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| By MICHAEL R. McKAY | |
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While a Congressional subcommittee was holding a field hearing on maritime
security issues in the Port of New York and New Jersey on March 26, four
undocumented Pakistani seamen were on the lam somewhere near Norfolk, home
port to a large fleet of U.S. Navy carriers, combatants and support
vessels. According to a report in The Washington Post a day earlier, the four were among 27 foreign officers and crew members cleared by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for shore leave from a merchant ship owned in Russia and registered under the Maltese flag of convenience. The ship, a chemical tanker, was allowed to depart Norfolk without the missing personnel, the Post report said. According to the account by Cheryl W. Thompson, one of the Pakistani nationals "had committed an immigration law violation in Chicago several years ago," a relevant point that got by the local INS agent, who had reportedly entered the wrong birth date for the individual during a computer background check. The newspaper also reported that the INS agent had waived visa requirements for the 27 without following "protocol," including approval by a "senior level administrator." While ship-jumping by foreign mariners in the U.S. is nothing new, this incident was significant in the context of last Sept. 11, when the U.S. came under deadly and destructive attack by Islamic terrorists aligned with Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al-Qaeda organization. A nation still edgy over 9-11 took note of four illegal aliens from Pakistan--where popular support for bin Laden and his cause is known to be strong--disappearing into the U.S. While no one wanted to "profile" or presume criminal intent, there was discomfort over the prospect of the four blending seamlessly into any number of communities, as the 19 al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the strikes against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon had done. Reports April 9 said one of the Pakistanis had been arrested in Houston--another strategic port, with its concentration of tanker terminals, oil storage tanks, and refineries. The reports also said foreign nationals on as many as 40 foreign-flag merchant ships throughout the U.S. had been approved for shore time without visas. Such incidents helped bring into focus a grim truth addressed widely in Congress, in the administration, and in state and local governments since Sept. 11--with more than 300 ports handling foreign trade, the U.S. is vulnerable to maritime-related terrorist strikes in heavily populated cities on all deep-sea coasts and along the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence Seaway. Officials have discussed the potential use of ships as weapons, the possibility of terrorists stowing away on U.S.-bound ships, the prospect of foreign-flagged cargo or cruise ships providing crew cover for terrorists, and the possible use of cargo containers to conceal weapons, explosives, chemical and biological warfare agents, and "dirty nukes," the crude bombs experts say can scatter medical or industrial radioactive waste over wide areas (only two percent of the containers arriving in U.S. ports each year are actually inspected by U.S. Customs). But there is a broader issue that warrants consideration at the highest levels--excessive U.S. reliance on foreign-flagged ships and foreign crews for routine international trade and even for defense work. Foreign-flagged cargo ships now carry better than 97 percent of U.S. commercial imports and exports. Many of these ships are registered in unaccountable flag of convenience countries like Liberia (which has been said to use ship registry revenues to help finance a brutal rebel faction in neighboring Sierra Leone) and Panama (awash in fraudulent seafarer certificates and licenses for sale). Vessel ownership is often difficult if not impossible to determine, there is rarely a link between beneficial owners and the flag state (foreign-flag ship owners are now resisting U.S. Coast Guard calls for greater ownership "transparency"), and U.S. laws and regulations do not apply. Crews for most foreign-flagged ships serving U.S. trade are typically recruited from Third World countries, many with large Muslim populations, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan and states of the former Soviet Union. They often live and work at sea under harsh conditions, logging long hours for little pay and no benefits. They are often subject to dismissal anywhere in the world--including the U.S.--without recourse and without repatriation. Would anyone be surprised to learn that many of these mariners resent or even hate the U.S. and the industrialized West for what they represent? Foreign-flag ships are also used to an unnerving extent by the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command, which too often charters them for support services abroad. During the Persian Gulf war in 1990 and 1991, for example, MSC was able to charter foreign-flagged ships to cover U.S.-flag capacity shortfalls, but only at rates many analysts said were excessive. And there were documented cases of foreign crews--many of them Muslim--refusing to bring U.S. defense cargoes to the war zone. Given the preeminence of foreign-flagged ships (especially flags of convenience) in U.S. trade, and given the nature of the new enemy, the theoretically possible is looking more and more like the statistically probable--let enough dogs in the yard, and one of them is bound to bite you. Just something else for U.S. officials to think about as they develop U.S. port and waterway security policy. |
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