Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:34:01
This should be a bigger story
This is a real reason to get angry with Bush.
New York Sen. Charles Schumer won new allies in Congress and the media yesterday in his campaign to raise national security concerns about a planned transfer of port operations in Newark and other key East Coast cities to a company controlled by the government of Dubai.
Dubai Ports World, already a global player in port operations, acquired a stake in terminal operations in New Orleans, Miami, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Newark on Monday when shareholders approved its takeover of the British firm Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation. Critics fear the deal increases the risk of weapons or terrorists being smuggled into the United States.
The takeover was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency panel headed by the Treasury Department that can block foreign acquisitions that threaten national security.
But Schumer, who first raised questions Monday, was joined yesterday by an array of six congressmen, including Republicans such as conservative Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, in a call for a second look. Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) has also raised questions, and The New York Times yesterday editorialized against the deal.
“Outsourcing the operations of our largest ports to a country with a dubious record on terrorism is a homeland security and commerce accident waiting to happen,” Schumer said.
Drop the NSA crap. Drop the Cheney crap. Focus on this. It’s a travesty, and mark your frigging calendar, because you may never see me write this again…
Chuck Schumer is right.
Posted by JimK at 01:34 PM on February 17, 2006
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#2 Posted by CommandoCody 
on 02/19 at 09:29 PM -
Hereis the article that I’m working off of myself.
After reading through it, I spotted some telling things.
First, notice one of the chief complaints:
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said it was a mistake for the administration to approve the sale and called on Congress to investigate it.
“It’s unbelievably tone deaf politicallyat 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,” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.”
So now our security precautions are to be predicated on whether they make good politics or not? Also, I could be wrong, I don’t thing DPW has ever made the destruction of Israel a business objective. If Graham is instead talking about UAE, then it would help us a great deal to learn whether that is the actual position of the UAE and if DPW is a subsidiary of the government.
I need to know these things before getting pissed off. These things and more.
For instance, I’d like to know what are the details behind this deal?
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Bush administration had approved the sale of British firm P&O;, which manages six U.S. ports including New York, to Dubai Ports World after a classified review and the deal would include safeguards to protect U.S. national security.
...
The UAE company would control management of major ports in New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami.
U.S. seaports handle 2 billion tons of freight each year. Only about 5 percent of containers are examined on arrival.
So, basically, a British firm is going to be sold to DPW on the condition that extra security is included in their operations. It does not say that the staff of those ports is going to be replaced, or that the security will have no oversight. The only thing that seems to be changing here is that the dock workers will have their checks signed by a different front office.
The fact that a Middle Eastern company is involved isn’t enough to make me angry. I need to know more. So let’s go ahead and have a Congressional investigation. Maybe they’ll turn up something interesting.
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on a totally unrelated matter, i love seeing articles about peter king. his office is in massapequa, and his phone number is one digit off from one of my parents’ phone numbers, and there was a misprint one year in the phone book… they came home one day to 20+ messages on their answering machine and it went on for a while. still get calls every now and then. so, we had to call him up and explain the oopsie.