You know the story. Personally, I actually agree with Bush on this. My primary reason for not being against the deal is because I don't see port security changing a bit. I don't believe for a second that a terrorist group couldn't currently smuggle in whatever they wanted to smuggle, so no change there. And I don't see the DPW firing existing workers in exchange for terrorist-friendly Middle Easterners
The only legitimate reason we would have to deny this deal is if DPW has had a mixed security record, or if we had some reason to suspect a large-scale change in personnel and/or security processes. Anything short of that is basically a knee-jerk reaction, which sends a pretty clear message to the moderate Muslims that we consider their whole region untrustworthy. While that may very well be the case, it would pretty much be an admission that we're no longer going to try to win hearts & minds over to our cause.
I know the UAE itself is a mixed bag, but like I said, unless they make wholesale changes through DPW, I don't see any real change.
I also have to say I'm intrigued by how many people are suddenly questioning Bush's attitude towards terrorism based on this situation. Why start questioning his resolve now?
Because it's politically expedient? Nah. That couldn't be it.
I also find it a little interesting that naysayers are clamoring for US intercession in the affairs of foreign interests here. The old port authority was a British company. The new port authority is UAE. I thought it was considered undesirable for the US to stick its nose in other nations' business.
The facts:
*2 of the 9/11 terrorists were from the UAI
*The money that funded 9/11 was laundered in the UAI
*The UAI have been the closest Arab ali of the US since 9/11
*The banking system in the UAI was reformed since 9/11
*The UAI allowed the US to establish an airbase since 9/11
*Almost 1/3 of US ports are run by foriegn corps/govts
*Nobody complained when Clinton allowed China to take over
management of certain US ports
*The larger Port companies, like the Dutch, did not want to
deal with the longshoreman's union
First off, I don't have the exact fiscal figures for a contract of this magnitude, but it has to be enormous. And forgive me for "profiling", but if there's one thing that we've learned from the Iraqi reconstruction, it's that Arabs love business...the areas in Iraq that have had the least violence and the best successes have been the ones where there has been enough money and contracts to go around and keep people working. I predict that the Dubai Ports World officers will bend over backwards to keep our government happy and satisfied with the state of operations.
Second, I'm pretty positive that port security itself is actually contracted out to companies like my parent company, L3 Communications, and other major contractors. The Coast Guard and local law enforcement also are involved with port security. It's not as if we're just handing the keys to the ports over to Dubai Ports World and telling them "Lock up when you're finished, OK?"
The ports are not OWNED by a foreign government. Port operations are being administered by a state-run corporation. There are differences.
its quite interesting cause you have Bush making it seem as many Arabs were the enemy and now he's all like oh no no they are our friends and allies....But then again I dont see what the problem is if a foreign country like the U.K. owned our ports before and now a country that happened to be a VERY VERY rich Arab country owning it. The security is still gonna be the same as it was before, only that the Dubai country owns the company..I find this to be good..build bridges that were burned before..and Dubai's Airline "Emirates" has soooooooo much invested in Boeing that them not getting this deal because they are feared a terrorist nation would bring Boeing and other major companies down hard..actually doesnt Saudi and other rich arab countries have ALOT invested in the US? I find this to be good..UAE is a calm rich (very rich) arab nation..I like this deal..
at the same time though, somthing deep inside of me tells me that Bush and his friends are benefiting somthing outa this deal..its just a personal gut feeling i have
..this deal was too good to be true
-the dubai company will not own the ports. at best you could call it renting space and they will not be in charge of security despite what is being reported in the news. we would still handle that.
-without doing the math myself to confirm i will just trust the economists and say that we are getting a very good deal from a purely monetary point of view.
-it would be extremely bad business to buy our ports just to blow them up.
-maybe the uae has changed its tune and now is on our side. then again maybe not. we have over a century of proof showing we can trust the brits not to try and kill/harm us. we do not have this with the uae. trust is earned, not given.
-hamas(a terrorist organization) legally took control of palistine. the naawp is a peaceful political offshoot of the kkk. both are prime examples of a wolf in sheep's clothing if there ever was one, which brings us to something an uncle of mine told me.
-one of my uncles was a marine who served two tours of duty in vietnam after which he spent a lifetime as a liar, a cheat and a thief involved with people who are, shall we say, unsavory at best. basically, he has spent his entire adult life protecting himself from people who would rather see him dead and as a result has a strict set of rules by which he lives. two of them directly apply here, they are edited for language:
if someone comes up to you acting like your best friend when he isn't, hang on to your "tool" and hang on to your wallet cause he is after something.
and
trust noone completely and most people not at all. not your momma, your daddy, brother, sister, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, your children, your best friend, not even the men you commit crimes with. trust noone totally.
i certainlly hope the uae is now our friend and i am certainly willing to give them the benefit of the doubt considering their checkered past with us but i would prefer to start off with something small.
