9/11 created cash cow in Homeland Security

August 28, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Some question spending $75B yearly

By Kim Murphy

Los Angeles Times

OGALLALA, Neb.

On the edge of the Nebraska sand hills is Lake McConaughy, a 22-mile-long reservoir that in summer becomes a magnet for Winnebagos, fishermen and kite sailors. But officials here in Keith County, population 8,370, have long imagined a different scenario: an al-Qaida sleeper cell hitching explosives onto a water skiing boat and plowing into the dam at the head of the lake.

The federal Department of Homeland Security a few years ago gave the county $42,000 to buy state-of-the-art dive gear, including full-face masks, underwater lights and radios, and a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar capable of mapping wide areas of the lake floor. Cherry County, Neb., population 6,148, got thousands of federal dollars for cattle nose leads, halters and electric prods in case terrorists decided to mount biological warfare against cows.

In the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, where police fear militants might be eyeing DreamWorks Animation or the Disney creative campus, a $205,000 Homeland Security grant bought a 9-ton BearCat armored vehicle, complete with turret. More than 300 BearCats — many acquired with federal money — are now deployed by police across the country; the arrests of meth dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on insurgents in Baghdad.

A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal and state governments are spending about $75 billion a year on domestic security, setting up sophisticated radio networks, upgrading emergency medical response equipment, installing surveillance cameras and bomb-proof walls and outfitting airport screeners to detect an ever-evolving list of mobile explosives.

But whether the 10-year spending spree has been worth it is the subject of increasing debate. Dozens of potential attacks likely have been disrupted because of hyper-vigilant police and an untold number of others deterred by measures like airport screening. Homeland security spending has acted as a primer-pump for local governments starved by the recession and dramatically improved emergency response networks across the country. Yet a number of critics suggest that the same billions spent on cancer research or safer cars would have saved more lives.

“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, al-Qaida wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

“So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is one in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to one in 4.5 million?” he said.

An entire industry has sprung up to sell a vast array of products, including high-tech motion sensors and fully outfitted emergency operations trailers. The market is expected to grow to $31 billion by 2014.

And grow it will: The Department of Homeland Security, a collection of agencies ranging from border control to airport security sewn quickly together after Sept. 11, is the third-largest Cabinet department and — with almost no lawmaker willing to render America less prepared for a terrorist attack.