Posted on 02/19/2006 3:07:52 PM PST by Aussie Dasher
THE Bush administration has failed to put adequate security conditions on a deal for a state-owned Dubai company to manage major U.S. ports, and it should not go forward pending a full investigation, a key Republican congressman said overnight.
Lawmakers from both parties joined in criticising the deal, and one called the administration "tone deaf" for approving it.
Republican Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, said that before the administration approved the sale of British firm P&O, which manages six U.S. ports, to Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates, it failed to determine whether the company could be trusted.
"The administration should freeze the contract ... until a full and thorough investigation is carried out," Congressman King said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, defending the deal, said the administration approved it after a classified review and included provisions to protect national security.
"You can be assured that before a deal is approved we put safeguards in place, assurances in place, that make everybody comfortable that we are where we need to be from a national security viewpoint," Mr Chertoff said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
Mr King said the safeguards did not go far enough, but that he could not disclose classified details about them.
"I know that they checked out the top people in the company, but middle-level management, the workers, people who would have access to any type of sensitive information, none of that really has been looked into," the New York lawmaker said.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said it was a mistake for the administration to approve the sale and said Congress should look into it.
"It's unbelievably tone deaf politically at this point in our history, four years after 9/11, to entertain the idea of turning port security over to a company based in the UAE who avows to destroy Israel," Mr Graham said on "Fox News Sunday."
Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, criticised the secrecy of the administration's review and said she would support legislation to block foreign companies from buying port facilities.
"I'm going to support legislation to say 'No more, No way.' We have to have American companies running our own ports," Senator Boxer said on CBS's "Face the Nation." Last week, Senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Hillary Clinton of New York, both Democrats, said they would offer legislation to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations.
"It is an unacceptable risk," Senator Menendez said overnight.
Some in Congress have expressed fears that the UAE was used as a conduit for parts used for nuclear proliferation and that the local banking system had been abused by financiers with possible links to terrorist organizations.
The Bush administration considers the UAE an ally against terrorism.
The UAE company would control management of ports in New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a U.S. inter-agency panel that reviews security implications of foreign takeovers of strategic assets, reviewed the transaction and did not object.
U.S. seaports handle 2 billion tonnes of freight each year. Only about 5 percent of containers are examined on arrival.
The Senate Banking Committee plans to hold a hearing next week to examine concerns about the P&O sale and the U.S. government review process, a panel spokesman said.
Very strange.
ping
"Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, criticised the secrecy of the administration's review..."
Absolutely. I never thought I'd agree with Boxer.
This administration's starchamber tactics are getting old.
There are stories I'm hearing the bidding was secret and American companies weren't in on the process. Maybe it's not true but if it is that'll all come out in the wash and won't look good for this administration.
There was a full investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. They approved the deal unanimously. I saw a guy on TV trying to defend this deal. Basically, what he said is that the deal does not involve the port security being run by Arabs. The security will continue to be handled by Americans. The only difference is that the company will pay the profits to the Arabs.
Personally, that seems reasonable to me, exept that it does not answer an important question: Will this increase the Arab's access to our port security information? You can do a lot of damage if you know where the security cameras are.
I think there's probably no problem with this deal. First off, the Dubai company is just buying a British company that has operated the ports for years. If we didn't have a problem with a foreign company running the ports in all this time, just having more people know is not a reason to worry.
But, even more, the media has been very careful not to tell us just what this company does. Apparently, they don't manage security. As far as I can tell, they just move containers from Point A to Point B. And most of the workers are American.
When the media doesn't want us to know the details, it's usually because they aren't likely to whip us into an anti-Bush frenzy.
I used to support Congressional hearings, but now all those are is an excuse for Congressfolk to get on talking head shows.
Let's get back to the important stuff - like Cheney's quail hunting adventure.
Hey thanks for ping.
Somebody's actually questioning foreign control of America? Everything is crumbling - first nation building democracy and now capitalist ownership in doubt as cure-alls? What next - 'free' trade with China?
Oh well. I trust the government's decision on this, because I know they know more about it than me. It does seem odd on its face though.
