Q: Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask you about government -- the U.S. government's decision to have a company from the UAE run six U.S. seaports. Is that a decision that the Defense Department weighed in on? And what, if any, national security issues do you think that raises?
SEC. RUMSFELD: First, let me say I'm not expert on this subject, and it -- my understanding that I've been told secondhand by others is the following: that there's a process that exists in the government; that six departments and agencies are involved, and five or six offices in the Executive Office of the President and the White House are involved; and there's a time limit of something like 30 days during which this process is to be executed; that the process worked; it was chaired by the Department of Treasury -- the deputy, Bob Kimmitt, is -- was the chairman -- and they -- in the normal order of things, what they do, as I understand it, is they select a lead agency or department based on the substance of it -- and in this case, it was Homeland Security, obviously, because the Coast Guard has the responsibility for the security of ports -- and that the process went forward; and in the course of it, the Department of Homeland Security and the interagency process negotiated a letter with the company that had purchased, I believe, a British company, setting forth exactly how security would be handled. I've not seen it, so I can't describe it, but that's my understanding.
And the -- I guess the only other thing I'd say is that we all deal with the UAE on a regular basis.
It's a country that's been involved in the global war on terror with us, it's a country that we have facilities that we use, and it's a country that was very responsive to assist in Katrina, one of the early countries that did that, and a country that we have very close military-to-military relations as well as political and economic relations.
Do you want to comment?
GEN. PACE: Sir, the military-to-military relationship with the United Arab Emirates is superb. They've got great seaports that are capable of handling, and do, our aircraft carriers. They've got airfields that they allow us to use, and their airspace, their logistics support. They've got a world-class air-to-air training facility that they let us use and cooperate with them in the training of our pilots. In everything that we have asked and work with them on, they have proven to be very, very solid partners. And as the Secretary said, they were the very first country -- a hundred million dollars is what they offered to Katrina victims.
My turn:
1. While nominally the paragon of Arab striving for modernity, Dubai and the rest of the Emirates are inhabited by people not only similar to their Muslim brethren elsewhere, but disproportionately inclined to Islamic terrorism. There are barely a million UAE citizens, but they included two of the 19 terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks—including Marwan al Shehhi, who—according to the FBI—flew United Airlines flight 175 into the second World Trade Center tower.
2. Several of the 9-11 hijackers and planners traveled through the UAE or stayed there while preparing the attack, and its banking system was used to move funds used in the operation. This has prompted critics to call the Emirates “an operational and financial base for the hijackers” who carried out the 9-11 attacks.
3. Only three countries in the world recognized the Taliban regime in Afghanistan: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan—and the UAE. Entrusting the running of America’s ports to a company owned by one of those three governments is inherently unsafe.
4. According to a bipartisan congressional letter of protest sent to the Administration last week, the UAE has been a key transfer point for illegal shipments of nuclear components to Iran and North Korea. If such shipments, many of them bulky, passed undetected, the UAE government is guilty either of gross negligence or of complicity.
5. The management structure, hiring policies, and external supervision of the company itself are flawed. “There are conditions, which shows they had concerns, but it’s all procedural and relies entirely on good faith,” according to Rep. Pete King, a Republican from New York and the House homeland security chief, but “there’s nothing those conditions . . . nothing that assures us they’re not hiring someone with bin Laden.”
6. The plan was not subjected to any proper evaluation by the Department of Homeland Security. Its administrators obediently rubber-stamped it, but its senior security analysts were surreptitious bypassed. They “were never told [about it] and they don’t like it now.”
7. The Dubai firm has unnaturally close ties to the White House. Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose department heads the federal panel that approved the deal, was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to Dubai Ports World for $1.15 billion in 2004—one year after Snow left for President Bush’s cabinet. David Sanborn, currently in charge of Dubai Ports World’s European and Latin American operations, “was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.”