as someone who was LIVING five blocks from the white house on 9/11 (and had to check in with a machine-gun equipped humvee every time she wanted to enter her building in the weeks after), whose close friend made it out of the pentagon a few seconds before a fireball ate her desk (and her co-worker), whose ex- still has nightmares about the sound of bodies falling around him in lower manhattan as he ran from the pancaking twin towers, i was livid by the time i got to the "Montana" sentence, right before the jump.
where the FUCK are our priorities? this reminds me of the past election, when people in flyover states that aren't exactly on al-qaeda's "hot list" were essentially making decisions for NY, NJ, DC et al. here's a thought-- while you desecrate the flag by tying it to your cursed SUV's antenna in *insert random state here*, earnestly worrying about them damned A-rabs, people in the cities that are REAL targets gnash their teeth over our irresponsible, short-sighted, retarded strategery. politics as usual, making my stomach turn. i almost feel like this should be on Sepia Mutiny, since New Jersey is one massively brown state. whatever. i just needed to get this off my ever-curvier chest.
Facing the City, Potential Targets Rely on a Patchwork of Security
KEARNY, N.J., May 7 - It is the deadliest target in a swath of industrial northern New Jersey that terrorism experts call the most dangerous two miles in America: a chemical plant that processes chlorine gas, so close to Manhattan that the Empire State Building seems to rise up behind its storage tanks.
According to federal Environmental Protection Agency records, the plant poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius.
Yet on a recent Friday afternoon, it remained loosely guarded and accessible. Dozens of trucks and cars drove by within 100 feet of the tanks. A reporter and photographer drove back and forth for five minutes, snapping photos with a camera the size of a large sidearm, then left without being approached.
That chemical plant is just one of dozens of vulnerable sites between Newark Liberty International Airport and Port Elizabeth, which extends two miles to the east. A Congressional study in 2000 by a former Coast Guard commander deemed it the nation's most enticing environment for terrorists, providing a convenient way to cripple the economy by disrupting major portions of the country's rail lines, oil storage tanks and refineries, pipelines, air traffic, communications networks and highway system.
Since 9/11, those concerns have only been magnified. Law enforcement officials have warned of the need to prepare for an assault on one of the four major chemical plants in the area or an attempt to ship nuclear or biological weapons through its two port complexes.
Trying to safeguard more than 100 potential terrorist targets in two miles surrounded by residential communities, industrial areas and commuter corridors has proved a daunting challenge. Federal, state and local officials have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to install gates, roadblocks and security cameras and to provide additional patrols, surveillance and intelligence operations.
But even those in charge of the effort say the job is incomplete, bogged down by obstacles that are a microcosm of the nation's struggle against potential terrorist threats.
After distributing tens of billions to state and local governments since 9/11, the federal Department of Homeland Security cut New Jersey's financing this year to about $60 million from $99 million last year. Many security experts have complained that the formula - which provides Montana with three times as much money per capita as New Jersey - is guided more by politics than by the likelihood of an attack.
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