The Ashford Zone Blog

The Nation:

[S]enior administration officials from the Departments of Defence, State, Treasury and Homeland Security trooped up to Capitol Hill to brief the Senate Armed Services Committee about the plan to let Dubai Ports World, a firm owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in charge of ports up and down the east coast.

Noting a particularly concerning line in the 9-11 Commission — "The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorismally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem" — U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, asked the administration representatives: "Just raise your hand if anybody (at the witness table) talked to the 9-11 commission," said Levin.

The senator’s request was met with blank stares.

Regarding the Dubai Ports deal, Bush said this morning:

The management of some ports, which, heretofore, has been managed by a foreign company will be managed by another company from a foreign land. And so people don’t need to worry about security. This deal wouldn’t go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.

Yup.  "Nothing to see here.  Daddy will take care of everything."

This comes on the heels of the revelation that the WH negotiated a "secret deal" with the UAE company:

Under a secretive agreement with the Bush administration, a company in the United Arab Emirates promised to cooperate with U.S. investigations as a condition of its takeover of operations at six major American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The U.S. government chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

In approving the $6.8 billion purchase, the administration chose not to require state-owned Dubai Ports World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to orders by American courts. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government.

While this deal does not necessarily implicate national security, it certainly looks like the White House bent over backwards to make sure that DPW was not accountable to American courts and oversight.

But, that’s okay, says Bush.  Don’t worry.

One of the six ports, by the way, is in New Orleans.  I wonder how many New Orleanians are reassured by Bush’s comment.

It looks like Osama’s days are numbered:

In his latest adventure, Batman will dispense with his old enemies, the Riddler and the Joker, and take on Osama bin Laden instead.

In Holy Terror, Batman!, a new graphic novel by the Batman writer Frank Miller, the Caped Crusader will take on al-Qa’eda when his home town, Gotham City, which is based on New York, is attacked by terrorists.

"It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a piece of propaganda – Batman kicks al-Qa’eda’s ass," Mr Miller told a San Francisco comic book convention. "It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you’ve got al-Qa’eda out there.

Well, it seems silly to have a fictional character going after bin Laden, but at least somebody’s on the case.

"Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for. It’s an explosion from my gut reaction of what’s happening now, a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against."

I think most people know who we’re up against.  The problem is, the Bush Administration forgot.  Then again, since they probably read comic books, maybe this will serve as a reminder.

It’s not who is conducting the stevedoring operations, and not really whether they are an American company, a Great British company, or a Dubai company.

The real problem from a national security standpoint is, and always has been, this:

Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said [Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is an expert on port security at the Council on Foreign Relations].

John Kerry, by the way was all over this back in late 2003

PORTSMOUTH — Calling the busy harbor port here a "point of opportunity" for terrorists, John F. Kerry called yesterday for significantly increasing screening of cargo and hiring of customs inspectors to improve security at the nation’s ports. After a morning boat tour of the harbor, Kerry expressed concern that US inspectors scrutinize only 4 percent of containers that are unloaded daily at the nation’s ports. He declined to give his own target percentage when asked, but said that the US should strive for 100 percent, though he acknowledged that the high cost of inspecting all containers would make it difficult. Kerry argued that President Bush has failed to make US ports more secure after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

… and throughout the 2004 campaign:

"The measurement is not, are we safer; the measurement is, are we as safe as we ought to be. And there are a host of options that this President had available to him, like making sure that at all our ports in America, containers are inspected. Only 95 percent of them — 95 percent come in today uninspected. That’s not good enough."

I find it slightly amusing that Bush supporters kept calling Kerry weak on homeland security, and — even now — still are content to have only 5% of containers inspected in our ports.

UPDATE:  The New York Times informs us:

That port, along with the five others Dubai Ports hopes to manage, are the last line of defense to stop a weapon from entering this country. But Mr. Seymour, head of the subsidiary now running the operations, says only one of the six ports whose fate is being debated so fiercely is equipped with a working radiation-detection system that every cargo container must pass through.