Ronald Reagan, when he was awake, got more than a little campaign traction when he asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This time next year, you can bet the farm that any political candidate without a trunk full of unfortunate presidential or congressional record is going to be asking, “Are you safer now than you were four years ago?” Unfortunately, the answer will be the same then as it was during Reagan’s tenure.
This morning’s Washington Post carries Howard Kurtz’s article reporting that ABC entertainers shipped 15 pounds of depleted uranium from Jakarta into the port of Los Angeles on the second anniversary of the events of 11 September 2001. For now, set aside the arguments regarding the legalities and ethics of what the Disney broadcast property did (Slate‘s Jack Shafer does a great job of addressing that issue; it was both illegal and unethical, but hey, this is Disney—that’s entertainment). Stop and ask yourself how effective the Bush administration’s “war on terror” has been. Looks to me that it’s been about as effective as the ongoing “war on drugs,” which is to say not very.
As it turns out, actually shipping the depleted uranium (which cannot be converted for use as a weapon) isn’t even illegal. But Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy told Kurtz that failure “to disclose the contents accurately, which is a false declaration,” apparently is. As if terrorists are going to fill out the appropriate disclosure forms accurately when they ship a suitcase bomb to Savannah. At any rate, the uranium, encased in lead and packed in a teak trunk, sailed into the Los Angeles port undetected and undeterred. Homeland Security adamantly says that if it was active uranium, of course it would have been detected. But a nuclear physicist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the group who supplied the uranium, disputes that, saying that if the inspectors “can’t detect that, then they can’t detect the real thing.”
In the fine tradition of the Keystone Kops, Kurtz reports “federal investigators interviewed some of the network’s staffers, demanded their videotapes and showed up unannounced at the Washington home of the NRDC physicist working with the network,” after the uranium had already passed through the Port of Los Angeles.
ABC shipped the same uranium last year, undetected, on the first anniversary of the events of 11 September 2001 to the port of Staten Island, NY.
