Thursday, March 30, 2006
Even When They Are Right They Are Wrong
This WaPo piece was fascinating. It's about the investigation in which radioactive material was smugled into the country to test our defenses. Here's what happened
I think this is a classic case of misdirection. They focus on what they can do (put in the monitors) to keep people from looking too closely at what they can't do (recruit and adequately train competent people) Besides, lobbying for the monitors means they increase the power and wealth of their little bureacratic fiefdom.
What gets to me is that we elect our legislators to smart enought o pick up on stuff like this and try to fix it, but instead they just seem to play along.
Related Tags: bureacracy, smuggling, border security, legislators
In a test in December, undercover teams from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, carried small amounts of cesium-137, used in industrial applications, in the trunks of rental cars through official crossing points on the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico. The material triggered radiation alarms, but the undercover investigators used false documents to persuade U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspectors to let them through.Note - the technology worked - it was human error here, not technological. Yet, after another paragrpah describing the context of the reporting here are the following three paragrpahs of the story
The GAO told the subcommittee it was "unlikely" that the Department of Homeland Security would be able to complete its goal of installing 3,034 new-generation radiation detectors by September 2009 at border crossings, ports and mail facilities.Why do they talk about the monitors when the monitors were the only thing that did work?
The government has spent about $300 million since 2000 on installing a current generation of radiation monitors at ports of entry.
Eugene Aloise of the GAO testified that Homeland Security is significantly behind schedule in deploying radiation portal monitors at U.S. ports of entry. Meanwhile, he said, the threat of nuclear smuggling persists.
I think this is a classic case of misdirection. They focus on what they can do (put in the monitors) to keep people from looking too closely at what they can't do (recruit and adequately train competent people) Besides, lobbying for the monitors means they increase the power and wealth of their little bureacratic fiefdom.
What gets to me is that we elect our legislators to smart enought o pick up on stuff like this and try to fix it, but instead they just seem to play along.
Related Tags: bureacracy, smuggling, border security, legislators