I think one thing which hasn't been mentioned is that the US is not simply telling the Brits that they are no longer working these US ports and that work will now be handed over to the UAE. But rather, it is UAE buying out this company.
Secondly, the UAE has been one of our strongiest allies in the middle. Not only do they have stakes in many US companies such as Boeing, but let me also mention that the US has sold the UAE 80 of THE most advanced and latest F-16s on the planet. No other nation includig the US has this Block of F-16s.
What is buggin' me is the press. They're reporting this like it was GW's deal or sup'm and I find that hard to swallow. The ports are not bought & sold by the feds are they? The ports down here have local port authorities or are privately owned. Is that unusual or sup'm?
According to one commentator I heard, the White House reported that GW didn't know about the deal until after the controversy started.
I don't know who, but somebody somewhere needs to get their facts straight.
Based on your own posts, sounds like people were doing their jobs & the administration was not micro-managing. A good thing IMO.
Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.
Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.
The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.
The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.
The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.
Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.
A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.
The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.
"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.
The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the site by Saddam's regime.
According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the seals were not broken.
It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N. team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.
A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.
The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.
A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.
However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.
The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.
Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.
The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.
The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.
Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.
"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.
Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.
The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.
Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.
The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.
Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.
The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military "plastic" high explosive.
Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.
I don't remember hearing much about that in the mainstream press back in 2005. How much air time did it get? Did it ever get to the front page of any paper? Gee, the media must have accidentally missed the story on the largest & most successful intelligence operation in the history of the planet... For a year & counting... Now that's a successful operation - it continues to elude the US press even now... Even after a former Iraqi general describes in his published book how the operation was carried out - in detail, the Ruskies still manage to pull the wool over the eyes of the press...
Shocking... Tricky those Rooskies...
Somebody give the turntable a shove 'cause the records skipping!
I was trying to make a funny not jack this thread but apparently you guys are still a little sensitive about that whole WMD thing.
Haha, this is great.
Americans pay $$$$ -> UAE for gas.
This money allows the UAE to have control over company that will take over US commerce ports.
UAE has terrorist, zealous islamic links.
UAE uses money from Americans to purchase ports.
UAE is now privvy to classified port security.
If this ever goes through, expect a nuclear detonation in one of the port cities by 2010.
How stupid is Bush saying he will veto any attempts to block it. The conflict of interest implications are so staggering its mind boggling to see why any government would allow this; especially the US when the country is on terror alert.
You honestly think the Arab nation cares so much about Western wealth ?
They're financing sucide bombers for goodness sake.
And officially, the government of UAE doesn't have to condone the terrorism; all it has to do is just have one person in that organization pull some strings and get the security procedures. "Tell" some radical about this and they'll know how to sneak things into the US.
Officially the UAE doesn't condone terrorism and is very west friendly, but why do you think they stock their schools with the most insane anti-american propaganda ?
Neither of those links says ANYTHING about UAE sponsorship of terror. Please try to stay on topic, UAE (which is a sovereign nation) management of US ports, not whether Saudis (which is a totally separate nation and government) are paying money to Palestine.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with this situation. A company with a very good record for port management all over the world purchases another port management company. Normal business transaction.
The UAE have been allies of ours for a long time, and show no signs that they will not continue to be. The uproar over all this is paranoia and has significantly racist overtones.
Oh, and by the way, these operations have very little to do with port security. That is still a government function, headed by the Coast Guard.
Time once again to play "Who said this". Here's the quote:
"This deal wouldn't go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America."
Clue - the speaker is a prominent American who had nothing to do with the decision to approve this deal and who did not even know about until after the Bush Administration had approved it.
Freudian slip or mere slip of the tongue???
I simply report. You decide.
tour, on the safety and security issues i refer you to my earlier post:
Originally posted by JB1:
-maybe the uae has changed its tune and now is on our side. then again maybe not. we have over a century of proof showing we can trust the brits not to try and kill/harm us. we do not have this with the uae. trust is earned, not given.
-hamas(a terrorist organization) legally took control of palistine. the naawp is a peaceful political offshoot of the kkk. both are prime examples of a wolf in sheep's clothing if there ever was one, which brings us to something an uncle of mine told me.
