Re: You are indeed confused, very confused


"Mark Fox" <mark_fox_@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1140377842.528736.44100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Its Just Me wrote:
What's funny about this is you believe your own bull***.

I agree, Joe's bull*** is really unbelievable. LOL!!

Joe S. wrote:
I am confused, very confused...


"Mark Fox" <mark_fox_@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

Of course you are. Liberals are lying to you and you believe them.
That's why you are confused. Pull your head out of your ass and smell
the reality.

Millions upon millions of containers enter US ports every year. Only
a tiny
fraction of these containers are inspected to ensure that what's
listed on
the shipping manifest is what's inside the container.

See, right here you clearly don't know what the heck you are talking
about. You clearly haven't the slightest idea how security on
international shipping containers is accomplished. and that's only the
unclassified procedures. You need to grow a brain and learn how the
world works before you will overcome your confusion.


Overcome this, fool:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/9629/

QUOTE

Port Security Is Still a House of Cards
Author: Stephen E. Flynn, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National
Security Studies


January/February 2006
Far Eastern Economic Review

As one of the world's busiest ports, it is fitting that Hong Kong played
host to the World Trade Organization's December 2005 meeting. After all,
seaports serve as the on- and off-ramps for the vast majority of traded
goods. Still, the leaders of the 145 delegations that convened in Hong Kong
undoubtedly did not have much more than a sightseer's interest in the host
city's magnificent and frenetic harbor. For the most part, finance and trade
ministers see trade liberalization as involving efforts to negotiate rules
that open markets and level the playing field. They take as a given the
availability of transportation infrastructures that physically link markets
separated by vast distances.

But the days when policy makers could take safe transportation for granted
are long past. The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and subsequent attacks
on Madrid and London show that transport systems have become favored targets
for terrorist organizations. It is only a matter of time before terrorists
breach the superficial security measures in place to protect the ports,
ships and the millions of intermodal containers that link global producers
to consumers.

Should that breach involve a weapon of mass destruction, the United States
and other countries will likely raise the port security alert system to its
highest level, while investigators sort out what happened and establish
whether or not a follow-on attack is likely. In the interim, the flow of all
inbound traffic will be slowed so that the entire intermodal container
system will grind to a halt. In economic terms, the costs associated with
managing the attack's aftermath will substantially dwarf the actual
destruction from the terrorist event itself.

Fortunately, there are pragmatic measures that governments and the private
sector can pursue right now that would substantially enhance the integrity
and resilience of global trade lanes. Trade security can be improved with
modest upfront investments that enhance supply chain visibility and
accountability, allowing companies to better manage the choreography of
global logistics-and, in the process, improve their financial returns. In
short, there is both a public safety imperative and a powerful economic case
for advancing trade security.

A Brittle System
Though advocates for more open global markets rarely acknowledge it, when it
comes to converting free trade from theory to practice the now-ubiquitous
cargo container deserves a great deal of credit. On any given day, millions
of containers carrying up to 32 tons of goods each are moving on trucks,
trains and ships. These movements have become remarkably affordable,
efficient, and reliable, resulting in increasingly complex and economically
expedient global supply chains for manufacturers and retailers.

From a commercial standpoint, this has been all for the good. But there is a
problem: as enterprises' dependence on the intermodal transportation system
rises, they become extremely vulnerable to the consequences of a disruption
in the system. To appreciate why that is so requires a brief primer on how
that system has evolved.

Arguably, one of the most unheralded revolutions of the 20th century was the
widespread adoption of the cargo container to move manufactured and
perishable goods around the planet. In the middle of the last century,
shipping most goods was labor intensive: items had to be individually moved
from a loading dock at a factory to the back of a truck and then offloaded
and reloaded onto a ship. Upon arrival in a foreign port, cargo had to be
removed by longshoremen from the ship's holds, then moved to dock warehouses
where the shipments would be examined by customs inspectors. Then they were
loaded onto another transportation conveyance to be delivered to their final
destination. This constant packing and repacking was inefficient and costly.
It also routinely involved damage and theft. As a practical matter, this
clumsy process was a barrier to trade.

