Duncan Hunter: President Trump Must Block The Sale of Delaware Port To Saddam’s Weapons Chief
Patrick Howley
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California Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, is urging President Donald Trump to block the state of Delaware’s sale of the Port of Wilmington to a Middle Eastern company owned by a weapons research chief who worked for Saddam Hussein.
The Delaware General Assembly votes Thursday to approve the full-scale lease of the Port to the company Gulftainer. Democrats are expected to approve the deal. Gulftainer is owned by Hamid Jafar, longtime Iraqi power broker and brother of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction chief Dhia Jafar.
Here is my shocking episode of “Howley Reports” on the case.
Hunter sent a letter to Trump to “place a hold on” the transfer of the port “until the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) can fully investigate the national security implications of this deal.”
Big League Politics reported that the Delaware-based International Longshoreman’s Association and a local Diamond State port board agreed to lease the Port of Wilmington to Gulftainer, which is listed to be in the ownership possession of Dr. Hamid Jafar and his family. Dr. Hamid Jafar is the brother of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction chief Jafar Dhia Jafar.
Technically a lease, the transfer of the port would give Gulftainer control of all security and operations. Gulftainer has already taken over operations of Port Canaveral’s cargo terminal in Florida.
The deal would cost $500 million and taxpayer money will be used in some capacity as the port gets transferred.
Mary Fanning and Alan Jones have done incredible reporting work for Big League Politics exposing Gulftainer’s designs on American ports, and the characters behind the takeover. They write:
The Obama administration placed Aimen Nabi Mir, former two-time president of the youth wing of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), into the top advisory position to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a national security post at the Treasury Department.
Aimen Mir was the CFIUS Staff Chairperson from 2009 until 2014. During that time, Aimen Mir played a key role in the CFIUS panel’s decision to approve the sale of Uranium One to Russia’s Rosatom. Mir also played a key role in the Treasury Department’s refusal to investigate the UAE’s Gulftainer 35-year cargo container terminal lease at Port Canaveral, a critical military infrastructure facility for U.S. naval and space operations. Both decisions severely damaged United States national security.
Aimen Mir helped set the table for Vladimir Putin to seize control of over 20 percent of U.S. uranium and was part of the decision that awarded control of Port Canaveral’s cargo container terminal to Saddam Hussein’s rogue nuclear weapons scientist and designated Iraq War enemy combatant, Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar. Dr. Jafar’s brother and business partner, Gulftainer co-owner Hamid Jafar, was under investigation by the Treasury Department and four congressional committees for his ‘Oil For Superweapons” scheme in concert with Saddam Hussein.
For starters, Aimen Mir’s ISNA connections are troubling. ISNA is one of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the U.S. and was named by the Department of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.
Further, Aimen Mir is the son of Kashmir-born physician Dr. Ghulam Nabi Mir, an ISNA Founders Committee member. Dr. Mir is also the president of the World Kashmir Awareness Forum (WKAF), an Islamic platform Dr. Mir uses to aggressively advocate for Kashmir’s secession from India in order to join Pakistan. WKAF’s Secretary General “Dr.” Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, is a convicted felon, also from Kashmir, who served as a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) operativeinside the United States.
Fai was arrested by the FBI in 2011 for covertly operating as an unregistered foreign agent while receiving $3.5 million dollars in wire transfers from the ISI. Fai used some of that money to fund an elaborate lobbying operation pushing Kashmiri “independence” on unsuspecting U.S. officials who remained seemingly unaware that Pakistan was running the operation. In 2013, Fai was granted early release from U.S. federal prison by the Justice Department.
Like his father’s ISI partner Fai, Aimen Mir appears to have been running his own operation at CFIUS.
Aimen Mir was the CFIUS Staff Chairperson from 2009 until 2014. During Mir’s five years in the staff chairperson’s seat, CFIUS approved Russia’s 2010 purchase of Uranium One, effectively handing Vladimir Putin control of 20 percent of America’s uranium. Also during Mir’s term, the Treasury Department refused to conduct two legally-required CFIUS investigations of Port Canaveral’s 2014 container terminal lease concession to the UAE’s Gulftainer.
The Gulftainer deal effectively placed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons mastermind, Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, along with his longtime Russian KGB/SVR and Iranian regime associates and a UAE Emir inside the wire of a national-security sensitive U.S. port. Gulftainer misrepresented its true ownership; facts that Mir could and should have uncovered easily.
A World Bank International Finance Corporation (IFC) document (now scrubbed from the IFC website) proved that Gulftainer was owned in part by Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, the Emir of Sharjah, UAE. Under the Foreign Investment National Security Act of 2007 (FINSA), foreign government ownership of an acquiring entity automatically triggers a mandatory CFIUS review, regardless of whether the transaction is a purchase or a lease. Aimen Mir understood CFIUS and FINSA law and chose to ignore it, as did Treasury Secretary Jacob ‘Jack’ Lew and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.
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