The trashed, teemingly industrialized landscape around the major container terminals in Elizabeth and Port Newark is perhaps the most critical couple of miles in the entire American transportation system. It includes the New Jersey Turnpike, Newark airport, and so many gas and oil and chemical storage tanks that it is known as the Chemical Coast, all within easy striking distance of the piers. And then, of course, there’s Manhattan. National-security analysts estimate that if a terrorist attack closed New York Harbor in winter New England and upstate New York would run out of heating fuel within ten days. Even temporarily hampering the port’s operations would have immeasurable cascading effects.

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If there is any one person in charge of the Port of New York and New Jersey, it is Glenn Wiltshire, United States Coast Guard, the Captain of the Port. From his command center, at Fort Wadsworth, on Staten Island, he surveys the waterside for problems, emergencies, threats. [...] "For certain vessels, we’ll put a boarding team aboard and, beyond the security exam, we’ll leave a team on board to watch the control spaces as the ship is coming in," he said. The Coast Guard calls these "ships of concern." "We want to make sure that nothing untoward is coming. There are three main possibilities. One, the ship is carrying the weapon. Two, the ship is the weapon. Three, the ship is carrying the people who intend an attack."

I asked how a ship might be a weapon.

"It could be a loaded oil tanker, intended to be used as a bomb, or to take down a bridge. Or maybe a bad guy plans to sink a ship in the middle of Kill Van Kull. That would stop about eighty per cent of our container traffic," Captain Wiltshire said. "We’re also on the lookout for a U.S.S. Cole-type attack." He was referring to the Al Qaeda attack, in 2000, in Yemen, by a bomb-filled dinghy against a Navy destroyer, which killed seventeen American sailors.

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The tension between security and commerce is inescapable. Last month, the Times reported that some Coast Guard commanders, heeding complaints from big shippers about costly delays, have been warning some ships about what are supposed to be random inspections. According to the Times, this practice (which seems to be common in Los Angeles and Long Beach, though not, apparently, in the Port of New York and New Jersey) was condoned by the Coast Guard’s top command in Washington.

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There are a hundred and twenty thousand merchant ships at work today. American intelligence agencies have estimated that Al Qaeda owns or controls as many as fifty. The explosives used to destroy the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998, were delivered to East Africa on an Al Qaeda ship. But it is impossible to trace ship ownership and registration with much accuracy. As a U.S. official told the Washington Post, "You can’t swing a dead cat in the shipping business without hitting somebody with phony papers." There are more than a million seafarers at work, and most come from poor countries—Indonesia, China, the Philippines. The opportunities for terrorist operatives to move by sea under false identities are effectively endless. The most glaring vulnerability in maritime security, however, is the container.

In 1955, a North Carolina trucking-company owner named Malcom McLean invented the modern cargo container. Today, ninety per cent of world shipping moves by container. (McLean’s company, Sea-Land, was sold to a Danish company, Maersk, in 1999.) Since 2002, a program known as the Container Security Initiative requires our main trading partners to send to U.S. Customs and Border Protection an electronic manifest for every U.S.-bound container twenty-four hours before it is loaded on a ship. Customs, if it notices anything alarming, may ask the foreign port to inspect the container’s contents, or refuse it. This program covers almost eighty per cent of all U.S.-bound ocean-borne cargo. There is also a voluntary, public-private initiative, established in late 2001, called the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, or C.-T.PAT, in which companies agree to have their security procedures vetted by U.S. authorities, in exchange for expedited handling of their business—the green lane. More than six thousand firms have been accepted into C.-T.PAT, including all the big American importers. Forty-five per cent of U.S. imports now pass through the green lane.

These systems are far from foolproof. The information on cargo manifests is routinely vague, incomplete, or wrong, and foreign ports are generally expected to purchase their own radiation-detection systems, which are expensive. Spot checks by American officials at a number of ports have not been reassuring. A Department of Homeland Security study leaked in March found opportunities, all along the cargo corridor—in American and foreign ports—"that would enable unmanifested material or weapons of mass destruction to be introduced into the supply chain."

In September, 2003, an investigative team at ABC News shipped fifteen pounds of depleted uranium from Jakarta to Los Angeles in a container full of furniture. Customs agents in Los Angeles targeted the container for screening—something that happens to less than seven per cent of all arriving containers. The container passed, and entered the country unopened. Depleted uranium is relatively harmless, and legal to import, but it gives off a radiation signature very similar to that of the highly enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons. "If they can’t detect that, then they can’t detect the real thing," a nuclear physicist told journalists.

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The largest American importer by far is Wal-Mart. Last year, it brought seven hundred thousand container units through the green lane into the country. The rise of the big-box retailers, with their global network of suppliers, has caused a shift in power in the international shipping business away from the steamship lines and terminal operators, and toward the importers. What is more, companies like Wal-Mart have been actively working against stronger port- and containersecurity laws since shortly after the September 11th terror attacks. The Retail Industry Leaders Association, a Washington lobby dominated by Wal-Mart, actually boasted, in a 2005 report to its members, about its "continued industry leadership in opposition to ill-advised and onerous port security measures (i.e. cargo fees, increased physical inspections)."

I'm so glad that Wal-Mart's massive profits come as the expense of keeping up secure from terrorism.

There's a lot more of interest in the article, so take a look.