Our friend John Magaw formerly head of the ATF is back.
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Los Angeles Times: Experts Question 'Trade-Offs' in U.S. Security

[url]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-031702safer.story[/url]

Experts Question 'Trade-Offs' in U.S. Security
Terrorism: A mix of safety measures is said to focus too much on aviation, and
too little on other likely targets.
By RICHARD T. COOPER and RICARDO ALONZO-ZALDIVAR
Times Staff Writers

March 17 2002

WASHINGTON -- Six months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, security experts worry that the nationwide effort to make Americans
safer has grown seriously unbalanced, with huge resources allocated to some
threats and comparatively little to potentially greater dangers.

The nation, according to this view, has failed to set priorities--to accept
lesser risks in order to avoid greater ones. In the language of emergency
medicine, it has forgotten the practice of triage.

"We are not consciously making trade-offs," domestic security specialist Frank
Hoffman said last week. What's missing, he said, is overall "national risk
assessment."

In 10 years, Hoffman said, the country may wish it had hired 10,000 more
security personnel for nuclear power plants and added 10,000 specialists to deal
with biochemical threats, instead of putting all 40,000 airport screeners on the
federal payroll.

It may rue the day when it embarked upon a massive effort to tighten airline
security, but let border inspectors generally check only a fraction of the
50,000-plus cargo containers entering the United States every day.

After Sept. 11, the pressure to do something visible--and to do it quickly, even
hastily--proved irresistible.

"In the first six months, the administration has been influenced by two
emotional factors: fear and anger," said William H. Webster, who has headed both
the FBI and the CIA. "Both of them were justified. Both demanded action sooner
rather than later."

Webster gives President Bush high marks on both counts, saying he assuaged the
nation's anxiety and channeled its anger into measured responses. Further, each
of the measures already adopted deals with a serious problem and is justifiable
when considered alone.

The ragged army of airport screeners will almost certainly meet higher standards
than before. Baggage will be checked more thoroughly. Laboratories are already
more aware of the need to protect sensitive materials. So are private shipping
companies.

From coast to coast, thousands of local fire and rescue teams are preparing to
be retrained and reequipped to handle biochemical and other terrorist attacks.

-- continued --

Moreover, simply by erecting more obstacles, the welter of new procedures forces
would-be attackers to expand their efforts, thus increasing the chances they
will betray themselves or fail.

Nonetheless, most of the initiatives now in train have been adopted with almost
no comprehensive weighing of comparative costs and benefits.

Federal officials plucked many initiatives from existing security studies. Some
address what experts consider relatively moderate, self-contained problems,
while potentially catastrophic threats get lesser responses.

"Although the United States government has done a great deal to prevent and
protect against international terrorism, and to be prepared to respond to it if
it comes, we still remain a country greatly at risk," former Sen. Warren B.
Rudman of New Hampshire said recently. As a member of the President's National
Intelligence Advisory Board, Rudman was a co-author of an exhaustive study of
21st century U.S. security needs.

Over time, some experts suggest, the Bush administration may modify some of the
early commitments and readjust its priorities.

A comprehensive security plan that homeland security director Tom Ridge plans to
deliver to the president this summer could encourage a balancing of priorities.
So could the fine-print scrutiny Congress will give President Bush's budget
request for $37.7 billion next year to fight terrorism.

Shifting priorities will not be easy. Each program already underway has a
constituency and addresses a real need. And the sheer volume of what government
officials have on their plates now makes it hard to consider alternatives.

Screening airline passengers is a case in point.

With more than 670-million passengers a year boarding commercial airline
flights, security personnel watching for potential terrorists might improve the
odds if they could narrow their focus, instead of trying to check everyone.

Inspecting only certain, presumably high-risk racial or ethnic groups is the
controversial, discredited practice called "profiling." More benign is singling
out low-risk passengers, starting with government workers, government
contractors and others with federal security clearances, to issue them
"safe-traveler" cards that would let them move quickly through checkpoints.

Experts disagree about the idea. Ridge is interested, while John Magaw, head of
the new Transportation Security Administration, is skeptical.

Whatever the merits, the proposal may not get a thorough vetting any time soon
because the officials involved are just too busy.

