"They're blowin' this town all to hell" -- Bo Hopkins in Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch"(1969)

By Sheila Samples

Senator John Warner (R-Va.) has the unexpected problem of a foreign state-owned company taking over operations at U.S. ports all figured out.  The dour, self-righteous chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee announced from the Senate floor on March 9 that Dubai Ports World (DPW), one of seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), "has decided to transfer fully U.S. operation of P&O Ports North America to a United States entity."  

For Rove-Cheney watchers, that immediately begs the question -- what U.S. entity?  What does "transfer fully" mean?  But, alas, Warner said details about that part of the scam "weren't immediately available."  For Warner watchers, especially those of us who have looked at him from every possible angle while scratching our heads, another question springs to mind -- What could Liz Taylor possibly have been thinking back in December 1976 when she took this cranky, cheerless man for a spin on her seventh time around?

Even as the Republicans in the House scramble to catch up to Democrats and block the Dubai Port deal under tremendous pressure from constituents, and even as the fight continues in the Senate, the White House hasn't backed down from it's position that it will veto any bill blocking the sale.

So here's a question: why?  It's certainly not the charges of racism the administration has tossed around.  It's not a concern that American policy might not seem "fair."

According to an analyst at an energy trading firm, the reason the Bush administration is so adamant about the ports deal comes down to a single word: Iran.

The PR machine of Dubai Ports World has been in full swing, with company executives taking to the airwaves to convince the American people that the U.A.E. company truly has American interests at heart.  First, the company claimed it was not owned by the government of Dubai, even though it is, and even though the Emir of Dubai chairs the company's Board of Directors. Second, the company claimed it 'volunteered' for a 45-day security review, but it has refused to delay the deal. Tomorrow, unless Congress takes action, DP World will take over P&O.  Most disturbing is the fact that DP World has essentially used its influence to hijack our national security process.

Let us first examine the original P&O - DP World contract.  Review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is purely voluntary. Here, both parties contracted to a CFIUS review. Yet DP World included the following in its contract:

In regulatory papers, the companies said either the committee must agree not to formally investigate the purchase or Bush must not move to block the sale for national security purposes

Read that again. DP World insisted that a Exon-Florio 45-day investigation not be initiated, and that Bush could not block the sale for "national security purposes."  The decision of whether a deal should be blocked because of national security should be made by the President and OUR government, not by the DP World and the government of Dubai. Yet the government of Dubai explicitly demanded that it essentially be exempted from a national security review.

More below...

From Egypt to Afghanistan, when terrorists and gangsters need a place to meet, to relax, maybe to invest, they head to Dubai...

[Dubai] serves as the region's criminal crossroads, a hub for smuggling, money laundering, and underground banking. There are Russian and Indian mobsters, Iranian arms traffickers, and Arab jihadists. Funds for the 9/11 hijackers and African embassy bombers were transferred through the city. It was the heart of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's black market in nuclear technology and other proliferation cases. Half of all applications to buy U.S. military equipment from Dubai are from bogus front companies, officials say. "Iran," adds one U.S. official, "is building a bomb through Dubai." Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents thwarted the shipment of 3,000 U.S. military night-vision goggles by an Iranian pair based in Dubai. Moving goods undetected is not hard.

 -- U.S. News & World Report (Dec 5, 2005)

President Bush has made it clear that he hadn't a clue about the events unfolding within his Administration surrounding the management takeover of 6 U.S. Ports by the United Arab Emirates.

We've also learned that very few others in the administration seemed to know anything about the transaction prior to the media blow-up -- certainly those who should have known about it were unaware. By their own admission, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow, and Homeland Security Czar, Michael Chertoff were left completely in the dark.

Normally, that would be no big deal, but here we're talking about a post-911 world (as the administration feels constantly compelled to remind us) coupled with arguably the nation's most vulnerable points of entry.

Try the United States Coast Guard

How many times have we been told that this deal would not affect security at the ports, that the security would still be under the control of the Coast Guard?  Yeah, well, it turns out that the Coast Guard is worried about the deal.

The Coast Guard warned that "intelligence gaps" prevented a broad assessment of any security risks posed by the takeover of some U.S. shipping terminals by a United Arab Emirates company, a Senate hearing revealed Monday.

While Republicans try to launch the "anybody agin' the deal is a racist" attack, the Coast Guard has more serious concerns.

"There are many intelligence gaps concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations that precludes an overall threat assessment of the potential merger," a Coast Guard report on the potential deal stated.

"The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities."

So now the very people who are charged with security, are also noting that the DP World deal was not adequately evaluated and may represent a real risk.  That should put a dent in a few talking points.

While the smoke, dust and ash was still settling from the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration's mad political scientist, Karl Rove, retreated deep into his undisclosed laboratory and began to create his dream; the pinnacle of his life's work...the ultimate political monster.

Working in the dead of night not unlike the witches from MacBeth, he concocted his monster from a powerful mixture of stolen parts of the body politic: a yellow belly, a lilied liver, trembling hands, rubber legs, lying eyes, and, worst of all, the heart of darkness.

He programmed his monster to listen to only his voice and vowed then and there that this creation would become the power behind his plans.

And the mad scientist succeeded in creating his alter-ego, Fearenstein.