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By The Hill Editors
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Posted: 07/13/07 07:11 PM [ET] |
The 109th Congress was often accused of failing to conduct its oversight responsibilities with any seriousness. This, it is frequently said, is substantially responsible for corruption on Capitol Hill and incompetence in the administration going unchecked.
But yesterday there was news of at least one piece of highly praiseworthy congressional oversight that has clearly exposed a nuclear security loophole through which terrorists could drive a truck bomb.
The Washington Post reports that under orders from Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) went undercover to test the vigilance of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The officials posed as businessmen and in this guise managed to get an NRC license to buy enough radioactive material to make a “dirty bomb.”
They did this without the trouble of even leaving their desks. No one from the NRC asked to meet them and discuss their plans for the fissile material or demanded to tour the site at which the GAO “businessmen” planned to use it. All the sleuths needed was a mailbox and a fax machine.
Reassuring, no?
Coleman, the ranking minority lawmaker on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, told the Post “it was as easy to get his material as a DVD at Netflix.”
In short, terrorists determined to construct a bomb that would kill nearby people with conventional explosives and dust the rest of the nation’s capital with radioactive poison would have met no resistance from the agency charged with regulating the dangerous materials required.
While pleading poverty, the NRC also makes a valid but unconvincing point: that terrorists have looked for relatively simple ways to mete out mass death and destruction and that the materials obtained by the GAO would have taken a lot of work to make dangerous.
True though that may be, it is surely apparent that an enemy who traces his grievances against our civilization back more than a thousand years takes the long view and would be prepared to put in whatever time and effort necessary to attack us.
The loophole has been tightened with new screening procedures, including the prerequisite of a face-to-face interview or a site visit for those applying for the NRC licenses. For this, Coleman and the GAO deserve a nod of gratitude. And the senator will doubtless (and properly) cite the case in his difficult reelection bid next year.
The moral of the case is that oversight works.
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