Radioactive
The headline on Spencer Hsu's good story yesterday in the Washington Post may be shocking. But it won't be a surprise to anyone who has been keeping an eye on the coverage of DHS's sputtering efforts to protect the country against nuclear attacks.
It says:
"Costly Weapon-Detection Plans Are in Disarray, Investigators Say."
"The administration budgeted $2.8 billion in 2007 for nuclear detection but lacks a strategic plan to plug gaps and move beyond its initial goals, such as placing radiation detectors at domestic and overseas ports, according to reports by the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing that will be held today."
The problems include but go far beyond the radiation detection machines known as Advanced Spectroscopic Portal monitors.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had a hearing about the new findings yesterday -- findings so compelling that even the normally cautious Sen. Joe Lieberman was prompted to speak out in strong terms.
"The system we have in place now, I conclude, is not complete," Lieberman, the committee chairman, said in a statement. "Our global nuclear detection architecture... may have both needless redundancies and/or dangerous gaps, which in this case is the worst of both worlds."
By Robert O'Harrow |
July 17, 2008; 6:30 AM ET
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Posted by: LALA | July 18, 2008 1:50 AM
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I have come to expect nothing else but failure and incompetence from this regime. Bush has been called the "CEO president" and he is leaving office with his golden umbrella intact even though he has run this "company" into the ground and left it vulnerable to hostile financial takeover.
All that remains is to find out how long it will take to recover from his total trust in privatization that has resulted in so much overspending on outsourced projects and so much fraud and incompetence. Trusting private companies to do the right by America, even when it comes to security, is an ideology that can only be viewed as possible by a supply-side 'dead-ender'.