United Arab Emirates Controlling U.S. Ports
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APFN-Port Deal 'Pull Out' Is PHONY
Cheryl Seal
Port Deal 'Pull Out' Is PHONY - Dubai Will STILL Be Owner
Thu Mar 9, 2006 19:02
So we are all supposed to click our heels, grin and
give Bush a big ole thumbs up in the next approval
poll because he tossed out a bogus bone: The Dubai
Port deal "pull out." The Bushie media are spouting
this story as if Bush had "given up" and Dubai Port
World had withdrawn from the deal. But look again. DPW
is only turning operations over to an American holding
company. They are STILL the guys "behind the curtain."
This smells very much like a back rooms deal worked
out by Bush and his pals in Dubai/UAE. Just tell let
'em think they won - meanwhile, it'll be the same
company, different name on the door.
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By DAVID ESPO and ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writers1 hour, 9 minutes ago
Bowing to ferocious opposition in Congress, a Dubai-owned company signaled surrender
Thursday in its quest to take over operations at U.S. ports.
"DP World will transfer fully the U.S. operations ... to a United States entity," the firm's
top executive, H. Edward Bilkey, said in an announcement that capped weeks of controversy.
Relieved Republicans in Congress said the firm had pledged full divestiture, a decision that
one senator said had been approved personally by the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.
A leading congressional critic of the ports deal, Rep. Peter King (news, bio, voting record),
applauded the decision but said he and others would wait to see the details. "It would have
to be an American company with no links to DP World, and that would be a tremendous
victory and very gratifying," said the New York Republican, chairman of the House Homeland
Security Committee.
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Baker Key to Dubai Ports Mess
by Anacher Forester
Thu Feb 23, 2006 at 12:09:34 PM PDT
Former Reagan Chief-of-Staff, ex-Treasury Secretary,
ex-Secretary of State, ex-NSC Council Member, ex-GWB
chief legal advisor, etc, and recent US Special Envoy
for Iraq debt is the invisible man in the middle of
this mess.
James A. Baker is Senior Partner of Baker Botts, a
legal firm very active in Middle East affairs perhaps
never more visibly than as legal representation for
the Saudi Royal family in the lawsuits brought by the
families of 9/11 victims. Baker Botts happens to
include Halliburton among its many clients and is
active in Egypt, Kuwait and Dubai, too.
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by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, The Nation
This focus on an Arab company fuels prejudice and obscures the
real issues at hand.
The fact is, the administration is defending this deal because their guiding principle is one
of maximizing corporate profits, as Harold Meyerson notes in the Washington Post yesterday.
Not surprisingly, the Bush administration has significant business ties to DP World. According
to the New York Daily News, David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American
operations, was named by Bush to direct the U.S. Maritime Administration just last month.
And Treasury Secretary John Snow, who headed the federal review of the deal, was Chairman
of CSX which sold its international port operations to DP Word for $1.15 billion just one year
before Mr. Snow joined the Bush cabinet.
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March 1, 2006
By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 — Lawmakers raised new objections on Tuesday to the proposed
takeover of some terminal operations at six United States ports by a Dubai company, demonstrating
that the administration-backed plan still faced significant obstacles despite an agreement for a more
extensive review of any security risks posed by the change in control.
Senate Democrats seized on a report that the parent company of state-owned Dubai Ports World
honors an Arab boycott of Israel, saying the United States should not be rewarding companies tied to
discrimination against a major ally.
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Neil Bush and the United Arab Emirates
By JEROME CORSI
February 27, 2006
INVESTORS from the United Arab Emirates helped fund the $23 million Neil Bush raised
for Ignite!, the learning systems company that holds lucrative No Child Left Behind Act
contracts in Florida and Texas.
Neil Bush’s frequent travels to Dubai are documented by Datamatix, a Dubai-based
information technology company that has featured Neil Bush as a speaker. The Datamatix
website features several prominent photographs of Neil Bush addressing a Dubai conference,
identifying Neil Bush as “the brother of U.S. President George Bush.”
