Reply With QuoteNot all govt. sucks. The current Regime sucks worse than a $10 crack ho. (With several teeth missing and chipped.)
Does the fact that "In past two years, the US has been negotiating a free-trade agreement with the UAE. "
It's a throwaway line in this piece, but it seems clearly to be a key piece in the "I'm going use my veto for the very first time" puzzle.
Let me throw in these from CNN today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF4K0SOSH80
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZZWa1QaG6k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK8OrzR5f98
If he doesn't back away on this I wouldn't be surprised to see his popularity dropping below 30.
Last edited by Andrew Mayer; 02-22-2006 at 12:09 AM.
Not all govt. sucks. The current Regime sucks worse than a $10 crack ho. (With several teeth missing and chipped.)
LOL! The Postal Service! Effectively dealing with stuff! You are too much. Well, that and the combination with "meme"...it's like a delicious nonsense pie with that frosting we call pseudoscientific language...Originally Posted by TylerG
What a shit move. Given the UAEs history of support for terrorist organizations (like the Taliban) and a slew of other concerns this seems crazy. The Bush administration wanted to quietly push this thru without any Congressional investigations. If it had come out that we were turning over our airport security to a UAE company would there be more outrage? Shouldn't we be working to make the terrorists job harder, not easier? Then again funding both at the southern boarder AND for ports still isn't happening. Given that the ports are almost WIDE open and already vulnerable to attack this is plain stupid:
http://www.forbes.com/logistics/2006...0222dubai.html
"...suggests that the real security problem is at the outbound port. The security of U.S. ports is at best barely adequate but the security at ports in Asia and elsewhere where the goods are loaded for the U.S. is just not there.
The majority of the containers coming into the U.S. at the five ports in question (and generally with all U.S. ports) are not fully monitored and very few are checked to any depth by human operators (it costs too much). The opportunity for disaster even without further risk in port operation is already too wide open."
I almost pointed out that the Taliban wasn't a terrorist organization, but then I scanned to the left and noticed who wrote this post, and stopped reading.
Barely any caps in this post, Gideon, and a few of them are actually warranted. Are you going soft? Either way, this is a dangerous trend. the departure from your normal style couple with this forum's lack of avatars almost made me take you semi-seriously.
Edit: although actually, this post is uncharacteristically not that bad.
I guess my position is this: I don't think we should be giving control of our ports to any foreign country, but this outrage isn't about that. It's about the fact that they're ay-rabs. And it strikes me as reactionary, silly, and borderline racist.
Racism's one of my buttons, and I tend to be quite sensitive to it, regardless of the target.I guess my position is this: I don't think we should be giving control of our ports to any foreign country, but this outrage isn't about that. It's about the fact that they're ay-rabs. And it strikes me as reactionary, silly, and borderline racist.
That said, I don't think the reaction here is at all racist. If the stuff posted in this thread about the UAE is correct, why in the world would we entrust our port security to them? Obviously, you can't say that just because the country leans towards supporting anti-US terrorists that whatever UAE based company will be the same, but I think it's perfectly fair and pretty obvious to say that it makes those terrorists' jobs a whole bunch easier.
Wasn't one of the big findings with the 9/11 report that port security in particular wasn't good enough?
Well, the same company already owns/controls many of the ports, in other countries, that the stuff is shipping from. FWIW.
Ahh so the control the exits and the entrances... thats nice.
So what I want to know, is what does the bush administration (or just his cronies) have to gain from all this? Why is it such a big deal for them to have the UAE in control?
That's a complete contradiction. If you agree that you can't assume a company sponsors international terrorism just because the country it's based in does, how can you turn around and say that it's "pretty obvious" that letting that company control the ports makes terrorists' jobs easier?
Sorry, but this whole outrage over giving control of the ports to Arabs just smacks of vandalizing a store that's owned by Arabs because you're made about 9/11, just on a larger scale.
I also read (on DailyKos admittedly) that the ports in question ship out 40% of our military's supplies to the Middle East. GREAT!
Which of Bush's friends stands to make all the cash from this deal? Because when he's this vehement about something you KNOW that's a big part of it.
The only two bills he's threatened to veto that I remember:
1. Anti-torture legislation (which he still effectively castrated with the infamous signing statement).
2. No terrorist-supporting countries running our ports legislation.
I just dont know what to say about that.
I don't give a SHIT about what it "smacks of." Lets be more concerned about the prevention of mass death and destruction than offending sensibilities. Then again, nobody claimed you had any common sense, extarbags. The Taliban was a terrorist regime in that it heavily supported Al Queda and numerous other terrorist organizations. So split cunt hairs if you want. Nobody cares. What people do care about is protecting our ports, and this just makes NO sense right now. The ports are already threatened and suffer from lack of funding, but to possibly increase the threat? Wtf is Bush thinking?
It looks like some of Bush's aides have ties to the UAE firm:
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-333478c.html
Also Sen. Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Coburn, and a slew of others in Congress including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert are joining together to either stop the deal or stop it long enough to do an investigation. Looks like Bush did not even know until after the deal was approved:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...J2aQc&refer=us
Then we get idiotic statements like the ones you made, made by Scott McClellan: ``This is a principled decision,'' McClellan said. ``We shouldn't be holding a Middle Eastern company to a different standard than a British company.''
BULLSHIT. No Brits helped hijack planes. Besides Britains wonderful peace loving arab muslim population (you know the ones who chant death to America and blow up subways), there is no terrorist threat from Britain. We know that two of the hijackers were from the UAE and of course that entire area of the world is full of radicals and terrorists that want to kill us. This is well been established. But lets just pretend differently- until they hit us again. Lets stick our heads up our asses and say shit like "it just smacks of RACISM-- oooohh,ooo,oooo noo."
