Political Skullduggery

In the most reassuring thing I've heard in awhile, Walter Pincus tells us that the U.S. Intelligence Community has confidence that the Dubai Port deal will not endanger national security.

The Community's BFF Pincus has been told that since the UAE has been so helpful in the "war on terror", that they are now part of the club.

Reviews by U.S. intelligence agencies supported Dubai Ports World's purchase of the British company running terminals at six American seaports, and the assessments were made available to the Treasury Department-run interagency committee that approved the deal, according to senior administration officials.

The intelligence studies were coordinated by the Intelligence Community Acquisition Risk Center, a new organization under the office of the Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, said one official. The center normally does broad threat analyses of foreign commercial entities that seek to do business with U.S. intelligence agencies.

Pincus is saying that a small office that does cursory checks of IC databases on the backgrounds of foreign companies gives the plan the thumbs up.

While contents of the intelligence assessments remain classified, current and former intelligence officials yesterday spoke highly of the level of counterterrorism cooperation provided after Sept. 11, 2001, by Dubai and several of the other states that make up the United Arab Emirates.

A former senior CIA official recalled that, although money transfers from Dubai were used by the Sept. 11 hijackers, Dubai's security services "were one of the best in the UAE to work with" after the attacks. He said that once the agency moved against Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and his black-market sales of nuclear technology, "they helped facilitate the CIA's penetration of Khan's network."

What are the odds that the UAE will be glad to see that revelation in a major newspaper, even if untrue? (Which is likely.)

Dubai also assisted in the capture of al-Qaeda terrorists.

Nice one. The proof:

An al-Qaeda statement released in Arabic in spring 2002 refers to UAE officials as wanting to "appease the Americans' wishes" including detaining "a number of Mujahideen," according to captured documents made available last week by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. The al-Qaeda statement threatened the UAE, saying that "you are an easier target than them; your homeland is exposed to us."

Anyone with a passing familiarity with al-Qaeda statements knows that most, if not all, of the Middle-Eastern nations collaborating with the U.S. in the "war on terror" have received the same type of boilerplate threats.

One intelligence official pointed out that when the U.S. Navy no longer made regular use of Yemen after the USS Cole was attacked in 2000, it moved its port calls for supplies and repairs to Dubai.

Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Tuesday praised the "superb" military-to-military relationship with the UAE, saying, "In everything that we have asked and work with them on, they have proven to be very, very solid partners."

This just tells us that if you play ball with the U.S. security regime, you will receive a payoff.

If Hugo Chavez entered the bidding for the British port management company P&O, beating out Dubai to buy the port operations, there is no way that he--with no ties to Muslim terrorists at all--would be the approved buyer.

The real issue anyway is the continued health of the U.S. dollar.

If the Arabs, who hold a huge portion of U.S. debt, get the idea that their dollar holdings don't have the buying power of everybody else's--they will unload their U.S. bond holdings--spelling doom for the dollar.

Update: My illustrious colleague at Swedish Meatballs Confidential, M1, has received information about the true motivation of the Bush administration in the Dubai Ports deal.

It involves allowing control of port management in the U.S. to be sold to a state-owned company in Dubai in exchange for U.S. oil companies being permitted to increase their stake in some UAE oil operations to majority ownership status.

See Swedish Meatballs Confidential