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DHS Orders Outside Study of Cargo Screeners
The U.S. Homeland Security Department has ordered a battery of independent tests for its highly touted cargo and vehicle radiation screening machines, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, July 20). A 2006 DHS cost-benefit report stated the portal monitors, which would be used to screen cars, cargo and trucks, would have a 95 percent success rate in detecting highly enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons. However, department trials have shown the $377,000 machines to be only 50 percent effective. The discrepancy prompted Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff to request the testing, he said Friday in a letter to several congressmen. The $1.2 billion cost of the radiation screening program demands close scrutiny of the machines, Chertoff added. Homeland Security has asked the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency to administer the tests, the Post reported. The new Advanced Spectroscopic Portal monitors are intended to improve upon technology that has set off false alarms over kitty litter and other harmless sources of radiation, clogging traffic at border crossings. However, a Government Accountability Office report questioned the DHS findings on the new technology and Congress has withheld funding until the monitors can be proven effective (see GSN, July 17, 2006). The Homeland Security cost-benefit study was found to be “incomplete and unreliable, and as a result, we do not have confidence in it,” said one Government Accountability Office official in March. “Given the likely expense and critical importance of these monitors, which is to cost $1.2 billion, we need independent and impartial validation from the start,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) (Robert O’Harrow, Washington Post, Aug. 1).
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