Schumer pushes for ports vote

BY GLENN THRUSH AND CAROL EISENBERG | Newsday Washington Bureau

September 12, 2006

WASHINGTON - Sen. Charles Schumer is demanding that all cargo shipped from 42 ports overseas be screened for nuclear devices and will try to force a vote on an amendment as early as today.

"We're going to require that all cargo that comes into the U.S. be screened within four years," Schumer (D-N.Y.) said yesterday. "That's because the worst thing is, God forbid, a nuclear weapon explodes in this country." Schumer's staff said that about 5 percent of incoming cargo is currently screened.

Homeland Security officials said that while only 5 percent is X-rayed or physically searched, an estimated 70 percent has been scanned for radiological and nuclear traces since Aug. 18.

The amendment is one of three that Schumer is trying to attach to a port security bill being debated by the Senate after languishing for years. A similar measure passed the House in May.

Congress made port security an election-year priority after a February fight over a buyout that put a Dubai company in control of some operations at six American ports. The outcry led the Dubai company, DP World, to sell the U.S. operations.

In July, Schumer and Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman won Senate passage of a $5 million one-year trial in three U.S. ports for technology pioneered by the port of Hong Kong. With the House proposing a more modest one-port trial instead, Schumer now wants to force Senate Republicans into an up-or-down vote, which he argues is the best hope of reducing the threat of a nuclear bomb or radioactive material being smuggled into the country on a cargo container. Critics of the Hong Kong system, however, say it has a high rate of false alarms.