Contain Yourself
By James Jay Carafano Posted in Immigration — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I did not like everything I saw during my time at the port of LA/Long Beach with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In fact, it reminded me how really stupid Congress can be sometimes when it fails to think through the dumb mandates they impose on the department—essentially wasting our tax dollars and diverting DHS from the tasks that could actually fight terrorism and secure our borders.
At the port of LA/Long Beach, the bad news is that sometimes Washington forces CBP to do some really dumb things. Looking for nuclear weapons smuggled in shipping containers is one of them. Any serious security analyst would tell you that the Tom Clancy “nuke in a box” scenario is pretty far-fetched; even if it were to happen, there are much better ways to stop the smuggling of nuclear and radiological threats than by rooting through containers of clothing from the Philippines.
Read on . . .
In fact, the best way to stop nuclear smuggling would be to beef-up the Proliferation Security Initiative, an effort started by President Bush that proactively goes after anyone who tries to covertly traffic in nuclear materials or technology.
Yet by law, CBP (which has about 500 agents at the port) has to dedicate about quarter of them to scanning every container. That’s right – all five million that pass through the port for radiation. And they can get hundreds of alerts a day. That is because there are lots of things like granite and tile that have naturally occurring radiation in them. Truth is, absent a stupid directive from Congress, I’m sure CBP could find a lot more efficient ways to use its agents. There are plenty of real everyday threats at the port they could spend more time on—like invasive species in packing crates that could destroy American crops or illegals sneaking in the cargo hold of a ship.
And it gets worse. Congress recently passed a requirement to physically scan every container coming into the U.S. That’s tens of millions of containers. Congress knows the threat does not warrant this measure and the technologies are not good enough to do it, and even if CBP could take a picture of every container, there is no way to look at all the pictures before the containers are delivered. Congress made it a law anyway. And now, the government will spend billions trying to do it. That represents a lot of time, money, and people that could have been spent on restoring the sovereignty of our borders and stopping terrorists.