WAR: U.S. Antiterrorism Screening Equipment Ineffective

After the terror attacks of September 2001 the U.S. government realized that it had done far to little to secure the nations airports, harbors and rails systems. The Department of Homeland Security was created and more than 4.5 billion dollars was spent to put in place monitoring equipment used to detect explosives, firearms, and biological or nuclear materials. Now, nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. government has a new problem. Much of the screening and monitoring equipment used is either totally ineffective or too unreliable to be used. The Dept. of Homeland security has announced that it plans to spend up to $7 billion to replace the ineffective equipment. This only serves to underscore what many people have long believed, that the security responses to 9/11 were just knee jerk reactions and not real solutions. The government acknowledges some missteps were taken when acquiring the security and screening equipment but maintains that no single device will compromise it's multi-layered security approach.



Despite spending billions of taxpayer dollars on security measures in the post 9/11 era America is still not doing enough to thwart potential terror attacks. While the U.S. should never be a steel fortress completely sealed from the rest of the world, much can be done to better perform the business of securing the people from terrorists. Those in charge of security must make better efforts to appropriately use the resources available and not waste them on ineffective measures just to show that they are indeed doing something. We may never know of all the successes made in protecting us, however it only takes one small failure to provide our enemies with the opportunity to strike.

they should take care of the borders first espically the mexican-US borders. a terrorist can just drive a bomb in a truck and go into US and no one can stop them. but no

bushco want all those illegals come into the country and give corprations cheap labor and americans lose their jobs.
and
he's too scared of mexicans, losing support and stuff.

A waste of money, in my opinion. If a "terrorist" wants to commit some "terroristic acts," whatever the hell THOSE are, then they will be able to. If we want to spend money on, uh, "thwarting" these fabled "terroristic" attacks, then we should spend that money on investigation and not low-end equipment.

Zip

Try preventing the cause of terrorism in the first place. The only sure fire way of preventing terrorism is to cut off its support base.

There are scores of reasons why people want to harm Americans and they are all down to American foreign policy.

How do you prevent domestic terrorism though? Border protection will not prevent that.

After a recent hand luggage search at an airport in the UK - I'm under the impression that standards are still not high enough...

I ended up as a passenger telling the woman what to do...