The cargo container changed all that. Now goods can be placed in a container
at a factory and be moved from one mode of transportation to another without
being manually handled by intermediaries along the way. Larger vessels can
be built to carry several thousand containers in a single voyage. In short,
as global trade liberalization accelerated, the transportation system was
able to accommodate the growing number of buyers and sellers.

Arguably, East Asia has been the biggest beneficiary of this transportation
revolution. Despite the distance between Asia and the U.S., a container can
be shipped from Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Singapore to the West Coast for
roughly $4,000. This cost represents a small fraction of the $66,000 average
value of goods in each container that is destined for the U.S.

However, multiple port closures in the U.S. and elsewhere would quickly
throw this system into chaos. U.S.-bound container ships would be stuck in
docks, unable to unload their cargo. Marine terminals would have to close
their gates to all incoming containers since they would have no place to
store them. Perishable cargo would spoil. Soon, factories would be idle and
retailers' shelves bare.

In short, a terrorist event involving the intermodal transportation system
could lead to unprecedented disruption of the global trade system, and East
Asia has the most to lose.

What Has Been Done?
The possibility that terrorists could compromise the maritime and intermodal
transportation system has led several U.S. agencies to pursue initiatives to
manage this risk. The U.S. Coast Guard chose to take a primarily
multilateral approach by working through the London-based International
Maritime Organization to establish new international standards for improving
security practices on vessels and within ports, known as the International
Ship and Port Facility Code (ISPS). As of July 1, 2004, each member state
was obliged to certify that the ships that fly their flag or the facilities
under their jurisdiction are code-compliant.

The Coast Guard also requires that ships destined for the U.S. provide a
notice of their arrival a minimum of 96 hours in advance and include a
description of their cargoes as well as a crew and passenger list. The
agency then assesses the potential risk the vessel might pose. If the
available intelligence indicates a pre-arrival security check may be
warranted, it arranges to intercept the ship at sea or as it enters the
harbor in order to conduct an inspection.

The new U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), which was
established within the Department of Homeland Security, mandated that ocean
carriers must electronically file cargo manifests outlining the contents of
U.S.-bound containers 24 hours in advance of their being loaded overseas.
These manifests are then analyzed against the intelligence databases at CBP's
National Targeting Center to determine if the container may pose a risk.

If so, it will likely be inspected overseas before it is loaded on a
U.S.-bound ship under a new protocol called the Container Security
Initiative (CSI). As of November 2005, there were 41 CSI port agreements in
place where the host country permits U.S. customs inspectors to operate
within its jurisdiction and agrees to pre-loading inspections of any
targeted containers.

Decisions about which containers will not be subjected to an inspection are
informed by an importer's willingness to participate in another post-9/11
initiative, known as the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism
(C-TPAT). C-TPAT importers and transportation companies agree voluntarily to
conduct self-assessments of their company operations and supply chains, and
then put in place security measures to address any security vulnerabilities
they find. At the multilateral level, U.S. customs authorities have worked
with the Brussels-based World Customs Organization on establishing a new
framework to improve trade security for all countries.

In addition to these Coast Guard and Customs initiatives, the U.S.
Department of Energy and Department of Defense have developed their own
programs aimed at the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction. They
have been focused primarily on developing the means to detect a "dirty bomb"
or a nuclear weapon.

The Energy Department has been funding and deploying radiation sensors in
many of the world's largest ports as a part of a program called the Megaport
Initiative. These sensors are designed to detect radioactive material within
containers. The Pentagon has undertaken a counterproliferation initiative
that involves obtaining permission from seafaring countries to allow
specially trained U.S Navy boarding teams to conduct inspections of a flag
vessel on the seas when there is intelligence that points to the possibility
that nuclear material or a weapon may be part of the ship's cargo.

Finally, in September 2005, the White House weighed in with its new National
Maritime Security Strategy. This purports to "present a comprehensive
national effort to promote global economic stability and protect legitimate
activities while preventing hostile or illegal acts within the maritime
domain."

