Category: port

LA Will Be The First Nuclear Casualty (Revelation 16)


A Los Angeles suburb released this ominous video about how to survive a nuclear attack

Leanna Garfield and Dave Mosher
Aug. 9, 2017, 3:36 PM 4,246
Earlier this week, an analysis from US intelligence officials revealed that North Korea has figured out how to fit nuclear warheads on missiles, and that the country may have up to 60 nuclear weapons. (Some independent experts estimate the figure is much smaller).
On Monday, North Korea issued a stark warning to the US: If you attack us, we will retaliate with nuclear weapons.
Several American cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Honolulu, have response plans for terrorist attacks, including so-called “dirty bombs” containing radioactive material. But few have publicized plans to deal with a real nuclear explosion.
One exception is Ventura County, a suburb about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles. In 2003, the local government launched a PSA campaign called “Ready” that aims to educate Americans how to survive a nuclear attack. The goal, according to the campaign site, is to “increase the level of basic preparedness across the nation.”
One of the more recent PSA videos is the one below, published in 2014. It opens with a short message from Ventura County public health officer Dr. Robert Levin, then cuts to a little girl with an ominous expression around the one-minute mark.
“Mom, I know you care about me,” she says. “When I was five, you taught me how to stop, drop, and roll … But what if something bigger happens?” The video then flashes to the girl walking down empty streets alone.
The Ventura County Health Care Agency has published several guides on what to do in the event of a nuclear bomb hitting the area. As the girl says in the video above, the agency’s focus is to “go in, stay in, tune in.”
The scenario assumes a terrorist-caused nuclear blast of about 10 kilotons’ worth of TNT or less. Few people would survive within the immediate damage zone, which may extend up to one or two miles wide, but those outside would have a chance.
Brooke Buddemeier, a health physicist and radiation expert at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, previously told Business Insider that he likes Ventura County’s PSAs because they’re simple and easy to remember. “There is a ton of guidance and information out there,” he said, but “it’s kind of too hard to digest quickly.”
Buddemeier said you’d have about 15 minutes – maybe a little bit longer, depending on how far away you are from the blast site – to get to the center of a building to avoid devastating exposure to radioactive fallout. Going below-ground is even better.
“Stay in, 12 to 24 hours, and tune in – try to use whatever communication tools you have. We’re getting better about being able to broadcast messages to cell phones, certainly the hand-cranked radio is a good idea – your car radio, if you’re in a parking garage with your car,” he said.
The protection factor that various buildings, and locations within them, offer from the radioactive fallout of a nuclear blast. The higher the number, the greater the protection.Brooke Buddemeier/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Buddemeier adds, however, that you shouldn’t try to drive away or stay in your car for very long, because it can’t really protect you. Today’s vehicles are made of glass and very light metals, and offer almost no shielding from damaging radiation.
In large cities, hundreds of thousands of people would be at risk of potentially deadly exposure. But fallout casualties are preventable, Buddemeier said.
“All of those hundreds of thousands of people could prevent that exposure that would make them sick by sheltering. So, this has a huge impact: Knowing what to do after an event like this can literally save hundreds of thousands of people from radiation illness or fatalities,” he said.

The Next 911 Will Be a Nuclear Attack at the Port of Long Beach (Rev 14)


