Bill Would Stop Sale of Port Operations to Arabs
    By Nicholas Johnston
    Bloomberg News

    Saturday 18 February 2006

Democratic senators cite security issue.

    Washington - Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Robert Menendez of New Jersey have introduced legislation to prohibit companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from buying U.S. port operations.

    The measure is intended to block the $6.8 billion sale of a company that operates six U.S. ports to a firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates.

    "Our port security is too important to place in the hands of foreign governments," Clinton said in a statement Friday.

    A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Thursday called for hearings on the purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., the U.K.'s largest port operator, by DP World, Dubai's port company. With the acquisition, DP World would gain control over most operations at ports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami, Baltimore and New Orleans.

    "Ports are the front lines of the war on terrorism," Menendez said. "We wouldn't turn the Border Patrol or the Customs Service over to a foreign government, and we can't afford to turn our ports over to one either."

    Lawmakers have also asked the Bush administration to conduct a more thorough review of the purchase. Seven lawmakers sent a letter Thursday to Treasury Secretary John Snow asking a government panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to look into the purchase.

    Snow said Friday that while he had not seen the congressional requests for an additional review, the committee was "thorough, and carefully considered the issue of national security in that acquisition."

    "The process worked as it is intended to work," Snow told reporters in Carol Stream, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are part of the process, he said.

    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the administration continued to support the sale and would brief members of Congress on its decision.

    "It's the considered opinion of the U.S. government that this can go forward," Rice told a roundtable of Arab journalists Friday at the State Department in Washington. Rice, who will visit the UAE next week as part of a three-country Middle East tour, said there had been a "thorough review" of the sale and "it was decided that this could be done and done safely."

    Rice described Abu Dhabi as "a very good friend" of the United States.

    Two of the Sept. 11 attackers in 2001 were citizens of the United Arab Emirates and the country's banking system helped transfer money to the plotters, according to Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. He was one of the signatories to the letter. "I approach this with a great deal of dubiousness," Schumer told reporters in Washington. "The chances for infiltration are just too great."

    Jarrod Agen, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said Thursday that the U.S. government would still control the ports.