by
Larry C Johnson (bio below)
If Dubai Ports World (DPW) does as nifty a job of running our ports as it has done
running the freeport in Dubai then we are screwed. This is not about the fact that
police and security officials from the United Arab Emirates have been helping us
track down Al Qaeda operatives and other ornery jihadists. The issue here is the
fact that the port in Dubai is one of the major ports in the world involved with
smuggling of counterfeit and contraband product. A few years ago, for example, I
was alerted to a shipment of several containers of cigarettes from Panama’s port
of Colon to Dubai. The addressee on the invoice? Al Rabea Spare Car Parts. Now,
last time I checked, cigarettes are not and never have been an automobile spare
car part.
Other items, including consumer electronics, liquor, HP print cartridges, make their
way to Dubai and are then smuggled into tough areas like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,
and Pakistan. And what is Dubai Ports World doing to crackdown on this activity?
Nothing.
Continued below:
The inability or refusal to deal with the use of ports under the control of Dubai
Ports World that are involved with smuggling is reason enough to stop this deal
dead in its tracks. The owners of DPW are not the ones cooperating closely with
the United States in tracking down the terrorists who attacked us. Instead, they
have close ties to a host of shipping companies, including those owned by the Bin
Laden family.
The challenge of smuggling a dirty nuke is comparable to smuggling containers of
cigarettes, liquor, and shoes. If DPW will not stop the latter how can we be confident
they will prevent the former? That’s a security bet we should not take or make.
……………………………………………………..
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications, including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world. Further bio details.
Personal Blog: No Quarter || Bio
Recommended Book List || More BoomanTribune Posts
Hey, thanks for the extra insight into that problem. Do you have any opinion as to the transport and global logistics company called TNT Express? I saw where they’re #2 and a big competitor to DPW. The thing that caught my attention was their plan to extend developed delivery service, including door to door, from Dubai into Iran.
A visit to their web site proves instructive. Their management structure appears very international as befits a corportation that operates, owns or is building facilities in many different countries including China, Korea, India, South America and West Africa and has “container facilities” in Australia and Germany.
Nobody from the US appears to have visited the site or they would have found this press release to make them more hysterical.
Hey, that looks interesting. They were having tax trouble in the EU or somewhere too weren’t they?
What? They are crooks! Imagine that! We can’t have arab crooks running our ports…we need American crooks with the know how to get the job done! A John Gotti, not a Mustapha Bwaziz.
Imagine if they flood our nation with their dirty cigarretes and our nations youth become infatuated with foregin tobacco. We can’t let this happen. Thank God they caught Padilla. i hear he was wearing a dirty shoe bomb when they caught him.
You Larry, you who support using torture techniques like keeping people from being able to sleep in Abu Ghraib who might be, or are suspected to be or at least kinda look like or have the same names of terroists…you must protect us. Their is evil all around. The world is a dangerous Place. Oooooh. I just got back from Buenos Aires…..Ooooh it’s dangerous there. Nobody tried to kill me but they wanted to! They wanted to take me money too! But I’m too smart for them. I wore a money belt. It’s really dangerous there Larry. Here in Chicago it’s much safer, though we have had 8 murders in my neighborhood this year, it’s much safer here in the US than in foreign countries right? And our criminals know what they are doing. They much better than Arab criminals.
Where ya from Larry? Pleasantville U.S.A.? Did you hang around the Mall on Main street? That’s how you began to learn your craft.
It’s good to know you are for humane torture of potential, maybe, sure looks like a terrorist to me terrorists.
Stu, I’m not going to downrate you, but this is not productive. Somewhere in the midst of all this I’m sure you have a legitimate point. But you’re making it awfully hard to find.
You have to have a bad sense of humor like me.
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is no excuse for such a fool’s rant.
I suggest you read up on the rogue state called UAE. The UAE links with the Bush cabal are for financial gain of the happy few at the expense of US Homeland Security.
It’s best just to request our troops to come home and fight the enemy within our borders. The US people need their National Guard at home and serve for the purpose intended and not an illegal foreign war.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Do you have much information or background on a company called CTI? It went public in 98 and was a division of CSX that was eventually bought buy TPG, the parent company of TNT Express which is DPW’s main competitor.
Well, I have never been to Dubai. I can only read about it. What I have read based on your suggestion is that it is a banking center and it runs a loose operation.
I am sorry but I am not convinced that we have a real terrorist threat from an organized group of people who are capable of acting in such a dramatic way as 911 with any consistency.
There are loose groups who are not connected but not an AL Queda. This is a Myth. These loose groups may be multiplying, one day they may be able to coordinate if the U.S. coninues in it’s meanless meanderings.