Trump’s Budget Would Leave U.S. Ports Open to Nuclear Threat
The administration is putting money toward a border wall, but giving short shrift to America’s other borders.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would pour money into a wall on the southern border — while stripping funding from protecting ports against the threat of nuclear attack.The administration’s proposed 2018 budget would halve funding for key counterterrorism programs at another kind of border: The 361 ports dotted across America’s 95,000 miles of coastline. The proposed cuts, leaving just $48 million in grant funding, have alarmed port operators, senators from both sides of the aisle, and counterterrorism experts alike.“I’m seriously concerned that these budget cuts will weaken our ability to detect, prevent, and respond to future attacks,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, last month.After the September 11, 2001 attacks, one of security experts’ greatest fears was that terrorists would acquire nuclear or radiological weapons and use them against the United States. Analysts determined that if a weapon of mass destruction were to be deployed, it would likely be delivered in one of the 12 million shipping containers arriving in ports every year — a flood of cargo seemingly too big to search without disrupting global trade.Determining that ports were “susceptible to large scale acts of terrorism,” Congress established the Port Security Grant Program in October 2002 to fund radiation detection scanners, security systems and maintenance, and training at maritime ports. But even today, worries about port security persist. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry said last month at an event at the Hoover Institute that North Korea may not need the long-range missiles it is currently developing in order to deliver a nuclear payload to American shores. Pyongyang, he said, “might even be able to do terrible damage to the United States by delivering [nuclear weapons] in freighters.”The Trump budget doesn’t just take aim at port security funding — it also would slash the U.S. Coast Guard budget, which provides layers of protection by tracking incoming vessels, scanning for illicit weapons, and making sure foreign ports have adequate security, Additionally, a pair of crack Coast Guard units — the Maritime Safety and Security Teams and the Maritime Security Response Teams — could lose their funding entirely, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press in February. The Response Teams are the Coast Guard’s ace in the hole against terrorists, said Cmdr. Paul Frantz, of the Coast Guard’s Office of Deployable Specialized Forces, “designed to respond to the threat or event of a terrorist attack.” This spring, nearly two dozen senators sent Trump’s budget director a letter warning against dismantling the Coast Guard units, warning that it would be “negligent and detrimental to our national security.”When the September 11 attacks occurred, U.S. ports were wide open to possible risks. Years of funding have built up the capabilities of ports around the country to detect potentially nefarious activity, including any smuggled nuclear bombs. According to testimony submitted to a June 2014 Senate homeland security committee hearing, in 2001 Customs and Border Patrol had none of the big scanners — known as radiation portal monitors — that spot radiological hazards. By 2014, it had 1,387 at ports across the country, able to screen 99 percent of incoming cargo, essentially meeting the post-9/11 Congressional mandate that 100 percent of incoming shipping containers be scanned.But these scanners require expensive maintenance and have a lifespan of 10 to 13 years, meaning those deployed after 9/11 will soon need to be replaced. Many ports don’t have the cash. “There’s a lot about the border wall, but we’re borders as well,” said April Danos, director of information technology at the Greater Lafourche Port Commission in Louisiana. The grants enable ports like Lafourche to install pricey security systems they wouldn’t have been able to afford, and to perform costly maintenance to keep systems operational. “Those budget cuts would impact us greatly,” said Danos. “We would not be able to maintain these systems.”The possible gutting of the grant program has port operators around the country up in arms. On June 12, the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) sent a letter calling on eight leading lawmakers to fully fund the grant program, highlighting that it is crucial in “helping seaports harden security and protect these vital transportation hubs and maritime borders.”Congress needs to be reminded that “ports are international borders,” said John Young, director of freight and surface transportation policy at the AAPA, in a phone interview with Foreign Policy. Used in collaboration with local law enforcement, said Young, port security grants “can do anything from fencing to cyber security assessments, to installing cyber equipment to purchasing equipment to help secure ports.”Without the grant money, it’s not clear how ports and operators will be able to fully address ongoing vulnerabilities or identify new ones.“It’s a big deal for us,” said Danos. “The gaps are going to be left wide open.”Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The First Nuclear Attack Will Be In LA (Revelation 14)

