Threat continues and NYC may be No. 1 target

Janet Napolitano

After a brief welcome from NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he said his city was the most likely terror target in the USA, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told a meeting of her Homeland Security Advisory Council on February 3 that, “We face an enemy whose desire to attack us at home has not diminished, nor do we expect it to diminish.”

To help confront that threat, Napolitano announced that she was asking the advisory panel to establish a new task force that would focus specifically on how community-based organizations – both religious and secular – could help identify homegrown terrorists and dampen domestic violence.

DHS wants to improve its outreach to such community-based groups, said Napolitano, and to receive greater input from them. “Security is a shared responsibility among many groups,” she added. The DHS Secretary specifically cited Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians and Arabs as among those groups to which her department is consciously reaching out.

Bloomberg ticked off the reasons why he felt NYC was an inviting terrorist target: the city serves as a “gateway” to the rest of the country, it is a financial capital, and it boasts such worldwide icons as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. “If anyone is going to attack,” said the mayor, “the probability is that we will be the target.”

He noted that the New York City government spends more money and takes more effort to protect its citizens than any other U.S. city, citing the police department’s huge $8 billion annual budget, and the total of $12 billion per year the city spends, when the fire department, emergency services and other services that protect citizens are included in the overall spending mix.

Bloomberg cited the Lower Manhattan initiative which the city has already launched to install video surveillance cameras, license plate readers and other security gear in the financial district to help thwart an attack in that neighborhood, and added, “We’ll create a similar initiative in midtown.”

During a brief one-hour public session, sandwiched between two sessions in which the advisory panel members met behind closed doors, the group heard a “sustainability and efficiency” task force report from its chairman, Dr. Lydia Thomas, a trustee and former President and CEO of Noblis, Inc. Thomas cited numerous ways in which DHS could husband its resources and save money, including an unusual suggestion that TSA should consider recycling the knives and other metal objects and the water bottles and other plastic items that its screeners confiscate from travelers who are prohibited from carrying such items aboard an aircraft.

Ruth David, President and Chief Executive Officer of ANSER (Analytic Services, Inc.), who served as vice chair of the quadrennial review advisory committee, noted that DHS had sent its top-to-bottom Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) report to Congress two days earlier.