Posted on: Sunday, June 8, 2003

EDITORIAL
Harbor security needs money, attention

In what at first seems a somewhat arcane dispute, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is blocking the presidential nomination of a bureaucrat because the administration is diverting $58 million that Congress approved last year for port and cargo security to help cover a $1 billion gap in this year's airport security budget.

Murray says the administration should have sought more funding for the needs of homeland security. Now, coming up far short on an obvious need, it's trying to rob Peter to pay Paul.

The $58 million was earmarked for a pilot program to test how to seal and electronically track containers from their points of origin overseas to their final destination in the United States.

A National Public Radio report said when members of Congress last week asked Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta about his biggest security concern, he said without hesitation it was security at the nation's ports.

Anyone looking across Honolulu Harbor gets much the same impression — and the same worry.

Security officials acknowledge that there's no way to inspect all of the thousands of containers that are off-loaded at Hawai'i ports.

Hawai'i, with its ocean isolation, seems to have decided that it has less of a security problem than the Mainland.

With that attitude and the Bush administration's unwillingness to pay for securing shipping containers, we wish Sen. Murray much luck in her lonely dispute over an obscure appointment.