I wanted to point out a really interesting story about ABC News testing the nation’s security system by shipping depleted uranium around the globe, into the United States, to see if it was detected. Unfortunately, it was not.
In fact, ABC News has tried this experiment twice in two years to see if the system put in place after 9/11 works. So far, the uranium has gone undetected both times.
To determine how easy it would be for terrorists to smuggle uranium into the U.S., over the summer an ABC team packed 15 pounds of depleted uranium in a suitcase, shielded by a steel pipe with a lead lining. The suitcase sailed through customs and arrived in Los Angeles without incident.
Worse, ABC conducted the test by having the suitcase go through Jakarta, Indonesia, a city considered by U.S. authorities to be one of the most active al Qaeda hot spots in the world.
The Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security is having a bit of a freak-out, not because the security system isn’t working, but because ABC pulled this stunt to show that the security system isn’t working.
In fact, federal officials are indicating that the news network may have committed a crime. While ABC believes this is legitimate investigative journalism, the Homeland Security folks are having the Justice Department investigate.
“Does a news organization have a right to break the law?” Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy told the Washington Post. “Can a reporter rob a bank to prove that bank security is weak? My understanding of journalistic ethics is you don’t break the law in pursuit of news.”
Oddly enough, the legal controversy isn’t directly over the shipping of the uranium, it’s over the false declaration when going through customs.
It isn’t actually a crime to ship depleted uranium, because it can’t be converted into a weapon (as opposed to enriched uranium, which is used in nuclear weapons). But when the ABC News team shipped the uranium, they were supposed to tell customs agents about the correct contents of the suitcase. They obviously didn’t.
Of course, as ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said this week, that was kind of the point.
“Do you think terrorists are going to fill out a form saying they’re shipping uranium?” Schneider asked. “That’s the point of the test.”
Well, if ABC was shipping depleted uranium, instead of the enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons, was it a legitimate test? Homeland Security officials say no and that their screening process is only designed to catch “the real thing.”
But that may not be quite right. ABC News used the uranium on loan from the Resources Defense Council (don’t worry, they didn’t buy it on the black market). Tom Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the NRDC, said, “If they can’t detect that, then they can’t detect the real thing.” He added that the enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons would, with slightly thicker shielding, give off a signature similar to depleted uranium in the screening devices currently being used by homeland security officials at American ports.
Nevertheless, many are wondering why the Department of Homeland Security seems more upset with ABC than it does the breakdown in the security screening process. It seems to me, among others, that ABC has done the government a favor by pointing out an area of domestic defense that needs immediate improvements.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) seems to agree. He wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge this week, saying, “I would urge that significant caution must be used by the federal government to ensure that legitimate reporting is not chilled.” He added, “If my neighbor told me my barn was on fire, my first instinct would be to thank my neighbor and get some water for the fire…. Time and again, I find federal agencies devoting enormous time and energy to attacking whoever put the spotlight on a government mistake.”