Port insecurity: Is it going to be terminal this time?

One of the many times I deservedly poked a stick in the eye of President George W. Bush (yeah the Republican one) was when his administration tried to put the United Arab Emirates in charge of major shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

You remember that?

It was 2006, just five years after the 9/11 terror attacks and in the midst of two wars being waged by the United States against two Islamic fundamentalist terror groups — al-Qaida and the Taliban. Yet President Bush thought it was no problem to put Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates in charge of our major East Coast ports.

Fortunately, Congress said NO in thunder back in the days when Congress still hadn’t ceded all or most of its constitutional authority over to the presidential branch.

That, you would hope, would be the end of it, but Mideastern potentates are apparently as persistent as Midwestern liberals. Just as health-care reform kept re-surfacing until it finally passed in President Obama’s first term, so too did the United Arab Emirates keep pressure on to gain control of a U.S. port.

And they did it.

A 35-year contract was quietly signed last year allowing United Arab Emirates-based Gulftainer to run an intermodal container terminal in Port Canaveral. Yeah, that Port Canaveral, the high security port that houses nuclear submarines, various military installations, defense contractors, and is within a figurative stone’s throw from Kennedy Space Center. Oh yes, and did I mention that it is also a favorite location for cruise ships to dock?

I heard about the Gulftainer contract from Mary Fanning, co-founder of the Coalition of Concerned Citizens (www.americanreport.org) and the Qatar Awareness Campaign (www.stopqatarnow.com).

Fanning is a colleague of Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, a tireless advocate for restoring U.S. national security who happens to live in Bigfork, Montana. They, along with Col. Allen West and other retired military figures, journalists and security analysts, have pieced together the facts behind the Gulftainer contract, and it’s even scarier than the Dubai Ports World scandal.

That’s because it’s already a done deal.

Apparently, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, a former Obama chief of staff, approved the Gulftainer deal without seeking approval of the Interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Remember, Gultainer is leasing the port facility rather than purchasing it outright. Lew rightly notes that such a lease can be considered something other than an investment, thus making it possible to bypass the Interagency Committee on Foreign Investment.

But whether you own the terminal or you lease it, you still have a massive stake in the security interests of the United States. The argument was used in the Dubai Ports World scandal that the Arab company was just operating the shipping facility and the Coast Guard would be in charge of security. Sorry, that dog didn’t hunt then, and it don’t hunt now. These port terminals are massive facilities, and all it would take is a couple of well-placed employees with terrorist connections to make Port Canaveral the scene of the next “Die Hard” sequel, except I am betting there won’t be a Bruce Willis on hand to stop the explosion in this real-life action thriller.

The fact that the owner of Gulftainer, Badr Jafar, has been tied to donations to the Clinton Family Foundation — and that Lew is a long-time Clinton associate! — just adds more fuel to the fire, but there doesn’t have to be any favoritism or corruption in play to make this a big story.

Bottom line: This is a national security threat that could play out any time in the next 35 years. Congress needs to get off its duff and do something just like it did in 2006 when the American public demanded action to stop President Bush’s ill-conceived surrender of our port sovereignty to the United Arab Emirates.

Because if we as a nation look the other way and ignore the fact that Dubai controls access to this crucial port, you can be sure of one thing — the Islamic terrorists will not.