Dubai Ports, revisited

More information comes out. The first...

It now appears that President Bush first learned of the Dubai Ports deal not from the news but several days earlier from Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

I mention this for two reasons: One, to set the record straight (since I had previously mentioned Scott McClellan's assertion that the President learned it in the news after it was a done deal. Two, because it is yet another instance of this Administration being entirely unwilling to share anything like the truth. We now have official statements from McClellan that the President learned about it from two different sources at two different times. Which one is true? Is either one true? How much thought went into each option?

Again, it could be that McClellan just got a fact wrong. But given his reticence to answer questions about anything important in press conferences, and his tendency to dissemble whenever facts (or the official line) have not yet been determined, I find it hard to believe he would say something like that by accident. Again, not provable, but it fits the pattern I perceive from this Administration.

The second correction is from this article from UPI. Previously, it's been reported that the sale to Dubai Ports World (DPW) would affect six ports, New York NY, Newark NJ, Philadelphia PA, Baltimore MD, Miami FL and New Orleans LA.

Now, it turns out that the British company Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O), the one that's being sold to DPW, is the parent company to P&O Ports North America (P&ONA).

P&ONA, according to the article, “leases terminals for the import and export and loading and unloading and security of cargo in 21 ports, 11 on the East Coast, ranging from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Miss., to Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the company's Web site.”

This deal would give DPW a toehold in ports across the entire east coast.

By the way, in the post 9/11 world we're told so much about, I'm not terribly happy with ANY company outside the US controlling our ports. It would seem to me that if national security is at as great risk as we've been repeatedly told by the President, Vice President, and on down, that having foreign control of our ports is a bad thing. So I want to be clear, while I don't like a company owned by a country which has a dubious record with regard to supporting al Qaeda and the Taliban owning these ports, it's not specifically a nationality thing (or if it is, only by degrees).

The bigger scandal here should be why haven't these ports been under American control thus far?

Liam.