Homeland Security: NYC has no national monuments or icons at risk of terrorist attack

When I was deciding whether to stay and take the bar exam here in New York, one of the things in the "Cons" list was the high likelihood that New York City will be hit by another terrorist attack during the next 3-4 years. During the six years I've lived here, I've experienced 9/11 from a skyscraper in Midtown, been informed that anthrax had been detected less than six blocks from where I was sitting, watched from from the 27th floor of my company's building as the NYPD detonated a suspicious package in the middle of Third Avenue, sat on the E train and watched as jittery counterterrorism agents shined their flashlights into the tunnel under the East River, and been evacuated from Grand Central Station during a bomb threat.

Every single person living in New York since 9/11 has dealt with this kind of stuff on a regular basis. But despite New York's continually high threat level, the Department of Homeland Security is cutting the city's funding, because the agency found that "New York City has no national monuments or icons that would be at risk of terrorist attack." [Washington Post] Mayor Bloomberg responded: "I don't have to list the Brooklyn Bridge, the United Nations and Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building and the Stock Exchange . . . So you really wonder what was going through somebody's mind." [Washington Post]

Bloomberg left out plenty of other candidates for the list, including Ellis Island, Times Square (which is as much a symbol of American capitalism as the World Trade Center was), Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Guggenheim, and the new World Trade Center site, currently under construction, which seems like a pretty obvious candidate for any list of terrorism targets.

There is no doubt that terrorism is a national threat, and considering that generating fear is the primary goal of terrorism, one can imagine terrorists targeting a smaller city, to show Americans that nowhere is safe. But the funds to protect these smaller cities should not be taken from New York and Washington, the two Americans cities which have actually been attacked. Mayor Bloomberg put it best: "When you stop a terrorist, they have a map of New York City in their pocket. They don't have a map of any of the other 45 places." [Washington Post]

"Anti-Terror Funding Cut in D.C. and New York" [Washington Post]