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.

Carl Levin was direct and to the point this morning when a few key Senators were allowed to be briefed by Bush Administration officials:

Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, angrily accused the administration of ignoring the law by failing to launch more than a routine investigation.

Clashing with a Treasury Department official,  Levin said the law has language specifically requiring a longer review than the one that an interagency committee conducted, if a business deal could affect national security.

"Is there not one agency in this government that believes this takeover could affect the national security of the United States?" the Michigan Democrat asked. Chairman John Warner, R-Va., in a very unusual procedure on Capitol Hill, allowed reporters to question the administration witnesses.

As usual, those in authoritative positions were represented by their underlings in an apparent effort to shield higher-ups from interrogation, scrutiny, or accountability.

Representatives of key agencies that investigated the matter -- but not the heads of the departments involved -- sought to reassure senators just hours after President Bush declared that "people don't need to worry about security."

How much clearer can Levin make it?

"What is deeply troubling to me about this proposed sale is the combination of one of America's vulnerabilities to terrorist attack, our ports, with what appears to me to be a casual approach to reviewing the sale of US port facilities to a country with an uneven record of combating terrorism," Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, told the briefing.

Others objected as well, including John Warner.