Bush is telling us to trust him, he's got US port security under control and he's checked everything out and it's a go. So, just how good a record does Bush have verifying the security of US ports? According to the NYT article below, only 4 to 5 % of all containers coming into US ports are checked to see if, uh, they contain a frigging nuclear weapon.
In the political collision between the White House and Congress over the $6.8 billion deal that would give a Dubai company management of six American ports, most experts seem to agree on only one major point: The gaping holes in security at American ports have little to do with the nationality of who is running them....So what this issue really is about is whether George Bush is serious about stopping a nuclear weapon from being smuggled into the US by terrorists and blown up in a major American city (our bets are on NY or DC). That's the issue here, folks.
The administration's core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards ? and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.
Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container ? the real fear here ? "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said Mr. Flynn, the ports security expert....
That is where concerns about Dubai come in. While the company in question has not been a focus of investigations, Dubai has been a way station for contraband, some of it nuclear. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer, made Dubai his transshipment point for the equipment he sent to Libya and Iran because he could operate there without worrying about investigators....
That port, along with the five others Dubai Ports hopes to manage, are the last line of defense to stop a weapon from entering this country. But Mr. Seymour, head of the subsidiary now running the operations, says only one of the six ports whose fate is being debated so fiercely is equipped with a working radiation-detection system that every cargo container must pass through.
The Bush team couldn't save New Orleans, bumbled Iraq, let Osama go, can't even shoot straight, and now they want us to trust them regarding the nuclear threat when we already know they've dropped the ball regarding setting up a plan to effectively stop terrorist nukes from being snuck into the US through our ports. So instead of coming up with a real plan to protect our ports, they're putting the foxes in charge of the hen house - the very country that has helped spread nuclear weapons to unsavory countries.
So what exact part of this fiasco screams "trust me"?
