Byron Dorgan: “let me make two additional points. One of them is a point I have made many times on the floor of the Senate, and that is…”

“let me make two additional points. One of them is a point I have made many times on the floor of the Senate, and that is the issue of container security. We are spending about $8 billion to do something called a national missile defense plan, so that if there is an intercontinental ballistic missile aimed at the United States, and shot at us by a terrorist somewhere in the world, we can send up another missile, and with our $8 billion, we will hit a bullet with a bullet. That is the proposition, in any event. It is very unlikely, of course, that a terrorist group is going to have access to an intercontinental ballistic missile, but we are spending $8 billion dealing with that and rogue states having access to those missiles. A more likely threat, according to most people, is not a 15,000-mile-an-hour missile aimed at our country with a nuclear warhead; a more likely threat is a container on a container ship, slowly but surely, at 2 miles an hour, pulling up to a dock in New York City or Los Angeles or San Diego or Seattle, with a container in the middle of all the containers on that ship containing a dirty bomb or a nuclear weapon. Mr. President, 5.7 million of those containers come into this country each and every year; 100,000 of them are inspected, 5.6 million are not.”