Keeping homeland safe: No easy job

A couple of unrelated incidents in the past week have shed light on the great difficulty of protecting ourselves from potential terrorist attacks.

First, we should note that the country has been blessedly lucky in the past six years to avoid a repeat of Sept. 11, or even a distant echo. There has been in fact no successful mass terror attack on U.S. territory since that day of horror.

That would certainly suggest that some of the safeguards recommended after 9/11 have been effective, but we should also remember what experts have told us all along: It is not a matter of if there will be another terror attack, but when.

We got proof of this in dramatic fashion when the FBI announced it had broken up a plot to basically blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

It was instructive that the men charged in the plot were not Middle Eastern, but were rather Muslims from Latin America. There is no evidence they were working with al-Qaida, but it demonstrates plainly that the terror network can recruit people who either are U.S. citizens (as one of the suspects is) or who have no connection to known terror groups in the Middle East. That will make it much harder to foil terror plots and demonstrates why U.S. security measures must be wide, innovative and unstinting.

On the other hand, the second incident from last week demonstrates just how easy it is to penetrate the best security in the world if there is one weak link.

We are referring to the nonchalant security breach of our Canadian border by Andrew Speaker, the American infected with tuberculosis who was supposed to be quarantined but instead was waved across the border in one minute.

There is no explanation for this except human error. Speaker's name was tagged, and the border agent was correctly notified of his status. Unfortunately, the border agent decided Speaker didn't look sick so he was allowed to cross the border despite the warning from the Centers for Disease Control.

It only takes one such careless moment for a terrorist to enter our territory. It might have happened in 1999 when the Millennium Bomber tried to cross from Canada at Port Angeles, Wash. An alert agent prevented that from happening, but what would have happened if that agent had not been working that shift?

Clearly, we must keep our guard up. And that goes double when you remember that the JFK plotters were using such easily accessible technology as Google Earth to map their attack on the airport pipeline. There is no shortage of terrorist targets in the United States, and there may be no shortage of terrorists either. The government needs to be given the tools, the time and the authority to keep the terrorists and the targets apart.