Could Dubai become the most important city on earth?There’s another side to Dubai. Drive south along the Gulf, away from the glamour zone of the great hotels, past the giant malls and the huge gas-fired power stations, almost to the western border of Dubai, and you come to the largest man-made harbour in the world. The unapproachably vast quays of the modern port at Jebel Ali were dredged out of the desert sands in 1979 at a place where, Sheikh Rashid used to come for evenings camping with his friends. Abdulla bin Damithan, one of the port managers, showed me around in his red Audi. (This was a replacement; the BMW was in for service.) The 1.5 mile-long quays are so enormous that to look the length of them is to stare into a desert haze. Halfway along, the metal bodies of the ships and cranes disappear like mirages.
But it is no dreamy place: every minute, every towering gantry crane lifts another container off the high-stacked decks of the bulbous ships alongside, lowers it to a waiting truck that delivers it to another part of the site, or transfers it from the unimaginably huge motherships, which travel the world oceans, to the slightly less huge feeder ships which service the Gulf, the Indian trade and the Mediterranean. Nothing interrupts the movements, day and night, 365 days a year, even in July at 90% humidity, an air temperature usually over 49C and when even the seawater in the docks approaches 38C. No one works outside. More than seven million containers are moved here in the course of the year, a figure that grew 23% last year, and is set to triple within the next six years, serving a market of two billion people in the Middle East. It’s like looking at the guts of the world, the usually hidden machinery by which things actually happen. Over on the other side of the harbour, two diminutive destroyers are tied up, the stars and stripes hanging off their sterns. This is where the American carrier battle groups patrolling the Gulf come for service - and shopping. It’s the port most visited by the US navy outside the United States.
Like almost everything of any significance in Dubai, the port system belongs to the state, or to the Maktoums, the ruling family. The two are indistinguishable, and in some ways, Dubai is a princely vision of how the world might be. The Maktoums came here as Bedouin chieftains in the 1820s, to a small, palm-fringed trading creek, where political control was in the hands of the British. Only in 1971 did Dubai gain independence as part of the United Arab Emirates. It was already known that Abu Dhabi, by far the biggest and richest of the Emirates, was sitting on a vast mineral reserve. At current rates of production, Abu Dhabi has more than 120 years’ supply of oil and gas still untapped. Dubai is nothing like so well endowed, and so from the 1960s onwards, the Maktoums have been consciously shaping Dubai as the trading and financial motor of the Emirates, and the Dubai ports system is central to their vision.
Dubai sits on the all-important strategic routeway of the modern world: China, India, Middle East, Europe and the US. That is where the money is going to be. China has just become the third biggest economy in the world and it is the fastest growing. India is set for its own acceleration. The Maktoum plan is to make Dubai the centre of a global strategic network of port facilities to rival Singapore and the huge Hong Kong-based conglomerate of Hutchison-Whampoa. They have been acquiring hard and fast and now control massive facilities in China, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, India, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Romania, Germany and Latin America. In a profoundly symbolic move, Dubai Ports are now manoeuvring to make a bid for the great harbours in southern Iraq.
"Tone deaf" doesn't cover it. This is particularly stupid.
I am concerned that the Administration is more tied into the idea of free trade and globalism than national security. I think this deal needs to be investigated much more thoroughly. Either that or the transaction should be disapproved out of hand. Seems like a huge risk to our national security. And what, exactly, is the upside to the US?
They aren't true, but you already knew that and you tried to plant your lying seed anyway.
What and not have a Bush bash led by hillary/schumer/michael savage.
What are you still around? Have you talked with Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy yet, what do they think of the deal? Boy you democrats crack me up, make up your minds on this, where do you stand?
Wouldn't it be better if an American firm got the job and received the profits?
An American company can get the profits, but they have to pay for the privilege of getting the profits. Apparently, the Arabs are willing to pay more than the Americans for that privilege.
But that is not a security concern anyway. If we're going down that road, then why don't we just ban all foreigners from owning companies that do business in the US? We did not get to be the most competitive and strongest economy in the world by doing that. Quite the opposite.
no, the better analogies regarding foreign investment would be:
would we allow china to buy Dominos Pizza? yes, who really cares.
would we allow china to buy Lockheed Martin? no. why not?
And we should buy this why?
Perhaps because of the Administration's impeccable record on border security and putting a stop to the flood of illegal aliens into the United States...\sarc\
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