Flynn decries federal security mentality in Long Beach speech

Flynn decries federal security mentality in Long Beach speech    Port security expert Stephen Flynn on Wednesday told a crowd of shipping industry officials that the primary problem with the federal government’s approach to terrorism is that it is focused on security rather than resiliency.
   “I’m not someone who believes we can win the ‘war on terrorism,’ ” Flynn said to a meeting of the Propeller Club of Los Angeles-Long Beach. “To me it ‘s like the flu, where we have to deal with a different strain each season.”
   Flynn said the recently passed SAFE Ports Act should merely be a platform for more intense disaster prevention and preparedness planning.
   “SAFE didn’t give us a whole lot of new stuff as much as it codified what already existed, and that’s not a bad thing,” he said. “But it is very much a beta version, a version 1.0 and we need a 2.0 or 3.0. The real problem is not just the act itself, but rather the reaction, or overreaction to a problem.”
   Flynn described the nation’s approach to terror as “the spinach problem,” alluding to the recent bacterial scare in spinach crops that scared consumers away from the vegetable despite the statistically remote chance that the spinach they ate would be contaminated.
   “When we have this fear factor and can’t understand the source of where it comes from, there’s this push to make it go away,” Flynn said. “The federal government doesn’t have a plan for the day after. Local entities might, but the federal government doesn’t. It’s not a money issue, it’s a leadership issue.”
   Flynn said the DP World controversy earlier this year provided a foreshadowing of how the government might respond to a terrorist event at a U.S. port.
   “DP World, to me, was like the World Trade Center I (the initial attack in 1993),” he said. “What you see is how the body politic will react to a major event. We need to take out the security word as a national priority and take on resiliency. It’s a grown up way of accepting we can’t control everything. It’s how we recover that’s most important and by building resiliency, you ultimately make it a less attractive target.”