In a small seminar in the conference room at the American Friends Service Committee on York Road, Mike Peddicord, an AFSC volunteer and Goucher College senior, spoke on Friday, November 21, about his research on how federal “Homeland Security”dollars get spent in Maryland. Most of his research time, and this was a progress report, has been spent trying to unravel the bureaucratic mechanisms that obscure how Maryland officials will spend the $11 million allocated the state. Actually it is not just the bureaucracy that hides what is going on with these public funds, it is the all-too-familiar claims of “national security” that makes any investigation difficult. One security official commented to Peddicord that if he revealed what equipment he had purchased he would be exposing the program to terrorists. Apparently terrorists are reading state purchase orders and planning attacks in the soft underbelly of the state comptroller.

The “Urban Areas Security Initiative” seems to work just as many appropriations from Congress do. In this case, the US Congress appropriated $2.2 billion to be distributed among the states. The state of Maryland accordingly set up its own bureaucratic structure to manage its share. Who controls what and to what end, Peddicord found, was treated as if it were all highly classified. In Baltimore, the city fire department has established a Director of Emergency Management. Its executive officer is Lieutenant Bob Maloney. The fire department will presumably be the first responders to any major disaster.

At first glance it seems to all make sense. The money will go into planning, equipment acquisition, training and exercises. A modest 3 percent is allocated to administration with 25 percent dedicated to operational costs. Unfortunately, the researcher was not yet able to determine what these operations were, although he thought they would go to “overtime pay.” In the absence of a disaster or terrorist attack, though, it is hard to determine what overtime pay would be for.

The downpayment to the state, and correspondingly to the Baltimore metropolitan area, Peddicord said, would go to cover an evaluation of what could be done with current resources and in assessing the community’s needs in the event of a disaster. However, another component of this Congressional largess is that this money should also be used to prevent terrorist attacks. And how do you prevent terrorist attacks? One way to do so is to identify the “PTE’s”–the potential threat elements. Of course, the “elements,” when translated from police doublespeak, are people and organizations. Ironically, in the table of organization Peddicord presented, there was no apparent link to state or local police. Further, this charge to identify PTE’s comes at a time when the last of the battles to eliminate police files was just won by Denver, CO activists.

As the seminar disbanded, some of the participants recalled their own experiences with “red squads” and the FBI’s “administrative index,” earlier attempts at identifying “dangerous” persons and groups. One of those groups was the American Friends Service Committee.