A better path to container scanning
Analyst: The congressionally mandated 100 percent container screening is unworkable; it arouses opposition from U.S. trading partners and industry; a better solution would be the adoption of in-container sensing systems
Should 100 percent of freight containers arriving at U.S. ports be scanned? Dr. Jim Giermanski is director of the Center for Global Commerce at North Carolina’s Belmont Abbey College and chairman of Belmont, North Carolina-based Powers International, an international transportation security company, writes that to answer this question we need first to understand the purpose of 100 percent scanning.
The common sense answer to the question of whether we should scan all containers is that we should, because we want to find out whether there are any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) contained in an inbound container set to detonate in the United States. The other reasoning is that Congress legislated it and the president signed the legislation. The requirements to scan containers were contained in the SAFE Port Act signed into law in October 2006, and the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (9/11 Commission Act of 2007), signed into law in August 2007.
There are at least four problems with the 100 percent scanning proposition, though.
* Problem one: The United States cannot or should not mandate another nation to provide the means for or perform the scanning of containers in their ports inbound to the United States. There is a clear question of sovereignty and a foreign nation’s right to decide what steps to take within its sovereign territory. The burden of protecting the United States should not fall on U.S. trading partners.
* Problem Two: Both the Safe Port Act and the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 contain a fatal flaw, the use of the word, “at.” The SAFE Port Act contains 20 references to scanning containers but only two need to be used to demonstrate where the scanning is to take place. Why is the use of “at” so bad? Giermanski writes that “For all of us outside of Congress who know something about international transportation and global supply chain security, the port is the worst and last place to find out about WMD, if one really finds out about it.” We need to find out about it long before it gets to our trading partners’ ports because they cannot risk an explosion in one of their major seaports anymore than we in our seaports.
* Problem Three: The portal scanning machines used to detect shielded radiation do not exist, and Congress knew that they did not exist when
