White House Tried to Cut Explosive Detection Funding

Sometimes, the late night comedians must simply stand in awe of the Bush White House. Under the heading of, “you can’t make this stuff up,” the White House tried to cut $6 million from the funding of technology to detect explosives. This piffling reduction was stopped by the do-less-than-nothing Congress, but the fact remains that the Heimatschutzministerium (which at least sounds more effective that Department of Homeland Security) has failed to spend $200 million in R&D funds since its inception.

Thanks to world-class police work (and not armed might), it appears that the British have foiled a plot to blow up a dozen or so transatlantic flights using liquid explosives mixed on board the doomed craft. The Japanese have been using liquid explosive detectors at Narita Airport in Tokyo for months and demonstrated their technology to the US at a conference in January. The guys at the Heimatschutzministerium have decided to test six detectors at US airports soon. Six would cover the airports in the Greater Los Angeles Area, but the rest of the country would get nothing.

Kip Hawley, assistant secretary for transportation security and the guy to has to put lipstick on this pig for public viewing, said of the detectors the Japanese have been using, “It is very promising technology, and we are extremely interested in it to help us operationally in the next several years.” The fifth anniversary of the Al Qaeda murders in New York and Washington is less than a month away – yet there is no sense of urgency.

In any war, the usual complaint from the combatants is a lack of resources. Yet not in the half-hearted, half-assed war on Al Qaeda that the Bush administration is sort of fighting. Representative Martin Sabo (D-MN), noted in a recent Associated Press story, “They [the Heimatschutzministerium] clearly have been given lots of resources that they haven’t been using.”

The department is clearly dysfunctional and has been since its creation. Whether this is because the mission is cluttered is hard to say because the implementation has been such a mess. It fails at the one thing bureaucracies are supposed to be good at doing, spending money. Yet as Lee Hamilton, 9-11 commission co-chairman, said, “It’s appalling to us that five years after 9-11, you do not have detection devices for all kinds of explosives.” Remove the heads of the department, change its structure, abolish it and start over – anything is better than what exists now, a department that appears to be working for the other side.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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