Things to make you go....

Thanks to Daily Kos for a couple insights into the Dubai Portsworld deal. Or, as I call it, Dubai Portsworld Deal-Gate.

1) The Bush Administration's brilliant strategy to delay the deal by 45 days means this story will resurface right around April 15th. That date doesn't exactly signify a love-fest between the American people and their federal government.
2) Here's a former Bush Administration official discussing why concerns about security are well founded:

Joseph King, who headed the customs agency's anti-terrorism efforts under the Treasury Department and the new Department of Homeland Security, said a company the size of Dubai Ports World would be able to get hundreds of visas to relocate managers and other employees to the United States.

Using appeals to Muslim solidarity or threats of violence, al-Qaeda operatives could force low-level managers to provide some of those visas to al-Qaeda sympathizers, said King, who for years tracked similar efforts by organized crime to infiltrate ports in New York and New Jersey. Those sympathizers could obtain legitimate driver's licenses, work permits and mortgages that could then be used by terrorist operatives.

Dubai Ports World could also offer a simple conduit for wire transfers to terrorist operatives in the Middle East. Large wire transfers from individuals would quickly attract federal scrutiny, but such transfers, buried in the dozens of wire transfers a day from Dubai Ports World's operations in the United States to the Middle East would go undetected, King said.

For the record, when news of this story came out, I felt like most of the arguments against the deal were based on the simple, xenophobic gut reaction to an Arab corporation. Now I'm seeing more and more that there are real security concerns here that Bush's "Trust Us" defense don't allay.