“Lou Dobbs Tonight” hypes fear, excludes defenders of Arab port company.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs has often made the “Outsourcing of America” a focus of his nightly program, “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” But on the February 13 edition, Dobbs and reporter Bill Tucker went a step further, insinuating the federal government may be outsourcing U.S. port operations to a company prone to terrorist infiltration by allowing a firm from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to run port operations within the United States.
“Excellent job of reporting, Bill Tucker,” Dobbs thanked his correspondent, wondering aloud “why the government sees no problems with having the United Arab Emirates, a company based there, take over our vital seaports.” Tucker had left out any opposing points of view, although he quoted the concerns of a liberal Democratic senator and a defense analyst from a liberal-leaning think tank.
Tucker opened his taped report noting that the company, Dubai Ports World, “is set to take control of operations in ports in the United States” including the ports of New Orleans, Miami, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey. After airing a clip of Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) criticizing the contract, Tucker reminded viewers that The UAE was home to two of the September 11 hijackers.
While Tucker noted that a spokesman at the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) refused to comment, he aired reaction from The Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon, who said ports were “essentially on the front line in the war on terror … so allowing a foreign firm to operate a port is sort of like allowing a foreign firm to operate a U.S. military air field in a traditional conflict.”
Not all security experts share O’Hanlon’s concern, among them the Independent Institute’s Dr. Ivan Eland. The former Congressional Budget Office defense analyst disputed O’Hanlon’s military air field comparison and told the Free Market Project that Dubai Ports World has “an especially strong interest in operating safe and secure ports,” adding that a guilt-by-association connection of a UAE-based company to 9/11 hijackers is like calling “all Californians mass murderers” because “Charles Manson was from California.”
“How do we know that any American company running the port could not be infiltrated by terrorists?” Eland asked. “In fact, the fact that two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE leads to greater scrutiny on Dubai Ports World. If any terrorist incident occurred in one of their ports, they could lose much business worldwide.” He added, “This would probably not happen to a port operated by a company from a non-Arab country.”
The Free Market Project has previously chronicled the anti-free market biases of CNN’s Lou Dobbs.
Infathomable! I can’t even beleive any leader of our country would even conceive such a thing.
So much for being ‘strong on defense.’
Oh yeah. I know I feel safer knowing our ports will be under the control of foreigners. True, one cannot assume that a domestic company would be more cautious than a foreign one. However, one can assume that it is easier to hold accountable a US company. I’d gladly pay the extra dollars for that ability.
As long as I view Islam as a suspect religion (and I have good reason to be suspicious), I will view every Muslim with suspicion. All the ad campaigns and good PR mean nothing to me; and the blind ambition of the open borders/free market crowd represents the only failing in libertarian thought: that through commerce and the free movement of people, we can all get along. It’s a nice thought, but the uproar over the cartoons is enough evidence for me that it is at best, foolish. That it is state-sponsered violence seals the deal.
Dobbs should be ashamed of himself for caring about national security.
The point is more so that Dobbs and his reporters did not give a fuller accounting of the issue by giving the other side of the story a fair shake. Playing off of fears of terrorism via the UAE connection is more pandering than journalism. News consumers should expect inflated rhetoric, however sincerely believed, from politicians, not from the media.
Certainly it seems at this point a large bipartisan coalition of congressmen and senators are wary of the Dubai Ports World contract, but by the same token, there are libertarian and conservative analysts who believe the fears are overblown.
Additionally, one might reasonably argue that the government of the UAE would have strong incentive to be vigilant against terrorism and to cooperate fully with DHS in securing the ports: any terror event happening on U.S. soil in any way connected to this company, a state-owned venture, would be a strong case for war against the United Arab Emirates.
Such a fear, some analysts would argue, would not be lost on the UAE which is, while not a democratic regime, certainly a rational one.
Point taken, Mr. Sheperd, regarding the lack of balance on the Dobbs piece.
I have a compromise. One year of no terrorist attacks, and a majority of Imams and Mullahs denouncing jihad, then we can have dialog over the wisdom of having the UAE take over our ports.
Until then, your assurances will fall on my deaf ears.
I see your point and its a worthwhile debate. I tend to lean in the Bush administration’s favor on this argument as it stands now, personally, but I could be swayed with further evidence.
Certainly one could argue ANY foreign presence in operation of a U.S. port facility is suspect, particularly in an age of global terrorism where radical Muslim terrorists could infiltrate British, French, Canadian, German, and other companies and government operations from the West.
Remember that 9/11 happened in part due to the failure of private security screening by U.S. security firms at U.S. airports. Now we’ve federalized the system and we’ve still got people getting on planes with weapons and questionable tools (ice picks are safe to port on a plane?).
I think the real question is how much of the operations are going to be run by Americans? Certainly the lion’s share, I would imagine. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, and Hyundai employ thousands of people in America at dealerships, as truck drivers, as factory workers, as sailors and longshoremen offloading imported vehicles. Not many of those employees are Japanese, German, or South Korean, respectively.
At any rate, whoever runs port ops, or airport ops, or railway ops, must be held to vigilant oversight, and not just by government. I know a guy who works for a private security firm, and his job is to find weaknesses in US security and to try to exploit them to expose vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are then reported to his bosses and also to the US government. Certainly whoever ends up owning and/or running the U.S. seaports up for bid should be not only regulated and watched over by the DHS, but by private firms working on contract with the feds to find the security holes that government bureaucrats may have missed.
I’ve got a friend who works for a private security firm which contracts out to the government. His job is to look for weaknesses in security and try to exploit them, then report back to his superiors and in turn to the govt about where the weaknesses are, and how to sew them up. Certainly this would be called for in this case: have private firms staffed by ex-military contracted out to look for ways our security at ports is deficient, report those back to the government, and have that enforced.
I think if your going to talk about the Lou Dobbs show, the segment of the money trail and who this administration has been given too should be added. All the banter on fighting Corporate greed goes down the drain when you look at who Bush has put his buddies in power.
I’m just so happy that liberals are finally considering the importance of a strong American national defense. The next logical step it for them to reverse their positions on the Patriot Act, monitoring of communications to and from foreign nations, the Minutemen, continued right to bear arms, etc. We’ll be one happy family!