New-found port hysteria and selective amnesia
Who are these panicked, hysterical people suddenly concerned about the security of our nation and sanctity of our seaports? Who are these Johnnie-come-latelies, righteously pontificating whenever they hear the whirr of a TV camera? Where were these hypocrites during the last administration?
Where was Mrs. Clinton, the Smartest Woman In America? Where was the man who never met a camera he didn't like or a lie he didn't utter, Chuckie Schumer? Where were Howard Dean and al-Gore, two rapscallions who spend their time screaming and pandering to the fears of the gullible?
A look back
None of this pathetic lot cared one whit when Bill Clinton sold $8 billion worth of F-16s, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, and other advanced weapons to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) less than two years after al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Not one of these chicken hawks raised a concern about the UAE when under Bill Clinton's watch al-Qaeda blew up the U.S.S. Cole. Where was Mrs. Clinton and her gang of leftist thugs when her husband authorized a Communist Chinese company, a front for that country's Peoples' Liberation Army, to administer several port operations on the West Coast?
Mrs Clinton once touted, "when you elected my husband you got two for the price of one." Indeed. I guess that as a former co-president, Mrs. Clinton cannot use her standard line of "I don't recall" on these issues as she conveniently did during all of the investigations into her husband's scandalous administration or her illegal investments.
Wasn't it former president Bill Clinton who in 2002 accepted a $300,000.00 speaking fee from the UAE, lauding the Emirates' staunch friendship and loyalty in the war on terror? Is this the same UAE that is now being trashed by Mrs. Clinton, Schumer, and the rest of the usual rabble?
The fact is, folks, the Left's opposition to the UAE company's ports management deal is nothing more than political grand-standing tinged with fear-mongering and a distortion of history, all in the hope of harming the present administration. It's fine for the Chicoms to manage our ports, fine for the Brits to manage our ports, but it is a security risk for the UAE's Dubai Ports World, Inc., to manage our ports.
Follow the money
Here's another fact to consider. You and I would not have heard of this deal unless a certain port management company in Miami didn't complain because they lost out on the contract for those six ports. We wouldn't know about the deal unless the International Longshoremens' Association (ILA) didn't tell their democratic senators and representatives to raise a stink about the deal.
As with anything else, always follow the money. Dubai Ports World is the fourth-largest port management company in the world. We couldn't get the first and second-largest companies to manage our ports because of all the union trouble the ILA causes. Because of the ILA, those two largest companies refused to manage any port in the United States.
As you listen to the leftist bomb-throwers and demagoguery from political opportunists like Clinton and Schumer, remember that commercial port management is not the same as port security. These neo-patriots are the same sleazy partisan politicians who are doing their best to derail the Patriot Act and finagle the NSA's international surveillance of wartime enemy communications as an excuse to impeach the president.
Should we scrutinize the port deal? Certainly. Should we insist that any deal include extensive measures to ensure port security? Of course. Should the administration present its finalized deal to Congress and the American people? I think so.
National Review's Rich Lowry nicely summed up this brouhaha:
"It is loosely said that Dubai Ports World would 'take over six ports. That's false. The ports are owned by local governmental entities, and the company will manage only a few terminals. For instance, it will manage two terminals out of 14 in Baltimore. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns five terminals devoted chiefly to cargo. Dubai Ports World would be involved in only one, which it would manage together with a Danish firm."
"A management company has very little to do with port security. It unloads cargo containers and then holds them until they are hauled out by trucks. As homeland security expert Stewart Verdery says, this is but a small part of the process. The U.S. begins screening select cargo containers at their port of departure. Then, when they are on their way here, computer-based risk analysis is done to decide which containers need further scrutiny."
"Dubai Ports World would have no role in determining how containers or ships are reviewed and deciding which containers are inspected. Critics complain that the company will obtain inside information about U.S. ports. But because the UAE has signed on to the Container Security Initiative, in which foreign countries cooperate with the U.S. on safeguards, it already is privy to our security practices in general. The company will probably learn more about specific procedures at individual ports, but this knowledge is not that tightly held."
"The unionized employees at the ports would stay the same, and almost all of them are U.S. citizens. It seems unlikely that Dubai Ports World, even if it wanted to, could infiltrate Arab terrorists into the International Longshoremens' Association to plot mayhem in the United States."
"We should worry about port security. But the real vulnerability is foreign ports, where something noxious could be loaded on ships headed here. The nightmare, of course, is a nuclear or radiological device. More resources should be poured into detection technology deployed overseas and in the U.S., where only 37 percent of containers go through radiation detectors. That is a real issue; the furor over Dubai Ports World is a distraction."
Well stated. We hear your shrill voice now, Mrs. Clinton, but where were you during the last administration?