https://i0.wp.com/benmuse.typepad.com/ben_muse/images/port_of_long_beach_1.jpg

Effect of Nuclear Blast at Port Would Be National

August 16, 2006|Greg Krikorian | Times Staff Writer
Two years in the making, the detailed analysis by the Rand Corp.’s Center for Terrorism Risk Management Policy paints a terrifying picture not only of the possibility of such an attack but of its immediate and long-term effects on Southern California, the nation and the global economy.
“It would be bad enough if a terrorist organization were ever able to get a nuclear device inside the boundaries of the United States,” said Michael A. Wermuth, director of Rand’s homeland security research. “But this report shows that an attack of this scale can have far-reaching implications beyond the actual point of the attack itself.”
The study examined the effects of terrorists concealing a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in a shipping container and having the weapon explode shortly after it was unloaded onto a pier at the Port of Long Beach.
Within the first 72 hours, according to the study, the blast would “devastate a vast portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.”
In addition to the human casualties, the report says, the blast and subsequent fires might destroy the infrastructure and all ships in the Port of Long Beach and adjoining Port of Los Angeles, which combined comprise the nation’s busiest port of entry and handle about one-third of the nation’s imports.
If the attack led to the closure of all U.S. ports as a security measure, the report says, the ripple effect would be global since the value of imports and exports from American ports represents about 7.5% of world trade activity.
Additionally, the study says, 2 million to 3 million people might need to relocate because the nuclear fallout would contaminate a wide swath of the region. And the destruction of port area refineries, responsible for a third of the gas west of the Rockies, could create critical shortages of gasoline.
“It would take years to recover economically” from such an attack, Wermuth said. “It would take any number of years before some of the area close to ground zero could be rebuilt, and some of it would not be habitable for 20 years.”
The report is the latest to address concerns about the vulnerability of the nation’s ports nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Wermuth emphasized, however, that the study was not meant to predict that such an attack was likely.
Rather, he said, it was to analyze the potential consequences of a terrorist event “so all the various entities, both government and private, can see how dependent the broader economy is on a geographically specific part of the economy.”
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) echoed Wermuth’s comments about the scenario.
“The report does not estimate the likelihood of such an attack,” said Harman, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Committee on Homeland Security.
But it does underscore “the need to radically improve security at our ports,” Harman said, calling the ports “a gaping hole in American security for years.”

The Next Terrorist Attack Will Be In Our Ports (Revelation 14)

Image result for sea port long beach

The Next Terrorist Attack Will Be In Our Sea Ports

6 January, 2017 by 
Roger Aronoff image
By Roger Aronoff —— Bio and Archives January 5, 2017
In a recent column, I challenged the notion that the Obama administration has been scandal free. This has been the assertion, most recently, of Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, in a softball interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. The media have covered for the multiple scandals that have occurred right under their noses, and this is nothing less than willful blindness. It has applied to the Obama administration, the Clinton Foundation and recent presidential campaign, as well as going back to the Clinton administration. One largely overlooked scandal that ties together the Clintons, Barack Obama and the media’s willful blindness is the Gulftainer scandal.
Benefited from associations with the Obamas and Clintons
Hamid Jafar is the founder and chairman of the Crescent group of companies, according to the Crescent Petroleum website. However, as Alan Jones and Mary Fanning write for the CSP, Hamid Jafar “is the brother and the business partner of Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar—the Baghdad-born nuclear physicist who masterminded Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program.”
In other words, the company has links to terror. Jones and Fanning write that David Kay, a “U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991–1992” who returned to Iraq after 2003, says that Dr. Jafar told him, “You can bomb our buildings. You can destroy our technology. But you cannot take it [nuclear technology] out of our heads. We now have the capability.”
Dr. Jafar is currently CEO of Crescent’s URUK Engineering & Contracting subsidiary, although his brother claimed for years that he had “no business relationship” with Dr. Jafar, according to Jones and Fanning.
These are the business ties of a company in charge of shipping containers out of a port with close proximity to an Air Force base, a submarine base, and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Yet despite the risks, the mainstream media continue to look the other way on the Gulftainer scandal.

The Nuclear Truth (Revelation 15)

