Akkam’s Razor

I’m having the most difficult of times figuring out what the Bush Administration is up to regarding this United Arab Emirates Port Buying deal. Could they be so dumb, so drunk on power that they couldn’t realize the political shitstorm that this would stir up?

It’s obvious that the local and regional politicians that turning over these ports, especially in a “time of war”, as Dear Leader loves to point out when it’s serves his purposes, is not the best of ideas. In light of the fact that a couple of the 9/11 hijackers CAME from the UAE, as well as the laundering of money supporting the attacks coming from or through the UAE, one is left with questioning how smart it is to allow our most porous and least secure entrypoint into the US to be managed by a company headquarted in a nation that his home to many radicals who’d like nothing better to kill Americans. More importantly, the Philadelphia Port is actually a military port, tasked with offloading and resupplying for the war effort.

On the other hand, I do philosophically agree with the Preznit - it DOES send a bad message to be prejudiced against doing business with Muslims. It’s obvious that this is a political hot potato…so why pick this as the one item where your willing to use the Veto against a Republican-led Congress?

In moments like this I’m left asking…Who get’s paid? Who benefits from this move? Or why is it better that this goes away quietly? The NY Daily News has some details (via SubIntSoc):

The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan’s cruise ship terminal and Newark’s container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush’s cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.

Well, no great suprises there. The Elites all do seem to help each other out. But why are the Bushies AGAIN willing to go to the mattress over this one? Does it show that they are playing fast and loose with our security when they stand to profit from it? And given our recent legacy in Iraq (”They will greet us with flowers as liberators”) to Katrina (”We dodged a bullet”), is there assurances that they have fully vetted and have safeguards in place sufficient (keeping in mind the “thorough vetting” Bernie Kerik and Harriet Miers got prior to the nomination and de-nominations) for us to take them at their word?

Edit: Oh yeah, it seems that Bin Laden was chilling with the Royal Family of the UAE in 1999, which was why the Clinton Administration didn’t take him out. Even more interestingly, it appears that Bush didn’t even know about it until it was a done deal, the laws regarding such purchases, such as a mandatory 45-day investigation were ignored. And, although we’ve been assured that all of the relavent agencies that need to be aware of such decisions had signed off on it, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the top civilian at the Pentagon as well as the top uniformed person, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace had never heard of it.