Looking for a stiff port

I'm not terribly concerned about the ports issue. The US sells off chunks of itself to foreign investors every year. Many of these foreign investors are seeking to become transnational companies beholden to no one state in particular. This is the American way. That this particular company is from Dubai (based in London) and is owned by the United Arab Emirates smacks of political impropriety, but that's not unexpected from the current American government. There is a certain amount of xenophobia at play here, and the Republicans who are critical of the agreement are playing as much to xenophobic domestic audiences during an election year as anything else. Such is the state of affairs in the world. "Strictly business," as Digby says sardonically.

There are good "meta" reasons all around for resisting the move - regarding the significant role of transnational corporations in governing various aspects of our lives and economic conditions, the degree to which the agreement was secret, the close ties between members of the administration and the UAE, and even that the US wouldn't attack Bin Laden at one point for fear of killing UAE royal family members.

What's bothersome for me are two things, which are not unexpected. First is that the president has been clueless about the deal, and now defends it wholeheartedly. This underscores once again the extent to which this president is unable to run a presidency. This is one incompetent boob. But, like I said, we've known this for some time now - say, about six years (and for you Texas followers, longer than that). Second, the ports don't have much security in the first place.

Now, I'm not a security (or, rather "s'cur'ty") freak. I live in DC and worked in NYC during 9-11, and went through the experience of that date. Like many New Yorkers and DCers, I have a certain amount of fatalism on the issue that I'm simply not willing to let collapse into fear and trembling. The security fetish in this country does lots of direct and indirect damage to who Americans are and how Americans live, from gated communities to the erosion of civil liberties.

But there's a necessary modicum of security if the US is indeed concerned about terrorist WMDs entering the country (not to mention all the WMDs we already have here - biggest WMD-owning country in the world, after all). And these things can be done more or less well. But this obviously isn't the government to do it since there is not one single thing they can do well except line the pockets of their portfolios.

"The real issues are funding, threat intelligence and dissemination, and improved security at (foreign) ports of origin," said Kim Petersen, the president of SeaSecure, the oldest port security consulting firm in the United States. "There really isn't a lot of funding when you consider the magnitude of what's needed to support our ports. ... If al-Qaida can disrupt the flow of container shipments going into and out of the United States, we're talking about tens of billions of dollars."

In the past 4 { years, the Bush administration has installed more than 1,200 large or hand-held radiation detectors to scan for nuclear materials being smuggled into the nation's ports. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security, inspects and boards ships at 42 foreign ports before they send goods to America.

Still, only 5 percent of the 8.6 million shipping containers that flow into U.S. ports every year are opened and inspected, and a 2005 DHS inspector general's report concluded that nearly 80 percent of the port security grant money isn't being spent.

The DHS on Tuesday issued a fact sheet that brags about how it uses "a risk-based strategy to review information on 100 percent of all cargo information entering U.S. ports."

But the artful wording obscures the fact that paperwork, not containers, is being inspected, said Randolph Hall, the co-director of the CREATE Homeland Security Center at the University of Southern California.

UPDATE:

See Publius' excellent post on this.

See, also, Gordo's take.