The Dubai Ports Deal

The president can't get away with his usual "trust me" mantra now that Congress and the public have emphatically declared they don't believe that the administration's key committee in approving the takeover exercised appropriate care. Legitimate security questions have been raised that can be answered only by a genuinely fresh evaluation whose scope and results are transmitted to Congress and to a perplexed public as well. At this point there is little hard evidence that Dubai Ports World is especially vulnerable to infiltration by terrorists or lax on security. The company's home country, United Arab Emirates, has rightly been blistered in the past for taking inadequate steps to close down terrorist financing and stop a renegade Pakistani scientist from shipping nuclear technology to rogue nations. But in recent years, the country seems to have cooperated with American efforts in the war on terror, and it was one of the first to join American efforts to check containers abroad for dangerous weapons before they are loaded onto ships headed for the United States.