Adopting an ostrich-like approach to maritime security is not a good idea

which do not maintain effective anti-terrorism measures 2. The Coast Guard checks the travel logs of every vessel requesting permission to enter U.S. territorial water

3. The Coast Guard looks only at the ship’s last five ports of call

4. The Coast Guard checks to see whether the security measures the vessel took at the last five ports it visited before arriving in the United States correspond to U.S. port security requirements

5. If the security measures the ship took did not correspond to the appropriate security level of the port, the ship is denied access to U.S. ports

6. A U.K-flag ship requested entry to U.S. territorial water, but its manifest showed that the fifth port it visited before arriving in the United States was the high-risk port of Nouakchott, Mauritania

7. The ship’s records also showed that it took the U.K.-recommended Security Level 1 measures at Nouakchott rather than the U.S.-mandated Security Level 2 measures

8. The solutions worked out between the ship owners and the U.S. Coast Guard: Have the ship make an unplanned call on the Bahamas, thus dropping Nouakchott from No. 5 on the list to No. 6, solving everybody’s problems.

Except that no problem has been solved. In football they call this “punting.”

Talk of confusing substantive security with green eye-shade bureaucratic procedure. Just think of an extreme case: Suppose that terrorists, aided by local sympathizers and corrupt officials at the port of Nouakchott, were to load a container with a nuclear device in it onto the ship. One would think that the Coast Guard, learning of the fact that the hip has visited a high-risk port, would comb the ship from end to end using the latest detection and screening devices to find out what it was carrying in its hull. Instead, the Coast Guard sends the ship to the Bahamas so that the high-risk post is now No. 6 on the list and the ship can be allowed into the United States.

In any event, this ridiculous five-port policy is dangerous on its face: If I were a terrorist trying to smuggle something nasty into the United States, I would now make sure that the last five ports my ship visits are all above-board, thus ensuring a pass from the Coast Guard. What is more, why the fixation on five ports? If travel logs that a ship made a call on a high-risk port six or eight or ten visits before coming to the United States, does this mean that nothing dangerous has been loaded on the ship in those visits?

This is not maritime security. This is a farce.

We should also note that the shipping industry is not satisfied with this procedure, if for other reasons. Jan de Looff, head of Briese Shipping, said this sort of situation threatened to become a real problem for the maritime industry, one that could generate unnecessary costs. For example, the additional call to the Bahamas in order to meet U.S. requirements would mean extra fees to be met by the ship owner. The industry also says that raising a ship’s security level in high-risk ports in anticipation of an unexpected call to the United States would be expensive.

-read more in this report

The ostrich (Struthio camelus) is a flightless bird native to Africa. The ostrich is famous for hiding its head in the sand at the first sign of danger.