Speaker: Stephen E. Flynn, Ph.D., Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations

Stephen E. Flynn is a retired U.S. Coast Guard commander, and a foremost expert on homeland security and border control, and director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Hart- Rudman task force on homeland security. He received his Ph.D., and M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and his B.S. from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Stephen E. Flynn will speak about what can be done in these areas in the face of a war and an environment of terrorism.

"If an explosive device were loaded in a container and set off in a port, it would almost automatically raise concern about the integrity of the 21,000 containers that arrive in U.S. ports each day and the many thousands more that arrive by truck and rail across U.S. land borders. A three-to- four-week closure of U.S. ports would bring the global container industry to its knees. Mega ports such as Rotterdam and Singapore would have to close their gates to prevent boxes from piling up on their limited pier space. Trucks, trains, and barges would be stranded outside the terminals with no way to unload their boxes. Boxes bound for the United States would have to be unloaded from their outbound ships. Service contracts would need to be renegotiated. As this system became grid locked, so would much of global commerce." (From "America - Still Unprepared, Still in Danger")

Dr. Stephen Flynn was the director of the Independent Task Force that prepared the October 2002 publication, America - Still Unprepared, Still in Danger. That report concluded that the United States remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil. The task force that came to that conclusion included two former secretaries of state, three Nobel laureates, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former director of the CIA and FBI, and some of the nation's most distinguished financial, legal, and medical experts.