But what I heard from Larry is more of the same Larryisms. He has said in one of his diaries that Guantanamo prisoners should not be torutred in the way they are being tortured they should at worst merely be sleep deprived. He thinks sleep deprivation would be a good idea for people who most likely are innocent, certainly have not been convicted of anything. Sleep Deprivation is Torture. But Larry does not consider it so.The only possible explanation I can come up with is that Larry does not see Arabs as being human. He is unwilling or unable to imagine how these people might be feeling about being locked up without any reason. I don’t think they have more than a handful of people there who are remotely interested in committing terrorist acts.
These people are being tortured, it is fascism, it must be stopped and I don’t wanna hear about Arabs not being allowed to run ports because THEY might be influenced by terroist.
So it turns out that Europe has been complicit in the War in Iraq with the possible exception of France. Every government in Europe is covering up the fact that they secretly supported the war in Iraq while saying they did not. Proof is in the torture centers and the cover up of the flights.
But now France is indicating it’s willingness to participate in support of a war in Iran.
All of the Western world should be ashamed. The terrorists….the center of terrorism is correctly identified by Iran as The United States and it’s guide, Israel.
http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/2/23/63132/1147
Oui, check out Ductapes’s diary and let me know what you think.
Thanks
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Both DTF and soj have different views about the UAE – six US port facilities deal. A lot of facts are not addressed in their diaries. I have joined the discussion with many comments to their views. It should not be about lack of focus on other issues, that is no reason to let this deal pass without scrutiny by Congress.
Both are great writers and contributors to this site, I happen to have a completely opposite view. Ten years ago I had to learn the hard way what Dubai and Abu Dhabi was about, when a close relative was taken hostage by an Emirate national and imprisoned due to a difference in a financial deal. We had a period of thirty days to investigate, travel to the Emirates, go to court, solve his/her business transaction gone wrong and return to freedom. We managed to beat the system, cost a lot of money, but managed to get his/her passport returned and leave by first flight to Qatar. Ever since I have closely watched what was happening in the Emirates because of its location in the ME and the build-up of wealth, richness and unbelievable building boom.
The system is corrupt in the UAE, they deal in contraband drugs, money and arms. There are no legal rights, nor human rights as I have illustrated in my comments. CNN International had a documentary about the Emirates recently, about the slavery of migrant workers. This fact alone, the abuse of Human Rights, should be sufficient to sever all economic ties with the Sheikdom.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I read your diary. I read the sources who, I would say represent normally a conservative view … the Washington Post for example. The report on Sadaam’s bypassing UN sanctions seems ludicrous. He did the right thing. The sanctions were unjustly imposed and his invasion of Kuwait ought to be more controversial given the fact that Kuwait was once a part of Iraq and that it is the British and the West who have so hopelessly created all the problems in the Mid East including the state of Israel. Sadaam did not create the background against which he acted, he is not quite the devil he has been made out to be. Most of his alleged crimes (gassing his own people for ex.) are lies perpetrated by Bush. Bush however did gas and burn the Iraqis in Fallujah.
Your experience is interesting. I would like to know more about it, but it may be too personal. In any case you said the UAE deals in drug smuggling, contraband etc. What government on Earth does not unoffically? Here in the States there is law and then there is the fact that the law is applied to you based on your percieved wealth. It isn’t even what you really have in terms of weatlh. all the time, just what you look like.
The U.S. government nationally and in most cases locally is very corrupt. Bribery, payoffs, organized crime are typical. And it is dangerous in the streets of the city. Like almost nowhere else on earth.
The UAE, I don’t know how to compare them with the US. But I do know that the US is more crime ridden than anywhere in Europe with the exceoption of one or two countries and more crime ridden than anywhere in this hemispere. Nowhere, not in Mexico, Central or South America is their more crime, again with the exception of one or two countries. Police in the US do take bribes committ crimes as they do in other countries. And they do so in organized groups as well as individually.
But I believe you are saying that the government is an active participant in the lawlessness on a very active level, this is becoming more and more true here in the US.
Ports in the US have often been under control of the Mafia. I believe that in New York this has and still is the case though there has been some legal action on them recently.
As I said in a comment yesterday, I’d rather risk being blown up by a Timothy McVeigh than by some misguided individual from some foreign country precisely because it just goes to show that WE are the Champions, even when it comes to producing terrorists. As if the fact that we managed to let B*shCo take power weren’t evidence enough of that!
Get a grip, and do not misrepresent Larry’s writings. He and his friends are passionately opposed to torture. For humane reasons. And because they know it doesn’t work.
Think about the accusations you make before you write them. Especially when you’re making serious allegations.
We can express concern. We can question. But inaccurate, unnecessary attacks are ugly, to begin with and, most assuredly unproductive.
