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Monday, September 20, 2004

Bush: Reckless indifference to the nightmare scenario 

Because I live in a port city, Philadelphia—and others of us live in other port cities—my hair was been on fire about a loose nuke or a dirty bomb in a shipping container for some time (here, here, and here).

Now the CEO of the Port of Seattle is saying the same thing:

In the United States we have 361 river ports and seaports. Every year we get 50,000 visits from 8,100 foreign ships. Every day 21,000 containers enter the United States. We can verify the contents of only about 4 to 6 percent of those containers. And it would require only one rogue container to bring commerce to its knees.

It is a very different story at our nation's seaports. We're spending a fraction of what we spend at airports, on a far more complex problem. We do not have a comprehensive plan to know what is in the containers that arrive every day. We need to verify that those boxes are documented, loaded securely and protected against tampering throughout their journey.

Secretary Ridge has said that funding for more robust solutions to container security problems will have to come from the private sector.
(via WaPo)

These... people want to privatize port security? WTF?

Oh, wait. I forgot. The port cities are mostly in Blue states, and all the inhabitants are going to Hell anyhow. Fuck 'em.


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