The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.
One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.
Snow was 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.
The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
(snip)
The Daily News has learned that lawmakers also want to know if a detailed 45-day probe should have been conducted instead of one that lasted no more than 25 days.
According to a 1993 congressional measure, the longer review is mandated when the company is owned by a foreign government and the purchase "could result in control of a person engaged in interstate commerce in the U.S. that could affect the national security of the U.S."
No, fast-tracking the turning over of port control to a terrorist country isn't fishy at all; no reason this should impact Bush's anti-terror bona fides at all, right? This new whiff of complicity and favoritism makes it even more, well, true to form.
But why am I reading about this in the NY Daily News and not the NY Times?
1 comment:
Good question. The NYT has been strangely quiet about this. I thought , "Well, maybe they're doing an in-depth expose or something." But I haven't seen much out of them so far. Stinks to holy hell, it does.
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