What do Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo, the Apple and Pork Festival, and the Association for the Jewish Blind have in common?
They are all listed among the 77,069 potential terrorist targets in the Department of Homeland Security's updated National Assets Database (NADB), according to a recent report by the Inspector General.
The Inspector General's report expressed concern that "the varying presence of non-critical assets—and they are difficult to quantify—confirms that the NADB is not an accurate representation of the nation's CI/KR [critical infrastructure and key resources]."
The Database was created to help identify America's CI/KR and protect them against terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Critical infrastructure is defined as "systems or assets... so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems or assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety..."
Key assets are "individual targets whose destruction would not endanger vital systems, but could create local disaster or profoundly damage our Nation's morale and confidence." Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo presumably falls within the latter category.
How it Came About
In July 2004, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked the 56 U.S. states and territories to submit lists of what they felt should be protected assets. The results came back inconsistent and were difficult to categorize.
For example, Indiana had 8,591 assets listed in the NADB—more than any other state. New York, on the other hand, whose population is three times that of Indiana, had a mere 5,687 listed. Although the DHS refuses to disclose the full NADB list, CNN reported that this year's Homeland Security assessment of New York did not include Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Statue of Liberty.
States seemed to have very different priorities regarding their assets, and perhaps in part due to vague standards issued by the DHS, some states took a conservative approach, listing only what they were confident were vulnerable targets. Others felt they should include lots of extras, just in case.
Nebraska lists 17 times more emergency services than neighboring Iowa. Indiana listed 65 percent of all U.S. public health sector assets—including 417 nursing homes.
"The criticality of these assets," reads the DHS Inspector General's report, "is not clear."
"No, It Doesn't Worry Us at All"
Few could argue that there are no at-risk assets in the Database. For example, it includes 178 nuclear power plants, 2,963 chemical and hazardous materials facilities, and 6,141 transportation entities.
Actually, what may be more problematic than the extraneous contents of the NADB is the Department of Homeland Security's lack of response to the Inspector General's report.
When asked whether it concerns the DHS that some of the listings in the NADB are obviously not critical sites, DHS Spokesperson Joanna Gonzalez said, "No, it doesn't worry us at all. I think collecting all the information we can and having as much accurate information as we can is really what we need."
Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation Jim Carafano suggests that some critical assets would be better protected by those entities' private owners. He believes one reason some states listed so many assets is that they thought there might be money in it.
Carafano also thinks the number of truly critical assets is at most in the low hundreds, and certainly not in the tens of thousands.
"This notion that somehow you could childproof America and safeguard all this stuff is silly," he says.
$400 Million in Grants
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security promised to spare no expense to protect Americans from potential terrorist attacks by allocating $400 million in grants this year to help secure some of these assets.
Although not all have funding directly allocated to them, it does cost money to compile and sort through over 70,000 database entries. At this point, they are not yet prioritized according to criticality, a key step the Inspector General is urging the DHS to take.
Since its inception, the DHS's Infrastructure Protection Grant Program has given more than $1.1 billion to protect critical infrastructure sectors.
Thus, with such an enormous allocation of funding and a vast database of potential targets, it might appear that the DHS is doing an excellent job keeping America safe. Since September 11, 2001, over a dozen suspected terrorists have been convicted, and there has not been a single major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
Nonetheless, it might be somewhat specious to attribute such enormous success over the past five years purely to the Department of Homeland Security; after all, there were no major terrorist attacks in the U.S. in the five years preceding 9/11, either.
Some Suggestions for Improvement
In light of the one-plus billion tax dollars spent over the last several years to protect America's national assets from danger, some taxpayers want to be entitled to make suggestions on how DHS money is spent in the future.
Many critics proposed that the entire NADB be made public for review, although the DHS argues that that could give ideas to potential terrorists—who presumably are not able to think of these targets without help.
Others suggest the whole NADB system be scrapped, but in light of real terrorist attacks in other countries, including the London subway bombing a year ago, that might be extreme. A compromise, as Jim Carafano from the Heritage Foundation suggested, could be to have it redesigned from scratch by a private corporation that profits from its effectiveness and usability rather than its size.
But since none of these changes is likely to happen soon, this Epoch Times reporter would like to make a few suggestions of items to be added to the NADB while it still exists.
The first item is Hamburger University—a little known education facility probably not listed among the 4,164 in the NADB. Owned by McDonald's Corporation, this 130,000 square foot facility located in Oak Brook, Illinois trains over 5,800 McDonald's employees and franchise owners every year. Terrorists would wreak havoc on America by disrupting a system that facilitates one of the most important staples of the American diet.
Next is the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, California. Objects within this curious circular area on a wooded hillside seem to defy the laws of gravity; people appear shorter, balls roll uphill, and other inexplicable phenomenon occur.
Whether caused by magnetism, aliens, or forces from another dimension, the Mystery Spot certainly deserves further scientific research and it would be a catastrophic economic and emotional loss to Santa Cruz residents and tourists if it were destroyed.
And lastly, the list should also include the D'Aiuto pastry shop, a small corner bakery with an 80-year history just down the street from the Epoch Times headquarters in New York City. As the sign on the window boasts, they have "The Best Cheesecake on Earth"—and isn't that worth protecting, too?
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