“We will not discriminate between those who committed the acts and those who harbor them.”… “We will not discriminate between those who committed the acts and those who harbor them.”

Five years ago, it was a statement that brought comfort to a United States that found itself chilled to the bone, under attack on its own soil. Our president assuaged the nation’s anxiety and pain by promising us that the United States would punish terrorists and the governments that helped them. That was the mission.

Enter Dubai, city of ports, member of the United Arab Emirates, a country about which Thomas Kean Sr., Republican chairman of the 9/11 Commission, said, “There’s no question that two of the 9/11 hijackers came from there and money was laundered through there.” A country whose governing officials the CIA believes to have been “cozy” with Osama bin Laden, according to a Feb. 24 report in Newsday.

How does the White House plan to bring this terrorist-harboring government to justice?

They want to offer them control of six of our nation’s seaports, critical points of foreign access to our country.

Someone must have changed the mission.

It gets better; the port system itself was identified last year in a study conducted by the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard as a problem spot in securing the nation. Many of the ports, the study concluded, are inadequately secured and vulnerable to terrorist attack.

The administration’s rationale for this is that the United Arab Emirates has recently made itself a valuable ally of the United States in the war on terror, and that Dubai Ports World would do a very good job of managing U.S. ports, as it has done with its many other ports around the world, none of which have seen anything significant in the way of intrigue or controversy in the past.

President Bush has even gone so far as to threaten to veto any congressional action against the deal and challenged objectors “to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard.”

Allow us to make ourselves crystal clear: Dubai Ports World is owned by a state that not only provided two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, but is strongly suspected of having harbored Osama bin Laden himself. That is why.

Look, it’s no secret that the war on terror necessitates very strange (read: evil) bedfellows in the Middle East, but things like this evoke the idea that either the Bush White House is corrupt beyond all rational comprehension or just so asleep at the wheel that someone desperately needs to hit the brakes. It’s hard to say which one of those possibilities is more disturbing.

Sure, there’s always the possibility that DPW isn’t up to anything dirty other than making large amounts of money – and, in fact, a case could be made for that being the most probable scenario. But consider that the United States has spent $18 billion since 2001 making sure that nobody can sneak suspect shoes on an airplane and that grandma gets pulled out of the metal detector line every now and then for a cavity search.

If we’re willing to go so far against the law of diminishing returns to beef up airport security to a marginal degree, is it really too much to ask that we not hand over control of six U.S. ports – obvious, glaring points of weakness in securing the nation against terrorism – to a country that is suspected of harboring terrorists? What about the countless others that definitely didn’t? Don’t they have any port management companies?