Watson Coleman: “I share the deep concerns of my friend, high school classmate, colleague from New York, where I grew up, about the…”

“I share the deep concerns of my friend, high school classmate, colleague from New York, where I grew up, about the danger of a nuclear weapon, the danger of a weapon of mass destruction being smuggled into this country in 1 of 11 million containers. We have, no doubt, the same vision. We want America safe. That is what we have been doing here. That is what the work of the Senator from Maine and the Senator from Washington is about and what we have put forth in the underlying bill that will change. By the way, there were a lot of things in homeland security that I was frustrated with. We spent 3 years, the Permanent Committee on Investigations spent 3 years on this issue, studying it, holding hearings. I encourage my colleague from New York to go to Hong Kong to take a look. My colleague and the Presider Officer went to Hong Kong and took a look at the system that is operating on 2 lanes out of 40 to see what we could do to put in place a system that would scan each and every container that goes through. It is a wonderful system. What we need is action. That is what we did yesterday. We got action. We have in this bill a pilot project that will put in place, in mandates, in directives, not a mandate of what is going to happen in 2008 and 2010, not playing into the sloganeering of ``scan every container,'' but the reality of action today to immediately put in place a pilot project to see if we can make it work in a wider, more systematic way.…”