| Who’s the real threat to U.S. national security, democracy, freedom? |
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U.S. intelligence agencies supported the Bush Administration’s deal to have Dubai Ports (DP) World take charge of running terminals at six American seaports. These are the same intelligence agencies that supported Bush’s assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The DP matter was even being coordinated by the Intelligence Community Acquisition Risk Center, a new organization under the office of the Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, a Bush political appointee, reported the Washington Post.
Now members of Congress and the Senate are concerned about the DP deal because DP represents a serious threat to national security. The United Arab Emirates own Dubai Ports World Company. U.S. Representatives in Congress and U.S. Senators believe Muslim terrorists will use DP controlled ports to engage in terrorism. This is troubling. Still, Bush supports the DP deal.
The New York Daily News reports that Bush officials have ties with Dubai Ports.
In the report, United States Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to Dubai Ports World—Snow is reported to have been chairman of “the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.”
David Sanborn, who heads the U.S. Maritime Administration, once ran DP’s European and Latin American operations before being fingered by Bush to run the U.S. Maritime Administration.
These reports are even more troubling. Nevertheless, Bush still supports the DP deal.
As long as we’re talking about ports, let’s talk about the Panama Canal also.
Before the United States lowered its flag on December 31, 1999, giving up control of the Canal, U.S. influence in the area lasted since 1903. The administration of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt successfully negotiated the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty with Panama, conceding to the United States a ten-mile-wide strip across the isthmus for construction of a canal.
As a result of the Carter-Torrijos treaty of 1977, a treaty that called for the United States to surrender control of the Panama Canal on December 31, 1999, U.S. armed forces and most of its interests pulled out of the Canal region. The Treaty however, does allow for the United States to defend the Canal militarily if needed, but such an action today would cause serious concerns for China, who would probably challenge the U.S. military presence in the region now.
China is now in effect and without question, the gatekeeper of the Canal.
Not one word was bellowed by the GOP after Bush took office and allowed for Panama to lease the U.S.-built ports of Cristobal on the Atlantic end of the canal and Balboa on the Pacific end. The leases were awarded to Chinese Hong Kong corporation named Hutchison Whampoa operating under the name Hutchison Port Holdings.
Bush never moved to have the matter reviewed and the GOP House and Senate never ballyhooed concerns about the Chinese controlling the Panama Canal.
For the next 50 years, the Chinese have control of this hemisphere’s most vital port.
In 1996, China tested missiles to show its readiness to invade and take control of Taiwan if that nation proceeded to push for its own sovereignty. The United States sent warships to the area and China responded by boldly threatening to "rain down fire" on United States’ soil if the U.S. interfered—an inference to using its long-range missiles. Would Communist China threaten U.S. soil again if it bases its shorter-range missiles in Panama?
China has the opportunity to ship shorter-range missiles across the Pacific, unload them at Balboa, and conceal them in warehouses until the time is ripe.
Think there is something wrong with this picture? Well, you’re not alone.
Since red flags are flying in Washington (because of the DP deal) and red flags are flying around the Panama Canal (because of China’s control of the Canal), the ties that Snow and Sanborn (two leading figures in U.S. government) have with Dubai Ports, is but a sideshow to the concerns about Bush and his administration’s failure to recognize basic protocols of national security.
Indeed, while the debate in Washington continues to center around DP’s control of six American Ports, Bush and his cartel have yet to establish its policy regarding China and its control of the Panama Canal. And so it seems, in order to further the interests of commerce, Bush and his team see U.S. national security interests as secondary.
Dubai Ports having control of six American seaports and China having control of the Panama Canal, it seems, are less of a threat to our national and economic security than Bush and his cronies’ continued actions to surrender U.S. standards of freedom and democracy in order to advance global market philosophy around the world.
So, who’s the biggest threat to U.S. national security?
Robert Miranda, is a contributing columnist to HispanicVista.com.
© 2006 HispanicVista.com, Inc.
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