Posted on 02/19/2006 8:44:08 AM PST by radar101
Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff on Sunday defended the government's security review of an Arab company given permission to take over operations at six major U.S. ports.
"We make sure there are assurances in place, in general, sufficient to satisfy us that the deal is appropriate from a national security standpoint," Chertoff said on ABC's "This Week."
London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., was bought last week by Dubai Ports World, a state-owned business from the United Arab Emirates. Peninsular and Oriental runs major commercial operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.
U.S. lawmakers from both parties are questioning the sale, approved by the Bush administration, as a possible risk to national security.
"It's unbelievably tone deaf politically at this point in our history," Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C. said on "Fox News Sunday."
"Most Americans are scratching their heads, wondering why this company from this region now," Graham said.
Added Sen. Evan Bayh (news, bio, voting record), D-Ind.: "I think we've got to look into this company. We've got to ensure ... the American people that their national security interests are going to be protected."
At least one Senate oversight hearing is planned for later this month.
"Congress is welcome to look at this and can get classified briefings," Chertoff told CNN's "Late Edition."
"We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system," he added.
Sen. Robert Menendez, who is working on legislation to prohibit companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from running port operation in the U.S., said Chertoff's comments showed him that the administration "just does not get it."
In a statement, the New Jersey Democrat said, "No matter what steps the administration claims it has secretly taken, it is an unacceptable risk to turn control of our ports over to a foreign government, particularly one with a troubling history. We cannot depend on promises a foreign government has given the administration in secret to secure our ports."
Chertoff said Dubai Ports World should not be excluded automatically from such a deal because it is based in the UAE.
Critics have cited the UAE's history as an operational and financial base for the hijackers who carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In addition, they contend the UAE was an important transfer point for shipments of smuggled nuclear components sent to Iran, North Korea and Libya by a Pakistani scientist.
DP World has said it intends to "maintain and, where appropriate, enhance current security arrangements." The UAE's foreign minister has described his country as an important U.S. ally in fighting terrorism.
This is from another thread. It explains how we do have the ability to block these types of sales. The sale couldn't have gone through without our approval.
White House Defends Port Sale to Arab Co. - 02/16/2006
The sale to state-owned Dubai Ports World was "rigorously reviewed" by a U.S. committee that considers security threats when foreign companies seek to buy or invest in American industry, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, run by the Treasury Department, reviewed an assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies. The committee's 12 members agreed unanimously the sale did not present any problems, the department said.
Four senators and three House members asked the administration Thursday to reconsider its approval. The lawmakers contended the UAE is not consistent in its support of U.S. terrorism-fighting efforts.
The Homeland Security Department said it was legally impossible under the committee's rules to reconsider its approval without evidence DP World gave false information or withheld vital details from U.S. officials. The 30-day window for the committee to voice objections has ended.
snip
If I recall correctly, there was one vote against his confirmation: Hillary Clinton's.
This deal has me fuming. I figure any defense of this purchase must come from idiots with suicidal tendencies...or themselves covert islamofascists.
Anyway, your question "what can Bush do" was answered in #44.
No.
And don't ruin their fun.
If security is truly in doubt, then we cancel these Port contracts, and open the bidding. THIS is the American way.
BTW, it sounds like this deal was vetted pretty deeply. Hopefully all of the facts will be aired publicly, and if needed, action can be taken utilizing contractual solutions .
We DO NOT have to do business with companies that are NOT in our best interests.
LLS
Ostensibly an Economic Officer, one of his duties was to observe (or to have someone observe and report back to him) the movements of Russian ships, commercial and military, in, out, around or passing by the major port where he was stationed.
Many of our State Dept. officers stationed in embassies and consulates around the world double as spies. The other sides does the same here.
The burning question to me is why do foreign companies run so many of our ports? How did this ever happen? Are the highly-paid foreign port management executives doing work Americans don't want to do?
Man, this country is being sold out from under us by the internationalists.
Leni
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-ports1906feb19,0,4469240.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-state
A company at the Port of Miami has sued to block the takeover of shipping operations there by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates, officials said Saturday.
It is the first American courtroom effort to capsize the sale embroiled in national debate.
In Washington, the junior senators from New York and New Jersey added their voices to objections about the Bush administration's approval of the deal that will give a Dubai company a central role in operating ports in New York and across the country.
Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, both Democrats, said they plan to introduce legislation to prevent companies controlled by foreign governments from buying American port operations.
The purpose of the bill would be to block the $6.8 billion sale of a British shipping company to Dubai Ports World, a port operator controlled by the government of Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. The British company, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., operates the cruise-ship terminal on the west side of Manhattan and has a half-interest in the Port Newark Container Terminal, the third-largest cargo terminal in New York harbor.
Well said. Should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
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.
Well, they best be thinking about kissing the $$$$$$$$$$$'s GOODBYE because these fools don't have a clue about how pissed off the conservative base is. Right now, the last thing many of us feel like doing is donating to the GOP. We're tired of the wreckless spending, tired of the border situation, tired of the dems & media getting away with treason and now this!
I'm beginning to see a pattern of utter incompetence and dereliction of the conservative base that's reached the breaking point. Unless the Bush administration wakes up, tunes in and reverses course, the GOP is going to fast become the miniority party in November.
You say that like it is correct to do it, as if that makes it right to have those close to our enemies do it.
No foreign company should operate our border or our ports because we have nothing to say about who they hire. If it is an American company, we have strong pressure we can bring to bear in the company through the industrial security regulations, or even the FBI if necessary.
"Does everyone here realize that this is only a purchase of the contracts? The UAE wont be involved in the day to day operations at our ports"
Even if true, (which I doubt) it's a non issue. We don't want muslim terrorists involved in any measure (just on paper or not) with our ports. Why for idiots? Because our ports and our borders are critcial to our national security.
It takes an idiot not to get this...it takes an islamofascist to promote it.
Have fun.
Chertoff's head must be impacted in his posterior. This sale would aid and abet terrorists. What's wrong with all of our so called leaders?
"You say that like it is correct to do it, as if that makes it right to have those close to our enemies do it".
Wow, I have said nothing that would lead you to think that was my intent. Did you even read my posts on this thread?
My point was that it has been a "FOREIGN" power SUCCESSFULLY running these ports for many years. I would much prefer a US company do it, but YOU made it sound as if "foreign" was inherently risky. I was just pointing out that you came late to the party, and that a foreign company has caused no apparent security problems so far. This may completely change after this merger, and if so, we should use Contractual Law to rectify it.
It is NOT "OUR" business to stop legitimate International business transactions. It is our business who operates our ports. Can you see the difference?
"No foreign company should operate our border or our ports because we have nothing to say about who they hire".
DHS, FBI, and the Coast Guard have plenty of input.
"If it is an American company, we have strong pressure we can bring to bear in the company through the industrial security regulations, or even the FBI if necessary."
While I agree (and want an American company to run these operations) stopping this sale will deeply harm foreign business investment in the US. A better way to handle this, is that if this merger (that is what is actually going on) harms our National Security, we cancel these contracts. It IS that simple.
LLS
There is information here on the meetings, etc. of the "DP World Scheme meetings"
http://portal.pohub.com/portal/page?_pageid=71,207434&_dad=pogprtl&_schema=POGPRTL
If that link doesn't work go here and click on Media Center.
http://portal.pohub.com/portal/page?_pageid=71,207172&_dad=pogprtl&_schema=POGPRTL
allah fubar!!
Let me clarify myself, I'm not comparing H. Myers to port security literally. Just question why this administration makes decisions that doesn't make any sense. This port security situation will become a public relations nightmare, if it hasn't already.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.