Critics question federal preparedness for attacks on ports

Homeland Security officials said this week that the nation's waterways remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but indicated that the government would try to avoid shutting down ports across the country if an attack occurred.

"The waterways are a concern; we're not there in a perfect security environment yet," said Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department's undersecretary for border and transportation security, during a panel discussion Tuesday hosted by George Mason University.

He added, however, that DHS wants to avoid reacting to another terrorist incident the way it responded to the Sept. 11 attacks, after which airplanes across the country were grounded.

"If you're looking at a 9/11 circumstance, do you shut down our economic system in this country? I think we learned that you can't do that," Hutchinson said.

Other participants in the discussion questioned whether the government has an adequate system in place to isolate the response to another attack without sending shock waves across the entire economy.

"Do we have a system in place that allows us to effectively seal off the damage to a port or a couple of ports that may have been attacked, while letting the rest of the system continue to function?" asked Philip Crowley, senior fellow and director of national defense and homeland security for the Center for American Progress. "If you're shortchanging the investment on the front end, we're not going to have confidence on the back end."

Crowley said wargaming scenarios show that sealing off the nation's 361 ports would cause severe damage to the economy within two weeks. "We have to be mindful that the largest cost involved in the next attack, if it involves a port, will be a cost that we inflict on ourselves, rather than the cost of whatever is damaged at the port."

Carl Bentzel, senior counsel for the Senate Commerce Committee's minority staff, said the country needs a "security posture" that would allow ports to reopen to navigation.

"If it's a container that comes into the port of Los Angeles and it has something in it that we don't want, are you going to keep open all other ports with containerized cargo?" he asked.

Rear Adm. Larry Hereth, the Coast Guard's director of port security, said the government has enough flexibility to tailor its response to an attack on the nation's waterways.

"I think at the end of the day we do, in the United States, have a system to have legal controls to shut down ports or to reopen ports very quickly," he said.

He added that new domestic and international maritime security regulations that go into effect on Thursday will improve the government's ability to detect and deter attacks at ports. He said local maritime security committees would help manage recovery efforts after an attack.

"We want to know every single thing that moves on the water: who's in it, where they're going, and what their purpose is," Hereth said. "That's kind of a large vision or target, but the reality is there are enough agencies out there that if we pull together, we can eventually do it."