Actually the shoebomber was British.
The UAE is a terrorist supporting country? How does that work? Just because they recognised the Taleban regime as the legitimate government in Afghanistan, that makes them guilty of supporting Al Qaeda? I guess it doesn't matter that the UAE complied with sanctions against the Taleban for them refusing to hand over Bin Laden prior to 9/11, and then subsequently cut off all ties with the regime after 9/11.
By this bizarre definition of "support", we can conclude that the US supports the acts of any government it recognises as legitimate, including Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Burma. It won't even matter if the US government cuts ties with those nations for their abuses and imposes sanctions, they would still be supporters of their abuses years after this by your totally insane definition.
Remember when we used to argue that Bush was stupid, and people would say, "He's not as stupid as you think he is!"
As of today Bush is officially stupid:
And here's how much he loves the Royal Family:President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday.
The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.
Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.
Last edited by Andrew Mayer; 02-22-2006 at 10:23 AM.
Another pesky fact here: the job of port security falls to the United States Coast Guard and the United States Customs Service, regardless of who owns the port. The security concerns here are overblown.
If you really want to increase port security, increase funding to the aforementioned two agencies.
Assuming stated facts about UAE are true (2 of the 9/11 bombers, money, etc) :That's a complete contradiction. If you agree that you can't assume a company sponsors international terrorism just because the country it's based in does, how can you turn around and say that it's "pretty obvious" that letting that company control the ports makes terrorists' jobs easier?
A) The UAE has more ties to the 9/11 terrorists than the UK.
B) Terrorists have easier access to companies in their home country due to lack of visa checking/travel/etc.
Therefore, moving port security to a company in the UAE gives terrorists easier access. It's not because the company or country itself leans towards terrorism, or that it's arabic, it's that terrorists happen to be more concentrated in the UAE than they are in, say, the UK.
I don't have a problem when the police set up a sub station in a predominantly black neighborhood, as long as it's also a high crime neighborhood. Same thing in my mind. It isn't the race/ethnicity, it's the acts going on that motivates the authorities. In theory, anyway.
British citizens have been involved in Islamic terrorist attacks all over the globe. The former head of the Met police said around 3000 British citizens attended AQ training camps. So one can hardly complain about awarding a contract to the UAE when there was no problem with the British.
Please quit doing that. Nobody gives a shit if they're Arabs. We're concerned because they are from the UAE, which has a very spotty record when it comes to terrorism. If you're hung up on the fact that the people in charge in the UAE are Arabs, that's your problem.
H.
I think most people here knew that. I did. That's not the point. If you're the ones running the port, you know where the holes are. You know when Bob, the guy who knows what he is doing, has the day off. You know where to put a container so that the coast guard or customs doesn't check it.
You, in fact, can get whatever you want through security, since - as someone else said - there just isn't enough personnel.
Now tell me again why we would want an easily infiltrated company with that power?
Particularly since the current estimate is 7% of cargo checked. If you ran the port, you could smuggle elephants.
H.
How exactly does foreign ownership make the port easier to infiltrate? That's the part I'm not getting. It seems a stretch to me if that if a terrorist group wanted an inside man they would have to use some shadowy connection to a high level executive in UAE to get one. Couldn't they just send their dude to the port to fill out a job app?
Nick, lets say back during the cold war that a British company is running our ports for us. Then a British company gets bought by a government owned-corporation ofa semi-industrial third world country - say, Chile.
Now imagine that said country has unofficial links all over the place to the USSR, has a significant communist political presence, and is full of USSR spies.
Sound like a good idea?
On a confusing note, here's a CSM story by way of Daniel Drezner which says they aren't managing the port. No idea what's going on.
No, but that's the cold war. Bit apples to oranges. Soviet intel would have been interested in the data that could be gleaned from analysis of the books of such a company.
A terrorist would (by all the hypotheticals I'm hearing) be interested in either blowing up the port or smuggling naughty things through uninspected. Both obviously would be easier with inside info, but not executive level info. Like I said before, I'm not seeing why a terrorist group would need to do anything more complicated than have a member or at least a sympathetic party go get a job there. Dreaming up complicated conspiracies involving insidious foreign enterprises with terrorist sympathizing executives strikes me as more like the script of a bad Bond movie than a real problem.
Well sure, it's possibly overblown. But why would you ever take the chance?
And it's easily infiltrated because, well, I thought that was obvious. It's a 100% muslim country, no one is going to look funny at another muslim (like they would in Britain or the USA for instance).. That muslim infiltrator just needs to have a buddy (who doesn't know he's a terrorist, or does, doesn't matter) - let him have a job.
In any case, it sounds paranoid, but again - why open the biggest security hole the US has even wider? If a nuke ever gets into the US and used, it'll be because of the ports.
But the reality is that the difference between the Saudi Royal Family and the "worlds greatest terrorist" is nil. Bin Laden is a member of that family.
Uhm. Didn't they banish him from the country? Kinda hard to hold him against them with that being the case.
The company HQ in UAE would be easily infiltrated, sure. I completely agree. So what? There isn't anything useful to a terrorist to be learned back at HQ.
The people working on performing the lower level day to day operational tasks are going to physically be at the port, not in the UAE. It's the lower level people on the ground that can come up with the inside info on day to day operations info that could be useful for smuggling or blowing things up. That day to day info could be more easily gotten by just going to the port and applying for a job rather than trying to infiltrate HQ.
How does that have anything to do with what I posted? C'mon Mayer, normally you troll better than that.
I guess I just consider that to be a risk, and you don't.. fair enough.
Do you want to point to another postal service somewhere that is so vastly superior? Or should we just assume that since you find it so funny that it must be true?
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