By Staff
Almost four years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the expenditure of billions to beef up security, our porous border with Canada reminds us that we will never be able to spend enough to insure safety.
Even achieving efficiency seems elusive with 300,000 people flowing across each day.
The busiest trade traffic between the United States and Canada crosses the 1 1/2-mile Ambassador Bridge from Ontario to Detroit.
Vehicles are inspected only when they reach the opposite country, not when they embark.
Where Maine meets New Brunswick, Canadian-born Gregory Despres, a naturalized U.S. citizen, returned home in April.
According to an Associated Press investigation, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol admitted the man after confiscating the homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a blood-stained chainsaw he was carrying.
The following day, authorities in his Canadian hometown found two bodies - one decapitated, the other stabbed to death. When he was finally arrested Despres was wandering a Massachusetts road.
It's not that nothing has been done. In the Blaine, Wash., border sector, 32 new online camera surveillance systems are online. The 133 agents are 2 1/2 times the number before Sept. 11.
But know that Canada continues to admit 250,000 immigrants and refugees annually. Their government can delay refugee claims up to two years, during which time potentially dangerous applicants can vanish to plot against us.
The 1,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents working along the boundary between America and Canada are three times the 2001 force - but still a fraction of the 9,600 agents patrolling the Mexican border, which at 1,900 miles is about half as long.
Forests and water harbor plenty of hidden spots where motorboats and helicopters can make drops.
On the Canadian side, most of 160 land and maritime border crossings are staffed by one unarmed guard, with long unmanned stretches between entry points.
It's very fortunate Ahmed Ressam was intercepted in Port Angeles, Wash., in 1999 as he drove off a ferry from Canada.
Ressam, with ties to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, packed his trunk full of explosives to bomb the Los Angeles airport.
In Blaine, friendly 20-acre Peace Arch Park straddles the international line. People from both nations meander through its gardens, but some don't go home at the end of the day. That's how Palestinian Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, convicted in 1998 of plotting to bomb a New York subway, illegally snuck into the United States in 1996.
One way to speed passage while conserving limited resources for, say, screening suspicious cargo before vehicles make it across, is a program identifying and weeding out frequent low-risk travelers.
This effort enrolled 76,000 people and 54,000 truckers.