[Preechr]

I've been out of the loop for a couple of days, but IIRC, The deal was always for 21 or so ports worldwide, with 6 in America.

As I see it, the ownership of ports in any particular country is just an under-the-table form of payola. We don't want the media reporting that we are giving UAE billions of dollars in compensation for flyover rights and intelligence, so we set them up with a sweet little deal where they can rake in a nice profit for doing nothing.

What will DPW actually be getting? They lease the spaces in a dock to the actual companies with boats and cargo. Do they control what actually gets on the ships or where they go? No. No more so than your landlord can tell you what wear to work on any given day. There is a small security concern that through employment with or connections to DPW an infiltrator could access some specific information regarding where a particular shipment of coargo might be at any given moment, but I guarantee you could wrap a towel around your head, grab a briefcase with a blinky light and walk down to any dock in the United States and pay $1000 to get any container unlocked you wanted.

Remember the news organization that TWICE smuggled shipments of depleted uranium into New York from Indonesia? We need to be more worried about rampant incompetence and graft in the shipping industry more than we are about who owns what berth where.

Abcdxxxx, when you talk about ties to terror organizations, you are speaking in the extremely broad terms preferred by exaggerationists. What ties? The guys from 9/11? Criminals are born everyday all over the world... should we keep track of nationalities of various evil people so we can decide what countries are just inherently bad and which ones are good? The fact that they actually have a westernized banking system that was usable to terrorists? Weren't our own banks used similarly? The fact that Dubai is the most western city in the ARAB Middle East and thus the most economically sound? How is any of that proof that the country should be punished (or not rewarded for helping us out?)

Yours is a nuanced towel-head argument, man.