Ashley Collins | ashley.collins@naplesnews.com; 239-213-60292:44 p.m. ET March 8, 2017
Nuclear weapons can wipe out an entire city and kill millions. That power shouldn’t be taken lightly. Yet, several countries, including Iran, Pakistan and North Korea, continue to actively engage in creating and testing nuclear weapons. North Korea just test-launched four ballistic missiles into the sea near Japan Monday.
According to Dr. John Psaras, former chief scientific officer with the U.S. Department of Energy, the threat isn’t something to ignore. He spoke to more than 150 curious individuals at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples late last month during the annual “Progressive Voices Speak Out” lecture series.
His lecture — the fourth in the series — honed in on, “Nuclear Weapons in the Wrong Hands – Terrorism, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.” Other lectures in the series touched on the new presidential administration, rise in sea levels and the 2016 presidential election.
Psaras, now retired, dedicated more than 25 years to the U.S. Department of Energy.
In order to explain the current nuclear weapons situation, Psaras started off with its origin.
The nuclear age began in 1945; the year the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb in New Mexico, and dropped a uranium bomb over Japan’s Hiroshima, and a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki towards the end of World War II.
“Plutonium, to give you an idea, is roughly about, pound for pound, three times more vile than uranium,” Psaras said to the audience.
Ashley Collins
During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a nuclear arms race. At the peak of the war, the U.S. had more than 30,000 nuclear device units, Psaras added.
“Russia had almost double that amount. So we could have blown the world 100 times over with that power,” he said.
In order to quell the use and testing of nuclear weapons, an international treaty called Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was born in 1968, and was extended indefinitely in 1995.
The treaty recognized the U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France and China as nuclear-weapon states, and according to the Arms Control Association, legitimized those states’ arsenals. However, not all states’ agreeing to the treaty have stuck by the treaty’s rules. North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and has tested nuclear devices since. Iran engages in secret nuclear activities in violation of the treaty’s terms.
To date, there are still about 15,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, with more than 90 percent belonging to the U.S. and Russia, according to Psaras.
“In those instances you could have a situation where somebody may be able to steal a nuclear device… In the event that they do try to actually hit anybody, either ourselves or alternately our allies, we are ready, having anti-ballistic missiles located strategically in both Southeast Asia as well as Europe and the Middle East,” Psaras said.
He added that while he isn’t sure what the new presidential administration plans to do against nuclear weapons, it should be placed in high priority.
In a February interview with the Reuters news agency, President Donald Trump said he wants a world free of nuclear weapons, but if it can’t be, the United States should be “at the top of the pack.”
The lecture series concluded March 8 with Brendan Fischer, associate counsel with the Campaign Legal Center, speaking on the role of gerrymandering and voter suppression during the 2016 presidential election.
The congregation’s Rev. Tony Fisher hopes participants take action based on the information learned from the series.
“What we learn in these lectures hopefully just doesn’t sit in our brains and make us feel good that we’ve heard it. But that it motivates us to turn around and go out and do something in the wider world,” Fisher said to the audience.

The Next Terrorist Attack (Revelation 15:4)

