23 February 2006

port deal gets fishier

the more we hear about this deal to outsource the management of key US ports to a company owned by a bunch of emirs in the gulf, the more rotten it smells.

right now the administration is trying to peddle the line that the security measures they worked out with dubai ports world are unprecedented. i guess they're trying to convince us that means that the agreement is really stringent. but when you get a whiff of the details, it sure smells like they're unprecedented in laxity. get this latest little gem:
In approving the purchase, the administration chose not to require Dubai Ports 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.

Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.
boy, you talk about some fast-talking used car salesmen. in case you didn't catch that, they're planning to allow the dubai company not to keep their records in the US where they could be subpoenaed by law enforcement, nor will they need even a token american on hand who can be prosecuted for non-compliance. and they're tring to tell us that makes us safer.

can anyone be so thoroughly programmed by the propaganda that they can believe this stuff anymore? just yesterday they were trying to claim that while the president feels so strongly about supporting this deal that he'll veto congress' attempts to scuttle it, he really didn't know anything about it. at one and the same time. now there's a level of flip-flopping right up there with schrodinger's cat.

but even the duplicity aside, there's something really screwy about those two details, and these are just the ones that got out. those provisions are SOP, the experts tell us, so why would they be blowing them off in this case? i can't think of a single hypothetical that would make this omission work out in our interest.

instead the administration is trying to convince us that they've implemented some kind of super-secret plan that makes this ultra-secure.

the busheviks working out a secret back-room deal with oil-rich sheiks and emirs. really now, can even the most mindless bushevik apologist not have qualms about that?

1 Comments:

Cool blog, interesting information... Keep it UP » »

posted by Anonymous Anonymous on
07 February, 2007 11:34  

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