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The Broader Port Security Problem

The New York Times has a good article today on how the question of whether a Dubai-controlled company is allowed to operate a few ports or not is really the least of our port security issues:

The administration's core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards — and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.

Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said Mr. Flynn, the ports security expert….

"I'm not worried about who is running the New York port," a senior inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency said, insisting he could not be named because the agency's work is considered confidential. "I'm worried about what arrives at the New York port."

A while back Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard official who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations, had a longer piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review describing just how shaky port security is. Worth reading. And P.J. Crowley of the Center for American Progress did a short piece back in 2004 on how the administration just doesn't take this stuff very seriously at all: "Rather than increasing federal assistance in the face of new security requirements, the Bush administration's port security grant request is actually a huge reduction from the still inadequate total of $500 million allocated for port security in the first three years of the Bush administration."

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 02/23/06 at 10:48 AM | E-mail | Print | Digg this | de.licio.us

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William H. Webster (former director FBI and CIA) once disclosed how in ten separate chilling instances airport security bagged middle easterners trying to smuggle a suitcase full of explosives into the US--then they succeeded and blew up the World Trade Center.
So what's the story...?
Is our corrupt government purposely leaving the door open to terrorists?, and is this why a nation with strong ties to terrorist orgs. is being allowed to run vital national infrastructures (port operations)? This certainly seems to be the case here...
Currently our borders are wide open. Relatively recently there was a case where a border patrol airplane surreptitiously followed a pickup truck full of pot as it drove from a house in Mexico right across the border to a freeway in the US.
Is the nefarious plan here that, with the implementation of new sensing technology on the border, we're to be "cursed" with another wide open door into the homeland...?
Follow the money... What if all the money that's gone into the Department of Homeland Security went into directly protecting our borders and ports...
Instead, so it would seem, the government is intent on opening up a terrorist pipeline straight into the Middle East.
Something "funny" must be going on here, because no one is that stupid (but, of course, how stupid not to have a policy of scrambling fighter jets if a domestic airliner is hijacked!)

Posted by: Michael L. Wagner on 02/23/06 at 12:18 PM

Stephen Flynn's book, America the Vulnerable, was cited by everyone from Coast Guard to maritime bigwigs at a ports security conference in Oakland a couple of years ago. All comments were along the lines of "this guy has it right". When I went to buy the book I found it on Amazon for $3 because it had already been remaindered -- it's probably out of print by now. Good to know he is continuing to get the message out.

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The Broader Port Security Problem

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