Last Thursday’s Herald-Sun of Durham included an Associated Press story from Singapore that sounded an ominous alarm about what al-Qaida might be planning from sea. Whenever I read a story that relates, even in part, to port security issues, I take notice, having recently written a story for Carolina Journal about security upgrades and concerns at North Carolina’s seaports in Wilmington and Morehead City.
The first two paragraphs of the AP story published March 18 are as follows:
“The al-Qaida terror network likely is planning an unprecedented maritime attack, hitting targets on land with ships carrying chemical, biological or dirty bomb weapons, a defense analyst said Wednesday. The terrorist network could easily exploit weaknesses in shipping companies’ crew selection procedures by planting sleeper agents on vessels to eventually seize them, said Michael Richardson, a senior researcher at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies who writes extensively on Asian security issues.”
To get up to speed on our own port security issues, including a new I.D. system and the threat posed by containerized cargo, read my CJ story from January.
