Who knows if Osama bin Laden had even heard of the petting zoo in Woodville, Ala., or the Amish Country Popcorn Factory in Berne, Ind., before this week. But those are listed among the potential terrorist targets provided by states and now displayed on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security database.
The department’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, conducted an audit of the National Asset Database and in a report last week deemed it flawed. That’s an understatement. Indiana as of January had listed 8,591 potential terror targets compared with 5,687 listed by New York, site of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.
“The presence of large numbers of out of place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the Skinner report says.
While the report didn’t disclose the 77,069 sites in the federal database, for security reasons, auditors questioned the inclusion of places like the “ice cream parlor,” the “donut shop” and the “tackle shop.” In rural Georgia, the Kangaroo Conservation Center, which houses 250 kangaroos, was listed. The Trees of Mystery in California’s redwood country is also on the list. Lance Clem, spokesman for Colorado’s Department of Public Safety, said Colorado has fewer than 1,300 targets but “nothing like those items.”
The database is used to help prioritize millions of dollars in anti-terrorism grants each year, including funds for key cities. There was an uproar a few weeks back when it was announced that grants to New York City and other big cities had fallen dramatically while smaller cities saw increases. Now we may know why.
The unusual listings were submitted by individual states after Homeland Security asked them to submit sites that, if attacked, would result in a “catastrophic” loss of lives or damage to the economy. States obviously pinpointed tourist attractions important to their economies. That’s understandable, but in the grand scheme of things, knowing that terrorists often go for maximum damage, Skinner was right to question some of the entries. More realistic targets would be a power transmission switch that controls an entire city’s power supply, or a Federal Aviation Administration control tower that could cripple the nation’s air traffic system.
The Homeland Security Department needs to set sensible standards and definitions for what should be on the list. That’s not to say that terrorists haven’t struck schools and malls elsewhere. But having the state of Washington list 65 national monuments as targets while Washington, D.C., listed just 37 has to raise eyebrows. States need to be more realistic in identifying terror targets and setting funding priorities.
