President Clinton’s visit to India In March 2000:

“The president was sick of not interacting with people,” said White House spokesman Jake Siewert.

It started in the village of Nayla, where Clinton allowed a swarm of colorfully dressed women to shower him with flower petals as they danced and chanted all around him. He did a sort of hopping dance in response, and the funny, happy scene aired on televisions throughout the world. Today in Hyderabad, Clinton spoke to high-tech industry executives and then plunged into the crowd to shake hands as if it were an election-eve rally. “¦ Tonight, at a meeting of business executives in Bombay, the president spoke fondly of the Nayla scene, when flower petals rained on him. “I’m known now for not dancing very well,” he said. [Washington Post, 3/25/00]

President Bush’s visit to India today:

Tens of thousands of Indians waving black and white flags and chanting “Death to Bush!” rallied Wednesday in New Delhi to protest a visit by President Bush. “¦ “Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message “” killer Bush go home,” one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd. [AP, 3/1/06]

The AP adds some more historical detail to the decline in the international respect for the American president. “The mood in New Delhi was much changed from 1959 when President Eisenhower became the first U.S. president to visit the nation. Then, an estimated 1 million joyous Indians threw rose petals at Eisenhower as he rode in an open limousine along a route where a sign heralded him as ‘Prince of Peace.’” One thing is certain — Indians no longer see the U.S. President as a “Prince of Peace.”

New evidence has emerged that key agencies of the United Arab Emirates may have been infiltrated by al-Qaeda. In May or June of 2002, al Qaeda officials wrote a letter to the UAE government claiming the emirates were “well aware” of the infiltration.

The letter, translated by the United States Government, is publicly available on the website of the West Point Combating Terrorism Center. The intro:

The key sentence:

During the initial 30-day review, the Coast Guard raised concerns that Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the UAE, could be infiltrated. An unclassified Coast Guard document cautioned, “There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations, that precludes an overall threat assessment”

The existence of the al-Qaeda letter – known officially as AFGP-2002-603856 – was first reported in a little noticed column by Scripps Howard.

The Bush administration has insisted that the law requires all information about the review of the United Arab Emirates port deal to be kept secret. State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli:

All departments are called upon to bring to the table derogatory information that they may have that would bear on the decisions of the committee. I would say that the deliberations are confidential so there’s basically not much I can share with you about what the specific deliberations were.

Jim Flurio, the co-sponsor of the law that created the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States – the panel that reviewed the Dubai port deal – said, under the law, most information could be made public:

In an interview, Florio said he did not like how application of the 17-year-old law had evolved, particularly the confidential nature of the CFIUS deliberations. “The confidentiality was designed to protect trade secrets. It was not designed to protect the deliberations and evaluations” of the government, he said. “The deliberations of this committee should be public and Congress should be engaged.”

Instead, he said the Republican Congress “has gone brain dead on oversight.”

In other words, there is no legal reason why the vast majority of the deliberations and evaluations of the UAE port deal could not be made available to the public and Congress. (That goes for the 30-day review that has already been conducted and the 45-day investigation to come.)

If this information establishes that there is no security risk associated with the deal, as the administration insists, it would be in their interest to do so.