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The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee held a hearing June 14 to review railroad security after evidence found at Osama bin Laden’s compound showed he was plotting terrorist attacks against U.S. passenger trains.
“Terrorists have been focused on trains for years,” said committee Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV). “We must recognize that our surface transportation network is enormous and heavily traveled, and is therefore an attractive target …. Make no mistake: the threat to America’s rail network is real, and we must do much more to keep it secure.”
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), a member of the committee and vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction over rail security funding, called on Republicans to reconsider reductions in this funding, saying al-Qaeda remains a threat “to our rails.”
John S. Pistole, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), said: “Due to the large populations and substantial infrastructure served by mass transit and national railroad systems, these networks remain a target for terrorist groups.” Moreover, he added, “an open architecture connecting millions of passengers in major metropolitan areas creates inherent potential security vulnerabilities.”
He noted that cuts put forth in the House “will have a serious and significant impact in the security work that we are able to do.”
TSA employs advanced risk-based, intelligence-driven techniques to prevent terrorist attacks and to reduce the vulnerability of the nation’s transportation systems to terrorism, Pistole said.
He added that TSA is developing and fielding a risk assessment capability focused on individual mass transit and passenger railroad agencies, their regional security partners, and connecting and adjoining transportation systems. “This effort,” he said, “aims to produce several risk and vulnerability assessment tools integrated into a single platform so that TSA and its component security partners in DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] can conduct joint assessments of mass transit and passenger railroad agencies, employing resources more efficiently and improving the audit process.”
John J. O’Connor, Amtrak’s chief of police, told the committee: “The recent events after the death of bin Laden serve as a stark reminder that these threats continue to be viable and that a new twist was added, that terrorists are considering derailing trains.”
The House passed a bill that potentially cuts federal spending on rail transit security by 65 percent in next year’s budget. This is in addition to other security grant cuts in the House appropriations bill for FY 2012. |
