Wall Street Journal June 25, 2002
U.S. Tightens Scrutiny of Sea Cargo
By GARY FIELDS
WASHINGTON -- Officials from the U.S. Customs Service and Dutch finance ministry meet Tuesday in Rotterdam to sign an agreement to station American inspectors there, under a Bush administration push to prevent terrorist attacks by knowing more about the contents of cargo ships headed to the U.S.
About 5.7 million shipping containers a year enter the U.S. by sea, roughly half of all U.S. imports. Due to increased concern that terrorists might use the containers to smuggle in a weapon of mass destruction or interrupt commerce by exploding such a device in an American seaport, Customs officials have been working with their foreign counterparts to develop a system for identifying suspicious shipments before they embark for this country.
Speaking at the Port of Elizabeth, N.J., Monday to promote his plan to create a Department of Homeland Security, President Bush said such initiatives will make the nation's ports safer.
"The Customs Service is working with overseas ports and shippers to improve its knowledge of container shipments, assessing risk so that we have a better feel for who we ought to look at, what we ought to worry about," Mr. Bush said.
To date, inspection agreements have been reached with Canada and Singapore. U.S. inspectors are working in Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver, ports where much cargo is offloaded from ships and sent on to the U.S. by truck and rail.
In Tuesday's ceremony in Rotterdam -- the fifth-leading port in the world for shipments to the U.S. -- Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner will be joined by Holland's minister of finance, Gerrit Zalm. Similar agreements are expected soon with Belgian and French officials, covering the ports of Antwerp and LeHavre, respectively. Customs' goal is to reach inspection agreements with the top 20 ports sending cargo to the U.S., which account for 68% of all seaborne imports and about a third of U.S. imports overall.
In a recent interview, Mr. Bonner called those 20 ports "choke points" where weapons of mass destruction or terrorist acts can be headed off.
Part of the program includes sharing intelligence information with foreign counterparts and using an automated system to help select potential problem cargo. That system selects containers based on a number of factors, such as the nature of the cargo, where it originated and what route it took to get to the port.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity .org, an Alexandria, Va.-based think tank that looks at security issues, said the inspection campaign is a step in the right direction, but he believes the magnitude of trying to zero in on a container holding a dangerous weapon from among the millions that come into the U.S. makes it a small step. "It would be stupid not to" try to expand inspections to foreign ports, he said. "But, it's a very small part of a very big problem."
Copyright 2002
