The federal Transportation Security Administration is on the defensive this week after reporting hundreds of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport security uniforms and identification cards went missing after Sept. 11.

Nearly 250 uniforms were lost or taken in 2002 and 2003 from BWI workers alone, said TSA spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. But she said those numbers don?t represent a security threat because every one of them had been accounted for by 2004. The uniform itself has been redesigned, and only seven disappeared from BWI last year. However, for at least two years some of them were unaccounted for.