, I'm not in favor of the way NYC is using this as a wedge to get money from the federal government:

"More than anything else, if true, these news reports offer incontrovertible proof that the federal government's homeland security strategy is flawed in its rhetoric and in its application. Let me be clear: Americans who face the greatest risk should receive the greatest amount of funding," said Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. "How anyone, at any level of government, could argue otherwise is beyond me and shows a flagrant disregard for the realities of protecting our homeland."

He continued: "For too long, the federal government has distributed security grants in a manner that seems to be based merely on whim. It certainly is not based on risk. It defies common sense that a would-be terrorist in Beirut with an Internet connection recognizes that the New York region is rife with significant landmarks, yet Homeland Security Secretary [Michael] Chertoff doesn't."

I do think that NYC and other places with major targets need help from the federal government to protect those targets. Any attack on those cities is an attack on America, in the same way that a criminal shooting a police officer is an attack on society as well as an attack on an individual. What they don't need is a blank check.

As a grant writer, I pick up tidbits here and there about what's happening in the grant writing community. Every major funding effort, especially something like Homeland Security funding, requires a proposal stating what will be done and what the rationale is. This past cycle, the big cities, especially NYC, saw a big drop in funding and other places in the US saw a rise in funding. NYC howled, of course it did. But the word I heard was that NYC submitted poor proposals, with the apparent expectation that nothing more than "Give us lots of money" was needed to open the coffers. Other, smaller jurisdictions proposed specific programs with good need justifications and good evidence for success for their type of program. That's what I heard, and I tend to believe it.

NYC is a money pit. No matter how much money goes there, they will always need more - or at least say they do. Of course they will. I have no objection to giving them money for genuine national security needs. But they must be required to justify the specific uses for the money. No carte blanche. No blank checks. The programs must be directly related to Homeland Security goals, designed tightly without a lot of miscellaneous costs (grants are notorious for being ways to get hardware into departments under the guise of program needs), and monitored strictly to make sure those goals are being addressed by the program.

Despite what many seem to think, while we have lots of money the pot is finite. From what I've seen, a lot of those programs proposed by the departments that got money in this cycle were important. Timothy McVey was not a Muslim radical, and people like him still operate in the US, especially in the interior. The Muslim radicals who flew into the WTC and the Pentagon didn't train or live in NYC - they trained and lived in Florida, Arizona, and other places. And while the high-value targets now seem to be in the big cities, that doesn't mean other targets in the US aren't being scouted too. How better to succeed than direct the attention to a big plot against NYC while plans proceed to menace America's heartland?

I'm very pleased that the plot against NYC was foiled, and I hope they continue to be. But that shouldn't mean we open the country's coffers and bury Manhattan in gold.