Free Republic

Al-Qaida may already have nuclear weapons hidden in major U.S. cities, says the author of "Nuclear Terrorism" and former Defense Department official. In response to reports last week that al-Qaida might hijack tanker trucks as a means of wreaking havoc in major U.S. cities, Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and former assistant secretary of defense, said smuggling a nuclear weapons into a major city is not improbable. "While not likely, it is possible that al-Qaida is hiding nuclear bombs in one or several American cities today,"...

...Kerry accused the Bush administration of failing adequately to police the six million cargo containers flowing into the country each year.... This absurdity, in fact, conceals one of the great, low-budget successes of the war on terrorism. A rule was instituted overnight requiring shippers to deliver an electronic manifest of every container to U.S. Customs 24 hours before it's loaded aboard a ship in a foreign port. The info is fed through a classified, rule-based screening program to identify "high-risk" cargos, shippers or handlers, with the targeted containers undergoing X-ray or physical search before loading.... All this was done... for...