Near 100% Screening at L.A. Port

[Isaiah538]

This is what has recently been put in place. It's from the Customs and Border Patrol Website. Some say nothing is getting done, but here are our deficit dollars at work.

"SAFE Ports LA/Long Beach Style

CBP Shows Off High-Tech Equipment To Detect Radiological Weapons

(Thursday, November 02, 2006)

Los Angeles/Long Beach, Calif.— The nation’s busiest seaport today was given a preview of how the SAFE Port legislation recently signed into law by President Bush would improve security, spotlighting new, highly sophisticated mobile radiation portal monitors, an integral component in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s layered defense against radiological weapons.


“Customs and Border Protection has worked hand-in-hand with state and local government to ensure that the nation’s busiest seaport is also the safest,” said CBP Commissioner W. Ralph Basham. ***“Nearly all containers currently exiting this port via truck and rail are screened for nuclear and radiological materials, and by January we will be at 100 percent.*** The mobile radiation portal monitors provide CBP with a tactical edge to conduct screening operations, as they can easily be deployed anywhere, including supporting state and locals to secure a major event.”


Commissioner Basham was joined for a tour of American President Lines operations by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), CBP Los Angeles Field Director Kevin W. Weeks and CBP Los Angeles/Long Beach Port Director Todd A. Hoffman.


The Security and Accountability for Every Port Act, signed Oct. 13 by the President, calls for modernized inspection technologies, codifies two CBP global port security programs and instructs the Department of Homeland Security to make plans for expedited resumption of trade should an attack impact a port.


In addition to the radiation portals, other sophisticated equipment used at LA/Long Beach by CBP in its layered enforcement strategy includes large-scale, non-intrusive X-ray technology that can scan an entire sea container within two to three minutes, and personal radiation detection devices that are assigned to all front-line officers.


CBP officers also use the Radiation Isotope Identifier, or RIID, a hand-held instrument capable of detecting and identifying various types of radiation emanating from radioactive materials, including materials used in a nuclear or radiation-dispersal weapons. It also is capable of identifying specialized nuclear materials from natural sources and isotopes commonly used in medicine and industry.


“The technology we have deployed enhances our critical mission of preventing terrorists or others from attempting to smuggle weapons of mass destruction through U.S. borders,” Basham said.


Since June 2005, CBP has installed 85 radiation portal monitors at 14 shipping terminals within Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor. Eighteen mobile portal monitors have been delivered and six more are expected by the end of this year.


Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor, covering 15,000 acres, is the nation’s biggest and busiest seaport complex. ***About 45 percent of all sea containers arriving in the U.S. come through LA/Long Beach.***


Over 5,550 vessels arrived last fiscal year at LA/Long Beach, about 15 per day. CBP processed over 5 million containers and cleared over 1 million cruise-line passengers and crew. LA/LB CBP collected over $6.3 billion in duties, fees and taxes for the United States last year, more than one-fifth of the total duties, fees and taxes collected at ports nationwide."

(Asterisks were mine.)

I'll admit they are here by then however, so it still takes overseas intelligence.

[Jinn]

and then?

and then?

[bermuDa]

so, is nuclear attack our new biggest fear... again?

[ratbastid]

(Isaiah--you should include a link to the article itself in your OP.)

Look at the byline on this article. Particularly the date.

Translation: "It's five days before the midterm election and YAY! Our ports are safe now! (Never mind that it's less than half of the goods imported by sea that are screened this way and even this port won't be at 100% until next year and critics have been screaming about this for five years.) YAY! Re-elect our buddies!"

Liberal media my ass.

Seriously: Why has this taken so damn long to implement? I mean, this seems smart and we should be doing it, but a big pat on the back for BushCo's efforts to keep us safe seems a little out of place here.

[NCB]

Who says liberals dwell on the negativity?

[dc_dux]

I guess its "negative" to consider how much more we could have done over the last 5 years to improve port security, rail security, nuclear facility security, border security, first responder readiness...... if we had not been spending $5 billion/month in Iraq.

[roachboy]

gee, back when i worked in logistics (i did, but it wasnt called that--the term is funny though) an customs inspection involved more than waving a hand-held tweaked gieger counter around.

it would involve actually looking at the contents of the container.
you know, actual customs people would actually look at the contents.
there used to be alot more inspections before the reagan period.
but under reagan, you see, that money was needed for military keynesianism and so it went away.
that meant fewer and fewer customs people and as a result fewer and fewer inspections.
and the proliferation of containerised shipping mean centralization of shipping and acceleration of volume.
more and more stuff passing through a smaller number of ports surveilled by hopelessly short staffed customs.
but the right is concerned about security.
apparently not enough to do it coherently.
welcome to rightwing world, where all that matters is what you are told matters.

when last i was involved with this white-collar mcdonalds of an industry--and this was quite a while ago--the routine was basically:

1. if you shipped from certain countries that hosted insects that agriculture was trying to keep out, your shipment would likely be inspected, which in this case ususally meant dounsed with methyl bromide.
textiles especially.

2. if yours was a first shipment into a particular port, it would probably get inspected.

3. if your shipment originated in a country that was on an alert list, you'd probably get inspected.

but that was about it.

there was a random inspection thing, but it was infrequent simply because the number of variables entering the system was very large and so random was very spread out.

it always seemed to me that if you wanted to bring whatever you like into the states, the way to do it, and do it in QUANTITY, would be to set up a regular shipping relation with a set origin firm/point and ship similar quantities each time. you would never get inspected that way.

since i left that tedious tedious industry, there has been the rise of just-in-time organization, which presupposes the above as a way of effectively bypassing customs delays.

so i see the article as ratbastid saw it: an obvious election ploy predicated on cheney's "vote for us or die" line--see you could be nuked, kids, aren;t you glad the authoritarian right is on the case, giving its meager customs staff new hand wands to wave about?

and shh...budget cuts undertaken by conservatives are not budget cuts, they're facts of nature.. the link between conservative ideology of state functions and the porosity of borders is non-existent--it's a fact of nature...