Bulk of Anti-Terror Funding Pegged to 9/11 Suspect

(Feb. 1) -- At first glance, the $213 million that the Obama administration wants to add to the federal budget in anti-terrorism funding for high-risk cities next year seems like a substantial increase. It would boost the pot of urban homeland security money by 24 percent over the current level.

But a closer look at the budget finds that almost all of the increase – $200 million – can be traced largely to one man: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

That's the money the federal government is offering to cities that host terrorist trials. There are several terrorists whose trials could qualify a city for the funds, but Mohammed is the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and his trial would be expected to command the lion's share of that pot.

Though a small fraction of the overall $56 billion budget proposed for the Department of Homeland Security, the $200 million is at the center of a heated debate over trials for accused terrorists and the funding of anti-terrorism operations more broadly. It will be allocated through the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), a federal grant program aimed at bolstering the terrorism defenses of high-risk cities nationwide.

Funding for the program has drawn sharp criticism in recent years from big cities, particularly New York, which have complained that as more and more cities were added to the list of localities eligible for anti-terror grants, less money went to the places where the threat was highest, like the Big Apple, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Department of Homeland Security officials trumpeted the $213 million increase to the UASI grants (which brings the total grant money to $1.1 billion) in a background briefing with reporters, a move that drew sharp retorts from critics who said the department was obscuring a minimal overall rise in funding along with cuts to other grants that go to states and cities.

"They can't say that," said Matt Mayer, a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who ran Homeland Security's terrorism preparedness program during the Bush administration. The $200 million, he said, "is a set-aside, a carve-out" for New York, or whichever city ultimately hosts the Mohammed trial.

Mayer said he saw little indication that the government was improving a funding process that allowed places like Omaha, Neb., and Toledo, Ohio, to compete for the same pot of security dollars as New York and Washington. "We continue to underfund high risk and overfund low risk," he said. What began as six cities eligible for UASI grants is now more than 60, he said. "It's gotten worse," Mayer said.

Rep. Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and a frequent critic of the Obama administration, said the government had "gotten a little better" in its allocation of anti-terrorism grants but that the $213 million figure was "a totally phony number."

"We need more than that," King said, adding that administration was doing little to correct a system in which "millions of dollars are being spent on areas that won't be attacked in a million years."

In the briefing with reporters, the administration officials stressed that the UASI grants were "a very targeted program" for the "highest-risk cities across the nation."

Overall, the Obama administration is proposing a 2 percent increase in the 2011 budget for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes funding for additional airport body scanners and federal marshals in the wake of the Christmas terror plot last year.

Senior Democrats in the House and Senate praised the budget request, although they criticized proposed cuts of $300 million to grant programs that fund firefighters, transit security and other popular initiatives. Homeland Security officials said many of the cuts were more than offset by $510 million in added security spending in last year's stimulus package.

Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill also don't want the $200 million for the terror trials spent at all, since they believe Mohammed and other alleged terrorists should be tried in military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., said he opposed the funding. And so did a moderate Democrat, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. Many Republicans have already come out against the civilian trials.

Today also brought little clarity to the uncertainty surrounding exactly where Mohammed will be tried. Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November that he would stand trial in a federal court in lower Manhattan. But after initially welcoming the decision, New York officials said the hassle and cost of the trial would be too big a burden.

The White House insisted today that no final decision had been made on whether the trial would be moved, and to where. "There's no doubt that a city like New York has serious security and logistical concerns about a trial, and those can, should and will be taken into account," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The Department of Justice could choose another jurisdiction with ties to the 9/11 attack, such as Pennsylvania or Virginia, but the not-in-my-backyard sentiments are prevailing there as well. Spokesmen for Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and the city of Alexandria, Va., indicated to The Associated Press that they wanted no part of the trial either.

One volunteer has popped up to host the trial: the smaller upstate New York city of Newburgh, population around 30,000. Newburgh's mayor, Nicholas Valentine, made national headlines when he said the struggling city would welcome the trial – and more specifically, it would love to take the $200 million the federal government is offering to whichever locality does host Mohammed.

"This could be an economic engine for us," Valentine told the local newspaper. The mayor also said the money could help fill a budget hole and would make Newburgh "visible around the world as a community that is really trying to be better."