Documents show conditions for Dubai deal

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

As part of the $6.8 billion purchase, state-owned Dubai Ports World agreed to reveal records on demand about “foreign operational direction” of its business at U.S. ports, the documents said. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment.

The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.

Marked ‘confidential’
“They’re not lax but they’re not draconian,” said James Lewis, a former U.S. official who worked on such agreements. If officials had predicted the firestorm of criticism over the deal, Lewis said, “they might have made them sound harder.”

The conditions involving the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., also known as P&O, were detailed in U.S. documents marked “confidential.” Such records are regularly guarded as trade secrets, and it is highly unusual for them to be made public.

The concessions — described previously by the Homeland Security Department as unprecedented among maritime companies — reflect the close relationship between the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

For Bush, an emerging headache
President Bush’s marquee issue, the war on terrorism, is being used against him by Democrats and rebelling members of his own party in a donnybrook that may prove to be a major headache in an election year.

In a sign of the growing bipartisan opposition to the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates, lawmakers on Wednesday ratcheted up their displeasure with President Bush, some saying that they could override a threatened presidential veto.

On the heels of debacles over government eavesdropping, Katrina recovery and Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident, people in both parties are suggesting the port security issue is another case of Bush appearing to be tone deaf to controversy.

The White House said Wednesday that Bush was unaware of the pending sale until the deal already had been approved by his administration.

Bush brushed aside objections by leaders in the Senate and House that the $6.8 billion sale could raise risks of terrorism at American ports. In a forceful defense of his administration’s earlier approval of the deal, he pledged Tuesday to veto any bill from Congress that would block the sale of a British company to the Arab firm.

The deal would put Dubai Ports World in charge of major shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

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