Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had given an initial estimate of $75 million a year but later warned it could be higher. A recent NYPD analysis came up with the totals cited by the mayor. Believing the high-profile trial could inspire another attack, the Police Department has planned a show of force involving thousands of officers and expects to protect the courthouse with car check points, bomb-sniffing dogs, rooftop sharpshooters, and helicopter patrols.
City officials and Senator Charles Schumer of New York have called on the federal government to foot the bill.
“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 in the letter dated Tuesday to the Office of Management and Budget in Washington.
Federal officials have said they are still determining the security costs and how they will be paid. No date has been set for the trial.
Meanwhile, a new classified Pentagon report found that 1 in 5 terror suspects released from Guantanamo Bay has returned to the fight - a finding expected to stoke an already fierce debate over President Obama’s plan to close the military prison.
Early last year, the Pentagon reported that the rate of released detainees returning to militancy was 11 percent. In April, it was 14 percent. The latest figure was 20 percent, according to a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had not been declassified and released.
Critics of the reports say there is so little information in the assessments that they are nearly impossible to verify independently. Civil rights advocates say the number of fighters suspected of or confirmed as returning to the battlefield is likely to be much smaller.
Republicans say Guantanamo cannot be closed because that would mean either releasing hardened terrorists back into the fight or moving them into US prisons, which many Americans oppose.
President Obama said Tuesday he still plans to close the detention facility, but Congress has blocked funding for the endeavor and, under significant political pressure, Obama has said he won’t release any more detainees to Yemen because of Al Qaeda’s grip on that nation.
