Follow the Money: Dubai Ports=CSX=ShrubCo=China=Solitary Confinement at Guantanamo

Not only are the ShrubCo prime directives were intact in the attempted ports deal with Dubai:
1) Transfer wealth to the rich from everyone else and/or
2) Distract the pilferees from the fact that #1 is taking place.
We may all be numb to the usual outrages that result from that but following the thread a bit further this time will lead a decent person to, at minimum, severe dyspepsia.

The New York Daily News story, "W aides' biz ties to Arab firm", exposes two keys reasons for the proposed deal with Dubai Ports World:

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel [a part of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.] that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration. ...

... lawmakers also want to know if a detailed 45-day probe should have been conducted instead of one that lasted no more than 25 days.

According to a 1993 congressional measure, the longer review is mandated when the company is owned by a foreign government and the purchase "could result in control of a person engaged in interstate commerce in the U.S. that could affect the national security of the U.S."

ShrubCo's reportedly bewildered by all the fuss. After all, they already turned over various ports' control to lots of other countries, including the largest state-owned Chinese shipping company. Any wonder we're still holding an unknown number of Uighur nationalists in Guantanamo despite that the tribunal there determined that these men "pose no risk to the United States"?

Wrote Adam Wolfe in Asia Times Online in late 2004:

There is little chance that the detainees will be freed from US custody any time soon, because there is little maneuverability for Washington's Xinjiang policy. The US will continue to search for a country that will accept the detainees, but China's importance to global capital markets makes this unlikely to succeed.

And ShrubCo and friends continue to laugh all the way to the bank.