February 28, 2006

Chinese Port Operator Linked to Weapons Smuggling

From NewsMax:

A ship owned by a Chinese government-run company that currently operates two giant terminals at the Port of Long Beach, California was found 10 years ago to have been used to smuggle a huge cache of illegal weapons - with the smugglers saying they planned to import missiles that could "take out a 747."

On the night of March 18, 1996, undercover Customs and BATF agents discovered 2000 AK-47's in a container smuggled aboard the Empress Phoenix, a ship owned by the China Ocean Shipping Company [COSCO] docked at the Port of Oakland.

The guns were manufactured by another state-run company, Poly Technologies, the international outlet for Chinese weapons sales.

According to Vanity Fair magazine, which covered the episode in detail, the Empress Phoenix's gun cargo was earmarked for sale to deadly Los Angeles street gangs.

It was the largest seizure of fully operational automatic weapons in the history of U.S. law enforcement.

Unless COSCO is more involved with port security than the U.A.E. would be, this appears to disprove arguments that there would be no security risk in letting U.A.E. operate ports in the U.S.

Why I Continue to Oppose the Port Deal

I say "continue" because so many of those with whom I agree on almost all subjects -- Prof. Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, and others -- support the deal.

However, Frank Gaffney and Michelle Malkin oppose it, as I do as well.

Many supporting the deal agree that it increases the risk to our national security, but say it is necessary to do so, so as not to offend the U.A.E. Charles Krauthammer's recent article on the subject is a good example:

This has raised the obvious question of whether we want our ports, through which a nuclear bomb could come, handled by a country that produced two nationals who flew into the south tower on 9/11 and that has a history of laundering money and nuclear secrets from bad guys to worse guys.

...as soon as the Dubai company takes over operations, it will necessarily become privy to information about security provisions at crucial U.S. ports. That would mean a transfer of information about our security operations - and maybe even worse, about the holes in our security operations - to a company in an Arab state where there might be employees who, for reasons of corruption or ideology, would pass this invaluable knowledge on to Al Qaeda-types.

That is the danger, and it is a risk, probably an unnecessary one.

...This contract should have been stopped at an earlier stage, but doing it now would cause too much damage to our relations with moderate Arab states.

If he'd concluded his remarks by opposing the deal, that conclusion would have been equally well supported by the article that preceded it.

This raises the question, whether it is reasonable to increase the risk to our national security, so as to avoid offending an ally? Just the increased, and reasonable, concerns we would all have about our security, would be too high a price to pay.

Whatever infiltration the U.A.E. has had by Al Qaeda up until now, that infiltration would be likely to increase, as Al Qaeda would be very likely to make infiltration of the U.A.E. a top priority, once the U.A.E. has gained control of key points at which the U.S. could be attacked. So whatever history the U.A.E. has of avoiding infiltration, no longer applies.

All this is abundantly clear to the American people, who overwhelmingly oppose the deal:

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they're opposed to the agreement.

Finally, I question the very premise on which many of the arguments in favor of the deal are made; I question whether canceling the deal would be   deleterious to our relations with the U.A.E. The U.A.E. has gotten control of numerous other non-U.S. harbors in other parts of the world as part of this deal, so they've already gotten a lot out of it. If the U.A.E. is really our friend, they should understand our reasonable concerns. Although he supports the deal, I quote Jim Dunnigan, from a recent Instapundit podcast:

Jim Dunnigan: The U.A.E. is our best ally over there. It is not like the rest of Arabia. It's only about 3 million people. Only 20% are resident; 80% are foreign workers. There's been practically zilch Al Qaeda activity in the U.A.E. and for good reason. The business of the U.A.E. is business. They want nothing to do with radicalism. Although it's a collection of 7 monarchies basically run by Dubai and Abu Dhabi, they have been very forthright in staying away from any kind of radicalism. They've shared out the oil and gas money a lot more equitably than in any other part of the Gulf, including Iran. And they have only gotten by for centuries by staying out of the fights of the big guys in the neighborhood. That's why they have always been particularly close to britain and the united states. they're the one place besides Kuwait where we can operate air bases and have military personnel basically do whatever we have to do.

"The business of the U.A.E. is business." They're interested in the bottom line. If they can't make a profit with us on the port deal, they'll do it some other way. It seems unlikely that they would respond to a cancellation of the port deal in a way that would be damaging to their other business dealings with the U.S.