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UAE Purchase of Ports Bad Idea on So Many Levels

Thursday, February 23, 2006


The recent announcement of the sale of six major us port facilities to Dubai Ports World, a corporation owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) raises concerns that go much deeper than American's fears of the Muslim world. Five of the six ports; New York, New Jersey-Port Elizabeth, Baltimore, Miami and Philadelphia; are the biggest points of entry for imported goods coming into America and the sixth is New Orleans, which was the single biggest port prior to the Katrina disaster.

The case against letting the U.A.E. run these ports stands up on its own.

1. A number of the 9/11 hijackers, unable to obtain flights out of Afghanistan due to travel restrictions, were allowed to fly into the U.A.E. which was one of the few governments that recognized the Taliban as a legitimate government. Only then were these men able to make their way to the United States.

2. The funds used by the 9/11 hijackers was laundered through the U.A.E. banking system. Following the attacks, the U.A.E. refused to cooperate with the U.S. government in tracking down and freezing the bank accounts used by Osama bin Laden to fund the operation.

3. Finally, the U.A.E. government, like those of both Iran and Palestine, does not recognize the state of Israel or even its right to exist in the first place. In the cases of both Iran and Palestine, this is one of the major barriers to direct negotiations with the two governments, impeding the attempt to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

None of that seems to matter to a Bush administration that is chock full of people with a long history of business dealing with both the Dubai government and Dubai Ports World.

John Snow, the current Secretary of the Treasury, was formerly the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CSX Corporation. Following his tenure, CSX closed a $1.15 billion deal with DPW to sell them control of CSX's World Terminals division, which operated 9 terminals with 24 berths in Europe, Asia and Latin America. (DP World Press Release, 09/12/04) To say that he had nothing to do with this transaction would be, at the very least, disingenuous.

David Sanborn, the newly minted Maritime Administrator, was nominated to the post just weeks before the deal was made public. What was his previous position, you might ask. Mr. Sanborn's last job was Director of Operations for Europe and Latin America for DPW. (DP World Press Release, 24/01/06) Who better to oversee the sale of our port operations to DPW than a former DPW exec. That doesn't look in the least ethically challenged. Not only was he a DPW exec, but he was the DPW exec who would have been in the negotiations on John Snow's CSX to DPW deal. (I apologize for the alphabet soup.) More disturbing is the fact that in the Editor's notes at the bottom of the press release, the acquisition of P&O stock and resulting control of the company, which includes the six U.S. ports, is mentioned as an aside. I personally can't decide if this appointment was a reward from the Bushies for getting the deal made or part of the terms of the deal in the first place.

The reason I think this might be a reward from the Bush administration is because of the last of our incestuous little group involved neck deep in this deal, The Carlyle Group. Yes, yes, yes, I know we've all heard that name before. That's because they have fingers in almost all the pies floating around the Beltway now. One of the Carlyle group's major investors is Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, which invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund. (from Vermont Daily Briefing) As we all know, Bush the Elder was a senior advisor to the Carlyle group and it's a who’s who of former high-level government officials.

Now that we have all the little snipey irrelevant cronyistic connections behind us, (and what does it matter anyway that the world is increasingly run by a smaller and smaller group of interconnected ultra-wealthy elite, right) let's discuss a few things about the actual security concerns of this deal and ports in general.

First, as the image at the top of this post details, only 5% of the containers coming into ports are physically checked. According to Jayson Ahern, Customs Assistant Commissioner, 37% of the containers are checked for radioactive material, (on C-Spans Washington Journal, 02/28/06)
Even if that is true, which while listening to radio show callers who work in the ports tell me it's not, it is still a poor level of security when, on average, nearly 20,000 containers move through a port in a given. Just to save you from breaking out the calculator, that's 19,000 containers that are not checked, placed on trains and trucks that roll across our country and directly through our neighborhoods. (from The Virtual Border: Countering Seaborne Container Terrorism)

On that same program, both Mr. Ahern and Asst. Commissioner & Rear Adm. Thomas Gilmour, U.S. Coast Guard, who is the Asst. Commandant for Marine Safety, continually made the statement that security measures have room for improvement but that they were not a risk. To that I have a question, when does stacking "layers of security measures" that all have "room for improvement" add up to a giant pile ofunnecessaryy and indefensible risk?

There are two specific points I'd like to look at. The first deals with the above mentioned, less than admirable job we do of checking these containers. Rear Admiral Gilmour mentioned that the Coast Guard receives a ship manifest and crew list at least three days before the ship reaches port and those documents are checked using a "threat matrix" to decide whether or not the ship should be checked. There are a number of things wrong with this:

1. This assumes that the documents are trustworthy. As Stephen Flynn mentions in his book and the website listed below, terrorists know which companies are trustworthy and will receive preferential treatment at the ports. Plus, there may or may not have been intermediate stops on that containers voyage that are not listed in the ships manifest and where anyone could have had access to the containers.

2. In regards to the DPW deal, DPW will be declared a "trustworthy" port operator and its ships and containers given preferential treatment in our ports. The government of Dubai is the owner of this company and like all Middle Eastern governments is relatively unstable, (especially following our adventures in nation building, a government seen by the Arab people as colluding with the United States could be in real danger of revolt at some time in the future.)

Secondly, a recent article in The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled "Port IDs system still adrift" says that not even the workers in our ports are being properly screened or given proper ID. The system mandated by Congress in 2002 is well behind schedule, (it is unlikely to be finished before 2007), even though the Transportation Safety Administration has dumped nearly $100 million into the project. The card would have had either a fingerprint or an iris image and it would have ensured that the person on the ID had been given a thorough background screening for a criminal history and/or against a terror watch list. Now, according to the article, administration support for the government is winding down which will make port authorities responsible for the congressionally mandated program, yet another federally unfunded mandate.

A final fact brought to the attention of the average citizen of the United States is that a number of ports are being run by foreign companies from places like China, Singapore, Great Britain, etc. Is this really a situation we should be encouraging. The Republicans came to power in 1994 with a message that among other things, accused the Democrats of fostering designs on a new world order based on global cooperation. Bush the younger has repeatedly made political hay by claiming that the Dems get their marching orders from the UN and France, in fact his claims that Kerry wanted to use a "global litmus test" to decide whether or not we should attack other countries to protect ourselves was a big part of how he was reelected. Now, the GOP wants to impose their own new world order based on the claims that we live in a global economy and foreign investment in the U.S. is "notnecessarilyy a bad thing" to quote Mr. Ahern no matter what part of our economy it is. We have returned to the foreign policy of the cold war where the choice of ally is based less on theircompatibilityy with our aims rather but instead what they can do for us, a mindset aptly described by the quote, "[They] may be an asshole, but [they're] our asshole."


For More Information Read:

Why America Is Still An Easy Target: An excerpt from Stephen Flynn's book America the Vulnerable

Port IDs system still adrift: Article from the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding vetting and ID process problems in our nations ports.

The Virtual Border: Countering Seaborne Container Terrorism: An article in Defense Horizons, a
Center for Technology and National Security Policy National Defense University publication.