A House of Cards
Ostensibly, the flurry of U.S. government initiatives since 9/11 suggests
substantial progress is being made in securing the global trade and
transportation system. Unfortunately, all this activity should not be
confused with real capability. For one thing, the approach has been
piecemeal, with each agency pursuing its signature program with little
regard for other initiatives. There are also vast disparities in the
resources that the agencies have been allocated, ranging from an $800
million budget for the Department of Energy's Megaport initiative to no
additional funding for the Coast Guard to support its congressionally
mandated compliance to the ISPS Code. Even more problematic are some of the
questionable assumptions about the nature of the terrorist threat that
underpin these programs.

In an effort to secure funding and public support, agency heads and the
White House have oversold the contributions of these new initiatives.
Against a backdrop of inflated and unrealistic expectations, the public is
likely to be highly skeptical of official assurances in the aftermath of a
terrorist attack involving the intermodal transportation system. Scrambling
for fresh alternatives to reassure anxious and angry citizens, the White
House and Congress are likely to impose Draconian inspection protocols that
dramatically raise costs and disrupt crossborder trade flows.

The new risk-management programs advanced by the CBP are especially
vulnerable to being discredited, should terrorists succeed at turning a
container into a poor man's missile. Before stepping down as commissioner in
late November 2005, Robert Bonner repeatedly stated in public and before
Congress that his inspectors were "inspecting 100% of the right 5% of
containers." That implies the CBP's intelligence and analytical tools can be
relied upon to pinpoint dangerous containers.

Former Commissioner Bonner is correct in identifying only a tiny percentage
of containers as potential security risks. Unfortunately, CBP's
risk-management framework is not up to the task of reliably identifying
them, much less screening the low- or medium-risk cargoes that constitute
the majority of containerized shipments and pass mostly uninspected into
U.S. ports. There is very little counterterrorism intelligence available to
support the agency's targeting system.

That leaves customs inspectors to rely primarily on their past experience in
identifying criminal or regulatory misconduct to determine if a
containerized shipment might potentially be compromised. This does not
inspire confidence, given that the U.S. Congress's watchdog, the Government
Accountability Office (GAO), and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's
own inspector general have documented glaring weaknesses with current
customs targeting practices.

Prior to 9/11, the cornerstone of the risk-assessment framework used by
customs inspectors was to identify "known shippers" that had an established
track record of engaging in legitimate commercial activity. After 9/11, the
agency expanded that model by extracting a commitment from shippers to
follow the supply chain security practices outlined in C-TPAT. As long as
there is no specific intelligence to tell inspectors otherwise, shipments
from C-TPAT-compliant companies are viewed as low-risk.

The problem with this method is that it is designed to fight conventional
crime; such an approach is not necessarily effective in combating determined
terrorists. An attack involving a weapon of mass destruction differs in
three important ways from organized criminal activity.

First, it is likely to be a one-time operation, and most private company
security measures are not designed to prevent single-event infractions.
Instead, corporate security officers try to detect infractions when they
occur, conduct investigations after the fact, and adapt precautionary
strategies accordingly.

Second, terrorists will likely target a legitimate company with a well-known
brand name precisely because they can count on these shipments entering the
U.S. with negligible or no inspection. It is no secret which companies are
viewed by U.S. customs inspectors as "trusted" shippers; many companies
enlisted in C-TPAT have advertised their participation. All a terrorist
organization needs to do is find a single weak link within a "trusted"
shipper's complex supply chain, such as a poorly paid truck driver taking a
container from a remote factory to a port. They can then gain access to the
container in one of the half-dozen ways well known to experienced smugglers.

Third, this terrorist threat is unique in terms of the severity of the
economic disruption. If a weapon of mass destruction arrives in the U.S.,
especially if it enters via a trusted shipper, the risk-management system
that customs authorities rely on will come under intense scrutiny. In the
interim, it will become impossible to treat crossborder shipments by other
trusted shippers as low-risk. When every container is assumed to be
potentially high-risk, everything must be examined, freezing the worldwide
intermodal transportation system. The credibility of the ISPS code as a
risk-detection tool is not likely to survive the aftermath of such a
maritime terrorist attack, and its collapse could exacerbate a climate of
insecurity that could likely exist after a successful attack.

Moreover, the radiation-detection technology currently used in the world's
ports by the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection Agency is not
adequately capable of detecting a nuclear weapon or a lightly shielded dirty
bomb. This is because nuclear weapons are extremely well-shielded and give
off very little radioactivity. If terrorists obtained a dirty bomb and put
it in a box lined with lead, it's unlikely radiation sensors would detect
the bomb's low levels of radioactivity.

