The foiled terror plot in Canada raises concerns that the United States could be vulnerable to attack launched from across its northern border.
WASHINGTON: Lawmakers in Washington said on Sunday that an apparent foiled terror plot in Canada raises concerns that the United States could be vulnerable to attack launched from across its northern border.
"These questions were raised long before these arrests," US Senator Carl Levin told a news channel.
"We've had great efforts made to improve our border security. We have tried to persuade the Department of Homeland Security that we have a longer border with Canada than we do with Mexico," said Levin, who represents the state of Michigan, which borders on Canada.
"We've got thousands of trucks that come in every day many of them, most of them not inspected -- and particularly, by the way, garbage trucks from Ontario which cannot be inspected -- represent a real, significant security threat," Levin said.
"We worry very much about a huge amount of commerce coming across a bridge and a tunnel in Detroit, a bridge in Port Huron. It's the major source of entry of commerce to the United States," he said.
Speaking on the same program, US Senator George Allen said a disproportionate amount of concern had been directed to security concern on the US-Mexico border.
"We have to be concerned about both borders. Of course we know in the southern border the main issue is people entering the country illegally by the hundreds of thousands, and we do need to secure our borders on the south. We also need to secure our borders in a different sense in the north," he said.
The 17 alleged Canadian terror plotters were arrested late Friday and early Saturday in the Toronto area, across Lake Ontario from the US state of New York, and were planning to commit a series of terrorist attacks against Canadian targets in southern Ontario, authorities said.
The group allegedly had acquired three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer that is highly explosive. Only one tonne of the fertilizer was used in the 1995 bombing of a US federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma that killed 168 people, when combined with racing fuel.
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