My Biggest Fear
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Quotes, The War On Terrorism“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.”
-Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
-President George W. Bush, September 1, 2005
“I think many realized how vulnerable our ports were, but didn’t do enough to avoid this unprecedented catastrophe.”
-President Elect John McCain, speaking at the Port of New Orleans on January 2, 2009, one week after a crude nuclear device was detonated in a cargo container
ps – this isn’t an endorsement of McCain, but he could win…so there you go.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 and is filed under Quotes, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 2nd, 2006 at 3:13 pm
If the goal is to keep a nuclear device from detonating at a port while still in a cargo container, I suspect that we’re screwed. About the best we could do would be to scan all cargo leaving other ports. But even that would fail, if the people operating the ship were in on it.
March 2nd, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Pretty much what Tom said.
While I think it’s absolutely imperitive that we keep the ports secure as best we can, it’s really an issue of getting lucky and hoping for the best.
If we want to be more secure from the threat of nuclear weapons being detonated on our soil, we do it by not letting anyone untrustworthy have nuclear weapons in the first place.
March 2nd, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Searching all the containers at the ports is the only way to solve that problem.
Ending all private involvement in the operation of the ports won’t make any difference. The government is already in charge of security at the ports. Changing security clearances for crane operators might make some slight difference in security if you really think that the job presents more of security risk than the government currently does. However, I don’t see why that would require ending private involvement for all positions at the ports.
March 2nd, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Jeff: But even searching the containers doesn’t help if the bomb is set off before the container is searched – If their goal is to set off the bomb at the port, you have to make sure it never gets there. And that’s a pretty tough task.
March 2nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
For the life of me, I can’t understand why we STILL haven’t secured all the sites in the former Soviet Union.
March 2nd, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Good points by Tom.
The thing that bugs me about the way this port management issue is playing out on the blogs is, they’re acting just like the old media. They see the words “ports” and “Arabs” in the same sentence and explode in bloviation — either calling racism on the one side, or decrying the breech of national security on the other (and never mind that the usual sides are all jumbled up here).
When it’s clear that nobody doing the loudest talking knew doodly-squat about ports governance, ports management, port security, the Container Security Initiative, the longshoreman’s union, the role of a terminal operator in security versus that of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or even the difference between a port and a cargo terminal.
Instead, they all locked into extreme positions at the word “go,” and since then they’ve been furiously digging through all the information they neglected beforehand, fetching up whatever fragments bolster their already-committed positions, and discarding the rest.
Folks, this is not how you learn anything, and this is not how you arrive at a coherent position on a complicated issue. And I thought we already had Old Media for this.
March 2nd, 2006 at 5:57 pm
heh; “breach,” I meant.
May 8th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
i do belived it happened i mean we knew they were there waiting for anytime to attack but still i understand where i didnt know they were going to take over an airplane