Koch: 100% screening law impractical

Koch: 100% screening law impractical Legislation requiring 100 percent inspection of all import containers before vessel loading “has not been clearly considered and remains presently impractical,” Christopher Koch president and chief executive officer of the World Shipping Council, told a congressional committee Tuesday.
   In testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, Koch noted the “Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act”, which was signed into law in August, includes a provision requiring that by 2012 all containers imported into the United States be “scanned” before being loaded aboard vessels destined for the United States.
   “Implementation of this law’s stated objective would require addressing many serious issues that the statute does not address, including the fact that implementation of overseas container inspection requires the cooperation of foreign government,” Koch said.
   “The U.S. government has no current plans to scan 100 percent of its outbound export cargo containers, and thus foreign governments’ predictable inquiries about reciprocity will likely be unanswerable,' he said.
   “And, if the United States’ trading partners do not implement 100 percent container scanning, there is nothing that the U.S. government can realistically do about it other than cease trading with the rest of the world.”
   Koch said “the legislation pointedly fails to address the issue of who is to perform this activity,” it is “clearly impossible” for Congress to require U.S. Customs and Border Protection to undertake such activities within the jurisdiction of other sovereign nations, and the U.S. cannot require foreign governments to perform screening.
   He also noted that since Congress “took the position that one of the largest port facility operators in the world, Dubai Ports World, was an unacceptable security risk to buy a U.S. marine terminal operating company and hire U.S. workers, working under U.S. management, to service vessels in U.S. ports, would Congress consider that company acceptable to perform this task in foreign ports?”
   He also said the law “fails to address whether the scanning data actually has to be reviewed and analyzed, and if so, under what circumstance, when and by whom?”
   Koch also noted that a provision in the SAFE Port Act includes a directive on procedures for securing containers.
   “There are at present many unanswered questions” about what container security devices will be required and called for “a fully transparent” process to find out what sort of technology is being considered with a chance for public comment on such requirements “before they are advanced as an element of the government’s container security strategy,” he said.