Here is additional support for Larry’s post.
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From personal experience of a Dubai adventure and it’s (lack of) legal system, I wrote my initial diary. Money deals in Dubai are more often done in cash, you therefore walk to your trading partner with a paper bag filled with $100k. Theft does not occur, because cutting off a hand is easily performed and the death penalty is imposed for a major crime.
Main UAE business is money laundering, illegal trade as port to all of ME countries, a police state with no regard for Human Rights and the Sheikdom was heavily involved in the BCCI banking system and the illegal trade of oil during the UN embargo of Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
In 1990, when accountants and regulators in the United Kingdom found fraud at BCCI, the Abu Dhabi ruling family and government stepped in again, agreeing to formally buy the bank, assert control, guarantee its losses, replace BCCI’s head with the head of its own BCCI affiliate, the Bank of Credit and Commerce Emirates (BCCE), move BCCI’s operations and records from London to Abu Dhabi, and work on a plan to find a way to save the bank despite its having acknowledged “mishandling” at least $2.2 billion of Abu Dhabi’s money.
By July 5, 1991, when BCCI was closed globally, the Government of Abu Dhabi, its ruling family, and an investment company holding the assets of the ruling family, were the controlling, and official “majority” shareholders of BCCI — owning 77 percent of the bank. But since the remaining 23 percent was actually held by nominees and by BCCI’s alter-ego ICIC, Abu Dhabi was in fact BCCI’s sole owner.
One can consider the United Arab Emirates as a new BCCI bank at the scale of a rogue state. All illicit forms of trade in the form of drugs, money and arms goes though the UAE. Wake up people, UAE is not a democracy!
The arms link is an illustration of UAE port insecurity.
On the other hand, Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor. Trade unions, strikes, and agitators are illegal, and 99% of the private-sector workforce are easily deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.
My earlier diary ::
Al Qaeda Buys Control Six US Port Facilities ¶ Chertoff Hands Over the Keys
Security Disconnect ◊ by Larry Johnson
Syria is also our great ally, permitting us to send Arab nationals to be tortured …
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
A client state of the US. e pluribus unum.
If the citizens of UAE, and other client states, were permitted to elect their own governments, it is almost certain that the governments elected could not be counted on to put US business interests above the needs of the citizenry.
It is equally certain that those elected governments would be opposed to many longstanding US policies, especially those that impact other nations.
This is why Americans pay so much of their hard-earned tax money to ensure that these rogue citizens are kept in strict crackdown, to prevent such terrorist acts as kicking out princes and emirs and electing a government of their own choosing.
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Is IMHO an impeachable offence.
The time has come to impeach President Bush
(Counterpunch) September 2005 — The raison d’etre of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure America’s oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically.
Bush’s single-minded focus on the “war against terrorism” has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The US has lost its largest and most strategic port, thousands of lives, and 80% of one of America’s most historic cities is under water.
If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
BCCI.
Bush Criminal Corporation Inc.
So nu???
What?
You’re surprised?
Iran/Contra continues.
Bigger than ever.
Mr. Bilkey?
Who is WRITING these names!!!???
AG
I thought it was the Bank of Crooks and Criminals. Same diff I guess.
Nope.
It’s Bush Criminal Corporation Inc. now.
There’s been a hostile takeover.
No honor amongst thieves, don’tcha know.
The crooks and criminals wanted a health plan.
And retirement benefits.
That doesn’t fly in the New World Order.
Too many crooks spoil the broth.
AG
LOL.
Surely you mean “froth” tho, not broth!
is that Bushco has beat it into our heads after 9/11 that the axis of evil=islamic jhads, etc., and so Common Sense would tell us that this is a bad deal.
But now that all their fear mongering for years is coming back to bite them in the ass.
We all know this deal will go through anyways. The Voice of Americans is not heard.
I just don’t understand why we can’t just fire the whole lot of them. We pay them. Fuck the elections-they don’t work anymore either.
Petard, meet hoist!
I do enjoy watching this bite ’em on the butt…
Your first paragraph made me laugh out loud. Great point.
Yup, you’ve summed it up well.
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SECURITY MATTERS!
Port of Rotterdam - Europe's largestWorld’s Largest Port of Rotterdam is owned and operated by the City of Rotterdam. Security is enhanced in cooperation with US Homeland Security. Investments in computer aided security checks and necessary equipment for screening and check of radioactive materials are all in place.
Forgery of freight documents will make any security impossible.
Don’t trust the Israelis, but certainly don’t trust the UAE government with a bad track record.
≈ Cross-posted from my diary —
Al Qaeda Buys Control Six US Port Facilities Chertoff Hands Over the Keys ≈
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY