One of the reasons I fled from Washington, DC was that I wanted to live somewhere where the Bush administration wouldn’t have such a foothold, a place where there were no missile launchers on street corners and fighter jets flying low over my house.
But I should have known, the reach of Homeland Security is great: it turns out that a miniature golf course here in San Jose was listed in the National Asset Database as a potential terrorist target. From the Mercury News:
Some time back, officials added the humble South San Jose theme park — “three acres, two mini golf courses, very challenging,” says Golfland’s VP Bob Kenney — to their National Asset Database. Local officials, figuring plenty of other Silicon Valley sites were richer targets, burst out laughing when they saw it.
“The moment we realized it was on the list, it was taken off,” said San Jose police officer Rubens Dalaison, who handles “critical infrastructure assessment” for the department. “I myself took it off.”
Then again, the list remains top secret. So who really knows?
The terrorist-watchers at Homeland Security did not return several phone calls. And no one locally seems to know how Golfland got on the list to begin with.
