At 1:30 PM Pacific Time today, the Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a special field hearing, “Examining Physical Security and Cybersecurity at Our Nation’s Ports”, at the Port of Los Angeles.
For nearly two decades now, politicians who adhere to the nationalist Homeland ideology have been warning that the port of the United States of America are dangerously insecure. They’ve passed huge amounts of spending to deal with the supposed insecurity, which is based on the idea that foreign terrorists could put a dirty bomb on a cargo ship, or could put chemical weapons on a cargo ship, or could put biological weapons on a cargo ship, or could put nuclear weapons on a cargo ship, or could put a thousand hungry lions on a cargo ship.
None of these things have ever actually happened. There has never been any specific terrorist plot to exploit supposed security weaknesses in America’s ports. The Homeland Security Committee is just making up terrorist attack fantasies about things that could theoretically happen, and treating them as real threats.
The House Homeland Security is working overtime to avoid dealing with the biggest terrorism story of 2017: There hasn’t been even one Radical Islamic Terrorist attack in the United States this year.
Just a few days ago the committee’s chair, Michael McCaul, released a Terror Threat Snapshot. The Terror Threat Snapshot used graphics with flames, and maps with lots of red painted on them. It mentioned things like violence in Egypt, an attack against a restaurant in Iraq, and the alarming trend of 2 terrorist attacks over the last 4 years in Kosovo.
The Terror Threat Snapshot could not identify a single Radical Islamic Terrorist attack taking place in the United States this year. The Snapshot didn’t actually mention this complete lack of Radical Islamic Terrorism in the US, of course.
Instead, Congressman McCaul’s Terror Threat Snapshot warned that ”Cases of homegrown Islamist extremism in the U.S. are on the rise as U.S. persons continue to radicalize.”
Pay attention to McCaul’s language here. He didn’t say that cases of Islamic extremist terrorism are on the rise. He said that Islamist extremism are on the rise.
McCaul’s Terror Threat Snapshot provided no statistics to substantiate a rise in Islamist extremism this year. Over and over again, the report cites what has happened ”since 2013”, while failing to report statistics of what’s actually happened – or not happened – this year.
All that McCaul could point to to substantiate his claim of a recent rise of Islamist extremism in the United States were two court cases last month:
1) A man plead guilty to traveling to Somalia and joining in the fighting there six years ago.
2) A woman was sentenced for planning to travel to Syria to get married to a member of the Islamic State there.
You’ll notice that neither of these cases have anything to do with terrorism in the United States.
While Michael McCaul and his Homeland Security Committee are busy fanning the flames of fear about non-existent Radical Islamic Terrorism in the United States, they’re ignoring actual threats to the country’s ports.
The Executive Editor Of Logistics Management recently pointed out that America’s ports are indeed vulnerable… to catastrophic storms and sea level rise resulting from climate change.
The House Homeland Security Committee has no plans to deal with that real and present danger.
