Sept. 27, 2006
 
EDITORIAL: Securing Our Ports
 
The Providence Journal
 
The hundreds of ports lining our coasts remain, five years after 9/11, vulnerable to terrorism. Efforts to improve port security have met serious obstacles, causing alarm among those who envision a containerized nuclear or bio-terrorism weapon slipping through the ports into our country.
 
Earlier this year, a proposal to contract with a Dubai-based company to manage our largest ports was scuttled, because of concerns about exactly such scenarios. An alarmed public made jumpy politicians reject the idea -- even though the country linked to the port company, the United Arab Emirates, has at times been a valuable Mideast ally in the fight against terrorism.
 
Recently, a bill has emerged from the Senate Commerce, Finance and Homeland Security committees that goes a long way toward addressing these issues. The Port Security Improvement Act, of 2006, would codify several measures to make our ports safer. One would be the Container Security Initiative, which would inspect suspicious-looking containers in their ports of origin -- before they got near U.S. shores. Another would install radiation portal monitors, to scan containers as they were unloaded in our largest ports.
 
With about 11 million containers annually entering the United States, such systematic measures would substantially increase port security.
 
Just as important as preventing attacks at the nation's ports is limiting the economic damage in the event of such an attack. The Port Security Improvement Act would instruct the Homeland Security Department to devise strategies for such disasters.
 
These are all sensible proposals. There is no way, as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told senators this month, that every potential threat at the ports could be eliminated. (Even if there were, such an effort would interfere so much with trade that it would bankrupt the country.) But developing a systematic approach would certainly minimize the risks.
 
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