Aberdeen Proving Ground
By Richard StoneFeb. 28, 2017 , 5:00 PM
Under cover of night, a blacked-out fishing boat slips into Baltimore, Maryland’s Inner Harbor. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter moves to apprehend the intruder. But before officers can board, both boats and much of Baltimore disappear in an intense flash: A nuclear bomb hidden on the boat has detonated. As first responders rush to victims, nuclear forensics specialists scrutinize data on radiation and acoustic and seismic waves from sensors placed around the city in a breakneck effort to decipher the bomb’s design and perhaps determine who was behind the blast.
At a time when a bomb smuggled by terrorists is as big a concern as one from a foreign power, delivered by missile or airplane, an attack at a port is “definitely a more likely scenario,” says Thomas Cartledge, a nuclear engineer with the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But forensic experts, who rely largely on nuclear test data collected years ago in Western deserts, lack a clear picture of how energy from a detonation would propagate in the highly saturated geology of many U.S. port cities. To remedy that, DTRA last October quietly staged Humming Terrapin: a 2-week test series at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland that detonated nearly 2 metric tons of conventional explosives to simulate nuclear blast effects in shallow water.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has mounted a major effort to prevent a nuclear bomb from being smuggled into a port. It has outfitted points of entry with radiation detectors, and it is working with foreign ports toward a goal of having all U.S.-bound cargo scanned for nuclear materials before departure. But it’s well nigh impossible to track the myriad small craft flitting in and out of the 361 U.S. ports and 153,000 kilometers of open shoreline. “There are a zillion fishing boats that leave U.S. ports and nobody inspects them when they come home,” says Matthew Bunn, a specialist on nuclear terrorism at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “If there is highly enriched uranium metal that’s shielded and below the water line, it’s going to be really tough to detect at long range.”
In case the unthinkable happens, a sensor array called Discreet Oculus that is being installed in major U.S. cities would capture key forensic information. The array, which DTRA is still developing, would record radiation and seismic waves emanating from the blast. “Discreet Oculus is up and running in several U.S. cities now,” Cartledge says. A sister system—a portable array that runs on battery or solar power called Minikin Echo—will be deployed at major events such as the Olympics or the Super Bowl. Data from Cold War–era nuclear testing and simulations are being used to calibrate the sensors.
Yet past U.S. testing is a poor proxy for detonations at a port, says Tamara VanHoose, a U.S. Army major and nuclear engineer at DTRA. A closer analog is a little-known campaign in 1963–64 in which the U.S. Air Force conducted a series of detonations of as much as 10 tons of chemical explosives at the bottom of Lake Superior. The tests offered a wealth of data on how seismic waves traverse the land-water interface, but they “were not instrumented to meet our needs,” VanHoose says.
Humming Terrapin aims to fill that gap. VanHoose and colleagues set up Discreet Oculus and two Minikin Echo arrays at Aberdeen, adding hydrophones, which are not currently included in either array. Another set of sensors probed how seismic signals ripple through East Coast rock layers. “These are wet-type geologies versus the granite geologies that we see out at the typical desert sites where we’ve done historic testing,” VanHoose says.
The team set out to test several scenarios. “We were looking at how a weapon might be delivered,” Cartledge says. A detonation above the water line—say in a container on the deck of a cargo ship—would produce a mostly acoustic signal, he says, whereas a detonation in a ship’s hull, below the surface, would be mostly seismic. “Really challenging,” he says, is the seismo-acoustic coupling “right at the surface”—a scenario one might expect for a detonation aboard a smaller boat.
Finally came the big bangs. Working with U.S. Navy hydrosound experts, the DTRA-led team detonated eight 175-kilogram TNT explosions at Aberdeen’s Briar Point Test Pond, as well as one 455-kilogram TNT explosion at a nearby underwater explosives facility. The team sheltered in a bunker about 450 meters away and watched the explosions on closed-circuit TV.
Less than a second after a detonation, the seismic waves arrived. The bunker “really rocks,” Cartledge says. “Wow, you don’t think it would shake us much as it does. That’s the fun part of the job.” A moment later came the airborne shock wave: “a very intense bang,” recalls Mark Leidig, a seismologist at Weston Geophysical Corp., a consulting firm in Lexington, Massachusetts, that designed the tests.
Now comes the hard work of sifting the data and “building our models to account for the coupling effects of the water we observed,” VanHoose says.
DTRA will stage its next test series back on dry land at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where an unshielded “fast-burst” nuclear reactor is normally used to test how military hardware might withstand a nuke’s high-energy neutron barrage. In June the DTRA team will verify that the speed-of-light sensors it is developing—detectors for gamma rays, radio waves, and light—can capture and model the fast burst, or the exponential rise of the nuclear reaction going critical. Such data provide “valuable forensic insight into weapon characteristics,” Cartledge says. Revealing a weapon’s design would speed the government’s response to a once-unimaginable act of terrorism, wherever it took place.

The Next Terrorist Attack Will Be In Our Sea Ports

Roger Aronoff image
By Roger Aronoff —— Bio and Archives January 5, 2017
In a recent column, I challenged the notion that the Obama administration has been scandal free. This has been the assertion, most recently, of Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, in a softball interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. The media have covered for the multiple scandals that have occurred right under their noses, and this is nothing less than willful blindness. It has applied to the Obama administration, the Clinton Foundation and recent presidential campaign, as well as going back to the Clinton administration. One largely overlooked scandal that ties together the Clintons, Barack Obama and the media’s willful blindness is the Gulftainer scandal.
Benefited from associations with the Obamas and Clintons
Hamid Jafar is the founder and chairman of the Crescent group of companies, according to the Crescent Petroleum website. However, as Alan Jones and Mary Fanning write for the CSP, Hamid Jafar “is the brother and the business partner of Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar—the Baghdad-born nuclear physicist who masterminded Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program.”
In other words, the company has links to terror. Jones and Fanning write that David Kay, a “U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991–1992” who returned to Iraq after 2003, says that Dr. Jafar told him, “You can bomb our buildings. You can destroy our technology. But you cannot take it [nuclear technology] out of our heads. We now have the capability.”
Dr. Jafar is currently CEO of Crescent’s URUK Engineering & Contracting subsidiary, although his brother claimed for years that he had “no business relationship” with Dr. Jafar, according to Jones and Fanning.
These are the business ties of a company in charge of shipping containers out of a port with close proximity to an Air Force base, a submarine base, and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Yet despite the risks, the mainstream media continue to look the other way on the Gulftainer scandal.

