Support for the port deal was hardly unanimous

February 28, 2006

Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee met to discuss the administration’s Dubai Ports World deal, and several senators specifically inquired about whether any government agency raised concerns about the contract. Agencies, administration officials said, were unanimous in their support.

“Is there not one agency in this government that believes this takeover could affect the national security of the United States?” asked Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

[Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt, representing the Bush administration before the Committee] said “all of those concerns were addressed” in the administration’s initial, three-month examination of the deal. When the interagency panel charged with reviewing foreign acquisitions met in mid-January — its only formal meeting on the Dubai Ports World acquisition — no agency raised further national concerns, Mr. Kimmitt said. That made an additional 45-day review unnecessary, he said.

This explanation, while literally true, left out a few key details that would have offered a more helpful context. For example, Kimmitt didn’t mention that DHS initially balked at the ports deal.

The Homeland Security Department objected at first to a United Arab Emirates company’s taking over significant operations at six U.S. ports. It was the lone protest among members of the government committee that eventually approved the deal without dissent.

The administration also neglected to report on the concerns raised by the Coast Guard.

The U.S. Coast Guard, in charge of reviewing security at ports operated by a Dubai maritime company, warned the Bush administration it could not rule out that the company’s assets could be used for terrorist operations, according to a document released yesterday by a Senate committee. […]

[I]n a Dec. 13 intelligence assessment of the company and its owners in the United Arab Emirates, the Coast Guard warned: “There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations, that preclude” the completion of a thorough threat assessment of the merger.

“The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities,” says the document, released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Coast Guard document was, apparently, not enough to prompt the administration to conduct a more thorough 45-day investigation of the deal, which has some lawmakers confused.

“Given the red-flag questions that the Coast Guard raised, very serious questions about operations, personnel and foreign influence, how could there not have been the 45-day investigation that’s clearly required by law?” asked Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine).

It sounds like a reasonable question.

To be fair, it’s worth noting that the Coast Guard report is still classified, and the excerpts released yesterday are only part of a larger document. What does the rest of the document say? We don’t know; reporters haven’t seen it.

That said, to suggest that the various administration agencies all agreed during the review process that this deal wasn’t the least bit controversial now seems misleading, at best. The next 45 days will likely prove pretty interesting.

Seems to me that this 45-day review is a deceptive stall tactic designed to pull one over on the public (as usual). Based on an NPR report this morning, the deal is going through this Thursday unless something stops it prior to that point. Even if something shows up during the 45-day review, it is difficult to see how the transaction could be undone. DPW has just agreed to certain operation and control steps during this period; ownership still vests.

  • I’m thinking about this DPW deal in light of the repubs 20 odd year crusade to privatize….well…everything. I’m no expert on port management, but might this be an area where government management might be preferable to private management? Just asking.

  • Once again this faith-based super-greedy administration chose to ignore its most reality-based public-service unit of government: the Coast Guard.

    The 45-day period is a smokescreen; Bush thinks we’ll all forget about it during that time. I don’t think so. I think this Dubai port deal opened up a can of worms. Most Americans didn’t know our ports had been privatized and sold. Now they do (as Pat Buchanan said on McLaughlin, Bubba in Mississippi has learned).

    Maybe the Democrats (any life in there?) can return to their party’s values and propose de-privatizing a few things. Things like ports and national parks … ya know: things which presumably were constructed in the PUBLIC interest. Nah, that would require the elected Democrats to acknowledge that they are PUBLIC servants rather than second-class members of The Oligarchy.

    I never thought I’d be using that phrase with reference to the United States of America, but Paul Krugman’s article yesterday convinced me. The top 20% of income earners are no better off than anyone else under this administration. The 99th %-ile, however, are making out like gangbusters. And the 99.9th %-ile make them look like pikers. And the 99.99th %-ile … ah, pure bliss and apotheosis. We now join 20th century Latin American nations as full-blown Oligarchies.

    There’s work here for Democrats, but they’ve all been bought off.

  • This is the exact same process this Admin used to dodge internal criticism of their pro-torture policies. The State Dept. was cut out of the conversation, and internal legal critics were generally ignored. But far worse was the deceptive process they used when the critics wouldn’t shut up. Rather than addressing the issue, the admin set up a committee to draft a report and figure out what should be done. Long story short, it was a farce, the report was forced to look like the REAL agenda (from that dirt-bag at Berkley, Yoo), and the final report wasn’t even discussed with the committee. Take a look at the http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?060227fa_fact>great New Yorker article by Jane Mayer titled “THE MEMO: How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted,” for the longer story of how the Geneva Convention was systematically ignored.

    What bothers me isn’t just what this means for civil liberties (although that’s a biggie), but also how this admin is actually a group within a group, with players like ‘I’m a Dick” Cheney pulling strings to obfuscate the true agenda and decision makers from their own team. Choice quote:

    Mora [a high-ranking lawyer cut out of the process after raising flags long before prisoner abuse broke in the press] went on, “It seemed odd to me that the actors weren’t more troubled by what they were doing.” Many Administration lawyers, he said, appeared to be unaware of history. “I wondered if they were even familiar with the Nuremberg trials—or with the laws of war, or with the Geneva conventions. They cut many of the experts on those areas out. The State Department wasn’t just on the back of the bus—it was left off the bus. . . . These were enormously hardworking, patriotic individuals,” he said. “When you put together the pieces, it’s all so sad. To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values”

  • From Buzzflash; “If Dubai is such a great protector of America (is this nutsy or what?), then, as one website noted, why don’t we let them take over the Secret Service and see how comfortable Bush and Cheney feel having Dubai protect THEM?”

  • This will be a tough issue for the Bush Administration to deal with, no matter what they decide to do. If they change their minds and put a stop to the deal after Bush threatened to use his veto, Bush is a flip flopper. If they push the deal through, then Bush is soft on terror. These are his two main perceived strengths.

    I don’t see an easy way out of this issue, either, like with Harriet Myers – since DP has threatened to sue if the deal doesn’t go through.

    Karl Rove will definitely be in line for a bonus if he can finagle his way out of this.

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