The flaws in detection technology require the Pentagon's
counterproliferation teams to physically board container ships at sea to
determine if they are carrying weapons of mass destruction. Even if there
were enough trained boarding teams to perform these inspections on a regular
basis-and there are not-there is still the practical problem of inspecting
the contents of cargo containers at sea. Such inspections are almost
impossible because containers are so closely packed on a container ship that
they are often simply inaccessible. This factor, when added to the sheer
number of containers on each ship-upwards of 3,000-guarantees that in the
absence of very detailed intelligence, inspectors will be able to perform
only the most superficial of examinations.

In the end, the U.S. government's container-security policy resembles a
house of cards. In all likelihood, any terrorist attack on U.S. soil that
involved a maritime container would come in contact with most, or even all,
of the existing maritime security protocols. Consequently, a successful
seaborne attack would implicate the entire security regime, generating
tremendous political pressure to abandon it.

The Way Ahead
We can do better. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations should work
with the U.S. and the European Union in authorizing third parties to conduct
validation audits in accordance with the security protocols outlined in the
International Ship and Port Facility Security Code and the World Customs
Organization's new framework for security and trade facilitation.

A multilateral auditing organization made up of experienced inspectors
should be created to periodically audit the third party auditors. This
organization also should be charged with investigating major incidents and
recommending appropriate changes to established security protocols.

To minimize the risk that containers will be targeted between the factory
and loading port, governments should create incentives for the speedy
adoption of technical standards developed by the International Standards
Organization for tracking a container and monitoring its integrity. The
technology now used by the U.S. Department of Defense for the global
movement of military goods can provide a model for such a regime.

Asean and the EU should also endorse a pilot project being sponsored by the
Container Terminal Operators Association (CTOA) of Hong Kong, in which every
container that arrives passes through a gamma-ray content-scanning machine,
as well as a radiation portal to record the levels of radioactivity within
the container. Optical character recognition cameras then photograph the
number painted on several sides of the container. These scanned images,
radiation profiles, and digital photos are then stored in a database where
they can be immediately retrieved if necessary.

The marine terminals in Hong Kong have invested in this system because they
hope that a 100% scanning regime will deter a terrorist organization from
placing a weapon of mass destruction in a container passing through their
port facilities. Since each container's contents are scanned, if a terrorist
tries to shield radioactive material to defeat the radiation portals, it
will be relatively easy to detect the shielding material because of its
density.

Another reason for making this investment is to minimize the disruption
associated with targeting containers for portside inspection. The system
allows the container to receive a remote preliminary inspection without the
container leaving the marine terminal.

By maintaining a record of each container's contents, the port is able to
provide government authorities with a forensic tool that can aid a follow-up
investigation should a container with a weapon of mass destruction still
slip through. This tool would allow authorities to quickly isolate the point
in the supply chain where the security compromise took place, thereby
minimizing the chance for a port-wide shut-down. By scanning every
container, the marine terminals in Hong Kong are well-positioned to
indemnify the port for security breaches. As a result, a terrorist would be
unable to successfully generate enough fear and uncertainty to warrant
disrupting the global trade system.

This low-cost inspection system is being carried out without impeding the
operations of busy marine terminals. It could be put in place in every major
container port in the world at a cost of $1.5 billion, or approximately $15
per container. Once such a system is operating globally, each nation would
be in a position to monitor its exports and to check their imports against
the images first collected at the loading port.

The total cost of third-party compliance inspections, deploying "smart"
containers, and operating a cargo scanning system such as Hong Kong's is
likely to reach $50 to $100 per container depending on the number of
containers an importer has and the complexity of its supply chain. Even if
the final price tag came in at $100 additional cost per container, it would
raise the average price of cargo moved by, say, Wal-Mart or Target by only
0.06%. What importers and consumers are getting in return is the reduced
risk of a catastrophic terrorist attack and its economic consequences.

In short, such an investment would allow container security to move from the
current "trust, but don't verify" system to a more robust "trust but verify"
regime. That would bring benefits to everyone but criminals and terrorists.

END QUOTE


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