"Mr. Magaw and his fledging organization have their hands full in staffing the
organization while at the same time dealing with a continuing crisis in aviation
security," said Bille H. Vincent, an aviation consultant who was the Federal
Aviation Administration's security chief. "Creating a 40,000-person organization
under normal conditions would be a major undertaking. To do so under the
existing threat conditions is mind-boggling."

-- continued --

"What people have got to understand," Magaw himself said recently, "is that four
weeks ago, it was just me and a white piece of paper."
___

It is not immediately clear how the blaze starts aboard the GrandCamp, a French
Line freighter nestling against a dock in Galveston, Texas. But at mid-morning,
when flames reach the cargo of ammonium nitrate, the ship explodes in a blast
that shakes a seismograph in Denver.

Soon, the docks and an adjacent chemical plant are burning. Deadly gases fill
the air as the fire jumps to a nearby oil tank farm, then detonates a second
freighter loaded with fertilizer chemicals. The disaster leaves 3,500 people
dead or injured, a major petrochemical complex in ruins and a community that
once housed 15,000 people incinerated.

This is no hypothetical scenario for some future terrorist attack. It actually
happened--in 1947. It is just the kind of disaster that many specialists see
near the top of the list of terrorist threats that are getting too little
attention now.

"The greatest threat to the country today is from weapons of mass
destruction--or, in the near term, conventional explosives--coming into the
country in cargo that is not inspected," Rudman said.

"We're talking about chemical and biological warfare, as well as potential
weapons of mass destruction. We have to protect what is coming into our
country," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), a member of the Senate
Commerce Committee. "We need a system to check cargo as well as people."

In a country that imports more than half its oil, every major harbor is lined
with tanker terminals, storage farms and petrochemical plants.

What makes them especially attractive targets--beyond the destructive power and
economic impact--is the fact that cargo shipping has become one unified global,
intermodal system, while security is balkanized. Modular containers, which may
travel on trucks, ships and trains, are only loosely monitored as they sit on
wharves, warehouse floors and outdoor rail yards.

Big trucks stream through border crossing points from Mexico and Canada by the
thousands each day. Trailers are shunted from rail to road and from one shipping
concern to another with no comprehensive system to assure the integrity of
cargoes or drivers.

The tiny Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, with its 275 inspectors,
only recently began to focus on terrorism. After Sept. 11, it counted 38,800
trucking companies with access to U.S. highways that haul "high-consequence"
hazardous materials such as explosives, toxic chemicals and radioactive
materials.

At the federal level, responsibility for border security is divided among the
Border Patrol, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard and other agencies--each
with its own traditions, priorities, procedures and often-incompatible
technology.

-- continued --

"They're going to have to be consolidated in one Cabinet agency," said a veteran
of the security policy wars. Ridge suggested such consolidation soon after his
appointment last year, however, the idea ran into massive resistance.

Its fate did not reassure Washington insiders, who have watched a succession of
other czars--especially in the now-forgotten war on drugs--break their lances
against intransigent bureaucracies and special interests.
___

Almost certainly, it is in commercial aviation that the greatest strides have
been made in the last six months. But even here, remaining loopholes and
lingering resistance to change demonstrate just how large the challenge remains.

Congress set a Dec. 31 deadline for screening all checked luggage, an estimated
1-billion bags a year, for explosives. But explosive-detection machines are
bulky, expensive and scarce, and they are plagued with operating problems.
Integrating them into the flow of baggage handling so that passengers avoid long
delays will require millions of dollars in reconstruction of existing systems.

Meanwhile, better machines may be developed. "We don't want to be locked into
buying machines that will essentially be obsolete," Transportation Secretary
Norman Y. Mineta said in a recent interview.

Regardless, bags checked by passengers on multi-flight trips get no enhanced
screening after being shuttled to a second plane. Airlines argued successfully
that the cost and inconvenience would be too great.

"You've still got the same deference to the airlines that you always had," said
Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA agent, "and I don't think that bodes well for the
future."

Then there's cargo. Airlines still count on shippers to vouch that their cargo
is safe, though several recommendations to improve cargo screening are under
review.

From airports and seaports to nuclear power plants, landmark buildings and all
other potential terrorist targets; protection is not impossible. But it requires
choices.

"You could shut the country down to an absolute stop if you made it impossible
for anything to happen. That could have a more deleterious effect than an
occasional failure to stop something, " said Webster.

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