John Sarbanes: “I commend my colleague, the very able Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed, for offering this amendment. I am pleased to…”

“I commend my colleague, the very able Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed, for offering this amendment. I am pleased to join with him as a cosponsor. Senator Reed has played a leading role in the Congress on the issue of transit security. In fact, in the last Congress he held a series of hearings on transit issues, and a good deal of the focus of those hearings was on the transit security challenges we face. This is a vitally important amendment needed to better protect the American people. I observe to my colleagues that throughout the world, public transportation systems have been a target of terrorist attacks. A terrorist attack against a passenger train in Madrid, attacks against transit systems in both Moscow and South Korea demonstrate that transit and rail systems are a target of terrorists worldwide. Despite the significant threat which obviously exists to transit and rail systems, security funding has been grossly inadequate. As a result, our Nation's transit and rail systems have been unable to implement necessary security improvements, in many instances even those that have been identified as necessary by the Department of Homeland Security. To take one example, Washington Metro's greatest security need at the moment is a backup operations control center.”