If you read this blog, you know I’m no fan of President Bush. But in the current dustup between Congress and the Administration over a British-owned port terminal company being bought out by a Dubai-owned company, I have to say I think Congress is way off base. NPR has done several stories on the subject, including one on Morning Edition this morning, which goes into the specifics of Port Newark, NJ, one of the six ports put in question by this deal.

In case you don’t feel like listening for four minutes and 48 seconds, here are a few salient points:

• There are six terminals in the port authority owned jointly by the states of New York and New Jersey; of these, two are run by Chinese companies, two by American companies, one by a Danish company, and the last, Port Newark, is run by a joint partnership of a Danish company and the British company which is being bought out by the Dubai company.
• Most employees of all these terminals are Americans; it’s just the ownership of the company which is foreign.
• The terminals are basically luggage handlers: they unload ships and load trucks. The terminal does preliminary security checks, such as radiation detection, verification of documentation, and so forth.
• The real security checking, however, is done by Customs agents. In other words, the federal government, same as every other port terminal in the country.

Suffice it to say, having heard three or four NPR pieces on this subject in the last day or so, I’m not losing any sleep over the Dubai company.

But that is a long way from saying our ports are safe—lots of people have raised the alarm over them as relatively easy targets for terrorist attacks. And it doesn’t say much for the Bush administration that the White House was apparently unaware of this transaction until Congress was already on it like a monkey on a cupcake. Or that the Treasury Secretary is a former CEO of a rail company now owned by the Dubai company, and the nominee to run the Maritime Administration is a former head of Latin American operations for the Dubai company—part of the Bushies’ long-standing practice of putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.

I have to say I’m thrilled to see Congress finally (finally!) beginning to act like an independent branch of government. It’s just too bad that they had to pick the wrong side of what appears to be a non-issue to do it, especially when the really important issue, port security, is so far being ignored.

Update: Dick Meyer at CBS News covers the same ground as the NPR stories, in a much more pointed manner. Glenn Greenwald seems to be coming to this conclusion, after initially saying he didn’t have an opinion (read the comments below the post). Also, as much as I generally despise Joe Lieberman, he seems to be the one person in Congress pointing out that Dubai ownership really isn’t a problem.