WASHINGTON -- Serious weaknesses in port security programs continue to hamper U.S. efforts to detect potential threats in the millions of cargo containers that enter the country each year, according to a report released yesterday detailing a three-year Senate investigation.
"America's supply chain remains vulnerable to the proverbial Trojan horse," said Sen. Norm Coleman, chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee that conducted the investigation.
Besides deaths and injuries that could be caused by a smuggled nuclear or radiological weapon, or by terrorists who enter the country by hiding inside containers, the economic cost would be enormous, Coleman said.
According to a Congressional Budget Office report, an attack at the giant ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach could cost the nation's economy $150 million a day.
Some of the programs highlighted in the report summarizing the committee's investigation are included in port security legislation before Congress. Lawmakers say those initiatives are good concepts that have been flawed in practice.
The report found that two of those programs, the Container Security Initiative and the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, have made progress in the past year. But the fledgling efforts have a long way to go, it said.
"I feel confident that we're safer today than we were yesterday," Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, said after a hearing at which the study was released. "But I'm not confident that we're as safe as we should be."
Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Michael P. Jackson said his agency is making progress toward creating "second-generation" programs to improve cargo security worldwide.
"Securing our borders requires us to dig deeper," Jackson said.
Lawmakers and security experts have long complained about the Homeland Security Department's slow pace in beefing up security at the nation's borders.
The committee's investigators found that that advances have been made since the Government Accountability Office, in reports released last year, criticized some of the security programs. But that progress has been limited by such things as uncooperative officials abroad and untested methods of analyzing what might constitute a threat, the report said.
For example, the Container Security Initiative - which stations U.S. personnel at overseas ports to help detect dangerous cargo before it is shipped to the United States - is inspecting less than 1 percent of containers.
