Al Cannon on Terrorism in Charleston
January 18, 2011: Rob Dewey introduced Sheriff Al Cannon as our guest speaker. Sheriff Cannon was elected as Charleston County Sheriff in 1988 and has served in that capacity for 6 terms. The Sheriff was educated at the College of Charleston and USC. He is known nationally for his law enforcement excellence.
Sheriff Cannon began by stating that he felt like coming to Rotary was like “old home week” because he knew so many of the Rotarians present. He told several humorous stories in his opening remarks.
He talked about Port Security mainly and many of the innovations and improvements that have been made since 9/11. The critical part of his plan for the Port was to involve all levels of security in the city of Charleston. At a later date, the Coast Guard and Homeland Security took over the supervision and implementation of the program he designed. The name of his pilot program was “Seahawk.” This program was the template for all Port Security around the country.
Sheriff Cannon developed tools with the Post Security Initiative called Watch-keeper, an arm of Seahawk. This program maintains a visible presence on ships randomly, and does security checks on the water. They also dive on the hulls of ships in the Port to make certain that there are no explosive devices attached to the hull. They also use air assets and engage the ships while they are offshore. They do aerial surveillance and often photograph ships from the air, analyzing the photos to make certain that there is nothing out of the ordinary being transported. They also analyze a wide variety of intelligence data that looks into ownership and ports of origin of the ships that enter our Port.
The Sheriff noted that securing the Port was more than just overseeing what comes in or goes out of the Port. He stated that over 40% of the material flowing out of Charleston to Iraq and Afghanistan goes through our air base.
Cannon was asked, among several questions,: “What are the threats you are most concerned about?” His response: “Something that would come into the Port to be used elsewhere, the smuggling in of people, all the home grown threats and various plots uncovered.” His greatest concern of all is that of low explosive devices with radioactive materials.
The Seahawk Program (at the Coast Guard Command Center), was selected as one of the 18th “best initiatives”, and is considered the very best in all of the southeastern United States.
Submitted by Bill Christian, Keyway Committee