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Reports Tied UAE to bin Laden, Cole Bombing
RAW STORY
Published: February 23, 2006
As its ties to the U.S. war on terror are brought into the spotlight, more details about the
ties between The United Arab Emirates and U.S. enemies abroad are being unearthed.
The AP recently reported that the Sept. 11 Commission report states U.S. intelligence
believed that Osama bin Laden had visited an Afghan desert in 1999 near a hunting camp
used by UAE officials.
According to the AP, commission sources claimed that:
"Bin Laden regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the
Emiratis ... National technical intelligence confirmed the location and description of the larger
camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates."
Reacting to this information, White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke reportedly
called the UAE to confront them about the government's reported contact with bin Laden,
hoping to monitor the camp to launch a missile strike when bin Laden returned. Less than a
week after the call, intelligence officials were "irate" to discover that the camp had been
abandoned and dismantled.
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POSTED: 7:37 am CST February 24, 2006
HOUSTON -- A sheik from the United Arab Emirates contributed at least $1 million to
the Bush Library Foundation, which established the George Bush Presidential Library at
Texas A&M University in College Station.
The UAE owns Dubai Ports World, which is taking operations from London-based Peninsular
and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which operates six U.S. ports.
A political uproar has ensued over the deal, which the White House approved without
congressional oversight. Dubai Ports World offered Thursday night to delay part of the takeover
to give the Bush administration more time to convince lawmakers the deal poses no security risks.
The donations were made in the early 1990s for the library, which houses the papers of former
President George Bush, the current president's father.
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UAE, Port Security & the Hariri Hit
By Robert Parry
February 22, 2006
The Bush administration is letting the United Arab Emirates take control of six key U.S.
ports despite its own port’s reputation as a smuggling center used by arms traffickers, drug
dealers and terrorists, apparently including the assassins of Lebanon’s ex-Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri.
Press accounts have noted that the UAE’s port of Dubai served as the main transshipment point
for Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Q. Khan’s illicit transfers of materiel for building atomic
bombs as well as the location of the money-laundering operations used by the Sept. 11 hijackers,
two of whom came from the UAE.
But the year-old mystery of the truck-bomb assassination of Hariri also has wound its way through
the UAE’s port facilities. United Nations investigators tracked the assassins’ white Mitsubishi Canter
Van from Japan, where it had been stolen, to the UAE, according to a Dec. 10, 2005, U.N. report.
At that time, UAE officials had been unable to track what happened to the van after its arrival in
Dubai. Presumably the van was loaded onto another freighter and shipped by sea through the Suez
Canal to Lebanon, but the trail had gone cold in the UAE.
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02/22/2006 @ 2:46 pm
Filed by RAW STORY
CNN reported on air Wednesday that former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-KS)
has been hired by Dubai Ports World to lobby for the approval of a deal that would give the
company control of several major U.S. ports, RAW STORY has learned.
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Equipment For The U.S. Army
There is bipartisan concern about the Bush administration’s decision to outsource the
operation of six of the nation’s largest ports to a company controlled by the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) because of that nation’s troubling ties to international terrorism. The sale
of P&O to Dubai World Ports would give the state-owned company control of “the ports
of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.”
A major part of the story, however, has been mostly overlooked. The company, Dubai Ports
World, would also control the movement of military equipment on behalf of the U.S. Army
through two other ports. From today’s edition of the British paper Lloyd’s List:
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February 20, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 — Conditions set by the federal government for approving an
Arab company's takeover of operations at six major American ports are not enough to
guard against terrorist infiltration, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee
said Sunday.
"I'm aware of the conditions, and they relate entirely to how the company carries out its
procedures, but it doesn't go to who they hire, or how they hire people," said the chairman,
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. Mr. King said senior administration
officials had shared details of the sale with him.