October 7, 2004
George W. Bush likes to boast of his record on homeland security, but the truth
is that corporate and political favoritism by the White House has badly
compromised our capacity to defend ourselves against a terrorist attack.
For example, even as we searched, apparently fruitlessly, for weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq, thousands of potential WMD — our nation's
chemical and nuclear energy facilities — have been left unguarded to
please the president's corporate friends and funders.
Of the nation's
15,000 chemical plants, the Environmental Protection Agency has identified 123
where toxic gases released by a terrorist assault could kill or injure more than
1 million people, and 700 others where deaths and injuries would exceed 100,000.
Yet a series of recent investigations by news organizations has found that most
of these plants are effectively unguarded, even though the risks are beyond
dispute and Al Qaeda's interest in these targets is generously
documented.
Seven wee ks after 9/11, a GOP-controlled Senate committee
unanimously passed a bill to require chemical plants to take steps to protect
the public from terrorist attacks. But the White House, at the chemical
industry's behest, derailed the bill and then removed the EPA's existing
regulatory authority to require improvements in chemical plant security. Why
would the Bush administration do this? All we know for sure is that President
Bush and his party have accepted more than $22 million from the chemical
industry since 1998.
The nuclear power industry, which gave $15
million to Bush and the GOP, also falls under the White House umbrella. A 2003
General Accounting Office report faulted the administration for failing to
bolster nuclear plant defenses and found faulty security the rule at nuclear
plants nationwide, despite myriad evidence that U.S. commercial nuclear
reactors are high-priority terrorist targets. Astonishingly, federal law
absolves nuclear power operators from protecting themselves against attack by
enemies of the United States.
In order to be licensed, operators are
required to protect their facilities from vandals. But both the GAO and
industry reports acknowledge that the industry's private security guards are
undertrained, underequipped and demoralized. When the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission stages mock assaults, the attackers are able to penetrate plant
defenses in half their attempts and trigger simulated catastrophic radiation
releases — even though the defenders have advance notice of the exact time
of the exercise and reinforce their defenses in anticipation. According to the
GAO, the federal government deliberately stages "softball" mock attacks to give
the impression of plant security and routinely shields the industry by burying
significant security breaches.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's
top aide, Al Martinez-Fonts, a former executive of JPMorgan Chase, recently
explained why his department was reluctant to force the industry to adopt
security reforms beyon d voluntary programs, which Ridge himself admits don't
work.
"I was in the private sector all my life," explained
Martinez-Fonts. "Did I like it when the government came in and stepped in and
told [us] to do certain things? The answer's no…. I think we're
trying to avoid that."
Applying this philosophy broadly, the White
House, at the behest of the airline industry and air cargo carriers, has opposed
a bill by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) to require that all commercial
cargo placed on passenger planes be physically screened, just like luggage.
Only about 5% of air cargo is now screened. Airline passengers are often
sitting only inches above cargo that has not been checked, despite a
Transportation Security Administration estimate in 2002 that there is a 35% to
65% chance that terrorists are planning to place a bomb in the cargo of a U.S.
passenger plane.
The administration's record on port security is equally
dismal. Only 1% of the 10 million cargo containers entering A merican ports
each year are ever checked, yet the administration has opposed bipartisan
legislation creating a cargo-container profiling plan that focuses on
inspections of high-risk cargo.
Tiptoeing around other big contributors,
the White House has done nothing to secure railroad and transit networks or
protect oil and gas pipelines. Two billion dollars in annual federal
anti-terror grants to the states has been distributed more on the basis of pork
than on need.
Martinez-Font's idea that industry will step up to the
plate on its own is pure folly. In July 2003, the Conference Board, a business
research group, found that American corporations had hiked security expenditures
less than 4% on average since the Sept. 11 attacks.
While asking
sacrifice of young soldiers and future generations who will pay his giant
deficits, Bush has been reluctant to curtail corporate profits or prerogatives
or to ask sacrifice of political pals or the large donors who helped put him in
office.