UAE Port Deal: Assessing the Threat
The pundits of the MSM keep prattling on about the possibility that a UAE government-run port management firm might be infiltrated by Al Qaeda. That’s a very valid concern, but what about the pertinent facts?
It's been widely noted that two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE. One of the two was Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot-hijacker of United Flight 175. It was Al-Shehhi who piloted that aircraft into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, killing over 650 people.
Al-Shehhi first joined Al Qaeda while he was a student in Hamburg. He went to school there on a military scholarship, which he received after joining the UAE Army in 1995. In fact, he continued to receive stipend payments from the UAE Army through December 23, 2000, using part of that money to pay for the flight lessons he took in preparation for the attacks. So the same government that will be running our major eastern ports helped finance the 9/11 attacks. I haven't seen anything to suggest this wasn't inadvertent on their part, but if they had no idea that one of Al Qaeda's deadliest killers was on their military payroll, how can we trust their assurances about Dubai Ports World?
FYI, this is covered in the staff reports of the 9/11 Commission. The reports are silent on whether Al-Shehhi was ever actually discharged from the UAE Army prior to September 11, 2001.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrFin_App.pdf
Very good point. I am very uneasy about the Dubai deal -- and it's difficult to articulate as I am hardly an expert about port security. But as usual with this Administration, the way they go about making deals is opaque and usually involves levels of cronyism and conflicts of intereset that boggle the mind.
One thing I have concluded, though, is this Dubai incident only shows that Bush and his people are doing their usual heck of a job with port security as they did with responding to Katrina. They never had any credibility with me but now I see the rest of the country is starting to catch on as well.
February 26, 2006 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with NPK on Dubai, and am pleased to see your factual approach as opposed to the approach that relies on assurances in contracts or corporate profit motives as protective of millions of lives. Security is fact and reality intensive. As Mr. Bush has said, "trust but verify." You can't verify if you can't go onto DP World premises in UAE because of sovereignty issues.
February 26, 2006 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink