House approves nuke and bio screenings at ports
According to this AP story, the house has approved a $2.4 billion dollar bill to provide radiological and biological screening of 98% of cargo containers at 140 U.S. ports.
From the article:
All it takes is one atomic or radiological bomb to make 9-11 look like a firecracker," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. "If we really want to make this country safer, we must demand that before any container is put on a ship bound for the United States it must be scanned electronically in the foreign port. It's too late if we find a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles or New York."
It's too bad that the radiological or biological devices being smuggled into our ports exist only in the minds of those who choose to live in a society of fear. Someone wake me up when we start spending our shekels on actual problems, rather than imaginary ones.
From the article:
All it takes is one atomic or radiological bomb to make 9-11 look like a firecracker," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. "If we really want to make this country safer, we must demand that before any container is put on a ship bound for the United States it must be scanned electronically in the foreign port. It's too late if we find a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles or New York."
It's too bad that the radiological or biological devices being smuggled into our ports exist only in the minds of those who choose to live in a society of fear. Someone wake me up when we start spending our shekels on actual problems, rather than imaginary ones.
4 Comments:
Actually, this is the only halfway good idea they've come up with so far. All the nonsense about background checks and biometric ID cards for "port workers" is half ignorance about what longshoremen/truckers/warehousemen actually do and half backdoor union-busting. The elephant in the room that nobody really wants to talk about is a remote controlled nuclear or bio device in a container, where the loaded container acts as the warhead and the ship acts as the missile. To the extent that there's any ter'rist threat at all in the ports, that's the threat right there.
I agree with IMBG. Nuke/bio/whatever screening is a much better idea than the ID card scheme.
Neither of them is a very good scheme. Having a nuke detector at a terminal is as useful as a unicorn detector.
The ID scheme is extremely flawed by the process by which it came about - from my understanding there are twenty seven different "pieces of information" stored on the card, and that exactly what those are is not known. Just look at the numerous "your terrorist baby is on the no-fly list" incidents and tell me you trust the feds to track Port workers for "likely terrorists".
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there is such a thing as a nuclear bomb.
Unicorns, I'm not so sure about. But you gotta figure that countless millions of hippies, new age practitioners, and eight year old girls can't all be wrong.
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