The letter written by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Washington earlier this month set a whopping $200-million-a-year price tag to secure the city during the trial
- more than double the original estimate. The speech by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly detailed a planned lockdown of lower Manhattan certain to set new standards for gridlock.
The resulting political and public outcry has forced the Obama administration to consider looking for a friendlier home for the high-profile trial, even as the legitimacy of the New York Police Department's security plan and its estimated cost goes unchallenged.
Kelly insists the plan is necessary - a reality that started to sink in after his remarks before business leaders.
"The investment that the department would have to make ... and the details of the plan itself, how it would've impacted the traffic in lower Manhattan," he told reporters Friday. "That was the first time they heard it in one fell swoop, so to speak, and it raised their concerns."
By announcing late last year that New York would host the trial of admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged al-Qaida cohorts, the Obama administration stumbled into a political fire that had burned the previous administration.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, New York and federal officials have quarreled over how much of the city's security costs should be borne by Washington. New York officials, led by Bloomberg, have complained for years that the government does not pay enough of those costs. The Bush administration long argued they have to spread resources to protect the entire country.
The latest round of that long-running fight began when the Bloomberg administration circulated a Jan. 5 letter to reporters from the mayor to the Office of Management and Budget in Washington.
The letter put the cost of stepped-up security at $216 million for the first year after Mohammed and the others arrive in Manhattan from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After that, the mayor said it would cost $200 million annually for as long as the men are detained in the city
- mainly overtime for extra NYPD patrols.
The police department had given an initial estimate of $75 million a year but later warned it could be higher. Officials said a second, more careful analysis produced the totals cited by the mayor, who warned the trial would strain the resources of the nation's largest police department.
"As 9/11 was an attack on the entire nation, we need the federal government to shoulder the significant costs we will incur and ease this burden," Bloomberg wrote.
The mayor left Kelly to explain the threat - and the extensive plans to thwart it.
"Given the unprecedented media attention the trial will attract, one concern is that terrorists may attempt to strike again in an effort to garner the publicity," he said in the Jan. 13 speech to a police organization.
On Friday, Kelly told reporters that public backlash made it "unlikely" the case would go forward in New York City. Two Obama administration officials said the Justice Department is drawing up plans for alternate locations for the terror trials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deliberations.