The Next Terrorist Attack (Revelation 15)

by CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY December 23, 2016
lopez@securefreedom.org | 202-719-2423
OMINOUS TIES RAISE ALARMS ABOUT FOREIGN ENTITY’S LEASE AT U.S. PORT
(Washington, DC): A new Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper authored by two intrepid and indefatigable researchers, Alan Jones and Mary Fanning, has brought to light a shocking fact: The family of Iraqi nuclear physicist Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, considered to be “the father of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program,” has been awarded a 35-year lease for cargo container operations at Port Canaveral, Florida.
According to Mr. Jones and Ms. Fanning’s paper, entitled “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” Secret Deal Allows Company Tied to Saddam’s Nuclear Bombmaker, Iran and U.A.E. to Manage Key Florida Port Facilities, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew unilaterally approved the lease for Gulftainer – a Middle Eastern ports company owned by the Emir of Sharjah of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iraqi businessman Hamid Dhia Jafar – following two years of secret talks.
It is deeply concerning that Lew and the Obama administration decided to forego any national security threat analysis by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which certainly seems in order given the nature and implications of this deal. After all, a similarly fraught arrangement – a contract for Dubai Ports World to manage a number of U.S. ports a decade ago – was submitted for CFIUS approval, and ultimately aborted.
In addition to being an important seaport in its own right, Port Canaveral is in close proximity to a number of key U.S. facilities – including the Navy’s East Coast ballistic missile submarine base, two U.S. Air Force Space Command bases and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
As the paper’s authors dug into the details surrounding this deal, they discovered – in addition to Gulftainer’s obvious and still potentially problematic ties to the UAE – a troubling array of connections linking it to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and President Barack Obama, himself. For example, Obama’s former college roommates, one Indian and one Pakistani – who remain to this day his close friends – have personal and business relationships with the Jafar family.
Then, there are ominous connections to Iran, as well. Siamak Namazi is a former Iranian government official who, along with Trita Parsi, helped found the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). NIAC is considered to be the U.S. lobbying arm of the Tehran regime. Namazi, Parsi, and NIAC were all deeply involved in the negotiations that led to the “Obamabomb Deal“: the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran.
As the secret Gulftainer negotiations were underway from 2012-2014, Namazi served as the head of strategic planning for Crescent Petroleum. The company is another Jafar family business based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Crescent is closely involved in oil and gas projects with Teheran’s state-owned petroleum concern, the National Iranian Oil Company. Interestingly, Siamak Namazi was detained inside Iran around mid-October 2015 and remains in custody there as of December 2016. Among other things, that puts him conveniently beyond the reach of the FBI.
In unveiling the Center’s new Occasional Paper, its president, Frank J. Gaffney, observed:
It is shocking that management of one of the United States’ most strategically located ports has been turned over to foreign interests that include: Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb-maker; the rabidly anti-American jihadist mullahs of Iran; and a country, the UAE, that was stopped from taking over operational control of American ports ten years ago.
This transaction must be suspended, if not canceled outright, pending a thorough evaluation of its merits, a rigorous national security threat assessment by CFIUS and most importantly, an informed and thorough debate on Capitol Hill.
“What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” is available for free in PDF format here: Download file Port_Canaveral_Occasional_Paper_12-23-16
For over twenty-five years, the Center for Security Policy has pioneered the organization, management and direction of public policy coalitions to promote U.S. national security. Even more importantly, the Center’s mission has been to secure the adoption of the products of such efforts by skillfully enlisting support from executive branch officials, key legislators, other public policy organizations, opinion-shapers in the media and the public at large.