Veto pen on behalf of Dubai

Bush willing to go to the mat for deal he claims he didn't even know about

President Bush is just daring someone to stop him. Tiny details of super-secret machinations behind the Dubai port deal are just beginning to peel away. For example, Josh Marshall today cites an apparent White House leak revealing that many standard operating procedures concerning business documents and other matters that are usually attached to foreign transactions were waved in this case.

What seems to be emerging is a story of close-knit inside dealing that has trumped the usual standards and practices for foreign ventures operating on US soil. Personally, I don't know if this Dubai firm presents any risk to national security. But I am convinced that the Bush administration sees security concerns too basically trumped by the deal.

Despite lingering questions about 911-UAE connections and other supposed Terror War issues (two 911 hijackers came from UAE, and the state was the main transshipment point for the clandestine nuclear-weapons-component supply network of Pakistani engineer AQ Kahn), no big Terror War issues seem to have been raised. According to a New York Times story today by Elisabeth Bumiller and Carl Hulse, the

deal to hand over operations at major American ports to a government-owned company in Dubai did not involve national security and so did not require a more lengthy review

What is really striking in this deal, I think, is the immediate threat of a presidential veto against any action Congress may take to block it. Yesterday, reporters David Sanger and Eric Lipton wrote Wednesday in the New York Times that Bush

said Tuesday that he would veto any legislation blocking a deal for a state-owned company in Dubai to take over the management of port terminals in New York, Miami, Baltimore and other major American cities

This from a president who, ``rarely makes veto threats, and he has not vetoed a single bill in his more than five years in office''.

Does that not seem like a strange way for the president to react to something so small that only last week, he claims not to have known anything about it?

Here is how CBS News phrased the mystery in a report including an interview by Gloria Borger with the Dark Lord himself, Richard Perle:

Yet why the president was ill-informed remains puzzling. One explanation is that Mr. Bush and his senior staff couldn't brief Congress, because they didn't know. The panel that makes the decisions, The Committee on Foreign Investments, is not run by high-level Cabinet members listed on its Web site. Instead they usually rubber-stamp decisions made by staffers, Borger reports.

``The committee almost never met, and when it deliberated it was usually at a fairly low bureaucratic level,'' Richard Perle said. Perle, who has worked for the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations added, ``I think it's a bit of a joke.''

So we are to believe that the decisions by a rubber-stamp committee that almost never met has slipped through something the White House did not know about but now finds so important that a veto of any attempt to stop the deal is threatened?

How much more evidence do we need that we are under an out-of-control band of radical statists in this administration? Maybe this episode will stir up the few true conservatives left who might be able to help set some limits.