A report will land on the president's desk early this year with recommendations to prevent terrorists from shipping a biological or chemical weapon directly into a major U.S city, White House officials confirm.
An interagency group in the White House Office of Homeland Security is working day and night trying to patch up what security and trade experts agree is a gaping whole in America's homeland security: the voluminous flow of unchecked cargo containers rolling off ships and into U.S. ports, most of which are located in the hearts of U.S. cities.
That report will recommend enlisting major companies in the war against terror: Companies that want to ship goods to the United States would become the first line of defense by guaranteeing to the U.S. government that they have searched and sealed cargo as it leaves a foreign plant and that it is secure until it reaches a U.S. port. In return, those shipments would sail through U.S. customs quickly and largely unmolested, while inspectors concentrate on other more mysterious cargo, according to officials in that office.
The report will also recommend that U.S. ports install a raft of space-age technology to scan cargo containers without opening them as they roll off ships and to signal inspectors if a container has been opened during passage. It will also outline a lengthy list of new requirements to ensure that companies' cargo manifests are detailed, up-to-date, and delivered electronically long before goods arrive.
U.S. officials will deliver a similar set of recommendations in a "white paper" to the International Maritime Organization, which sets up the rules for trade on the high seas, at a meeting in London set for Feb. 11-14, officials drafting that paper confirm.
Both sets of recommendations represent a drastic departure for the government as it scrambles to pair trade and security, after decades of concentrating almost solely on the former -- to the detriment of the latter, some security experts said.
Trade experts agree that the sheer volume -- 5.7 million maritime containers arrived in the United States in 2000, according to Customs officials -- far exceeds the patchwork of security mechanism in place to ensure that one does not contain a "dirty" nuclear device set to blow as it arrives near the heart of New York. The Coast Guard can only board and search a fraction of cargo ships before they arrive, and it takes five inspectors an average of 3 hours to search a cargo container, according the Council of Foreign Relations.
Customs and the Coast Guard scan cargo documents and passenger lists to identify possible irregularities, but companies are not required to deliver accurate cargo manifests to Customs officials until weeks after the goods actually arrive in port.
"We have no credible system of security within surface and maritime trade," said the Council on Foreign Relations' Stephen Flynn, an expert on trade and security. "The first time it is exploited, we will shut it down."
Turning off the spigot on maritime containers on the heels of a terrorist attack for any significant period of time could also spell economic doom. U.S. seaports handled nearly $737 billion mostly in containerized cargo in 2000.
"It would set the country's economy back 150 years," said Theresa Cardinal Brown, Manager of Labor and Immigration Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Grounding U.S. airlines for just a few days after Sept. 11 caused catastrophic damage to that industry, spurring Congress to swiftly pass a $15 billion airline bailout package later that same month and contributing to a downward-spiraling economy.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is responsible for overseeing the shipment of around 7,000 maritime containers each day, nearly 3 million last year. Director of Port Commerce Rick Larrabee said that in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, it quickly became clear that the potential threat that comes along with those thousands of containers far exceeds any ability to inspect them.
"As we have begun to talk about it, it became very obvious that the real weak link in the system is that there is no way you can physically inspect these containers and that we did not have very good reliable information about what was inside," Larrabee said.
In what was billed as a major policy speech at the Center for National Policy Jan. 4, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said that only two out of every 100 cargo containers that enter U.S. ports are inspected, a statistic that has galvanized debate over containerized cargo.
For the short term, the government is moving expeditiously to at least boost some security arrangements at U.S. ports and along U.S. borders.
Congress is considering legislation drafted by Sen. John Breaux, D-La., and Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., that would create a national "sea marshal" program to put officers in ports. That bill also would allow Congress to hand ports $400 million to improve physical security at ports.
Breaux chaired a series of hearings this month in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., New Orleans and Houston on security issues at U.S. ports.
"We have to ensure that the ports of America that deliver so much of our goods and services are, in fact, secure, and we are doing everything possible to ensure that,"
Breaux said.
The U.S. Customs Service has dispatched nearly 4,000 small, hand-held "radiation pagers" to help inspectors at borders and seaports look for nuclear weapons as best as they can.
The Coast Guard has shifted many of its assets away from prowling for drug runners and illegal immigrant smugglers and has launched an unprecedented effort to board and search suspect vessels miles off U.S. coasts. On Jan. 10, the U.S. Navy dedicated 13 fast and deadly 170-foot Cyclone Class Navy Patrol Coastal ships to escort commercial ships containing hazardous or explosive materials in and out of U.S. ports.
Some data on a ship's cargo and passengers are now due to the U.S. Customs service 96 hours before ships arrive, as opposed to 24 hours prior to Sept. 11, according to U.S. Coast Guard Director of Port Security Capt. Tony Regalbuto. But companies still are not required to prove those manifests truly match container contents until weeks after the goods arrive.
Larrabee, of the New York port authority, said the Breaux bill is only a step in the right direction and the government must address the broader problem by eliminating threats before they reach U.S. shores.
"It does some good things," Larrabee said of Holling's legislation. "But I don't think the
Hollings bill goes far enough."
The plan that is still under wraps at Gov. Tom Ridge's Office of Homeland Security is designed to go farther, by enlisting companies that do large volumes of trade with the Unites States into the security effort. One idea is to ensure that only certified individuals seal cargo containers overseas at companies that are known trading partners. New technologies would signal officials if those containers were opened in transit.
In return, companies that participate in such a program would get their goods zipped quickly through customs, allowing U.S. officials to concentrate on more mysterious shipments.
That plan has hope, Flynn said, because 58 percent of all imports come from the same 400 companies: "The good news is that most [trade] is milk runs."
Next: The U.S. government eyes security and the hum of traffic on border roads, bridges, tunnels and rails.
