Parsons’s Partners
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It will be illuminating to see how city politicians and community leaders react to the news that the engineering firm chosen for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan counts among its lucrative clients two terror sponsoring nations, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The story, reported in The New York Sun on Friday by our Benjamin Smith, concerns the selection of Parsons Brinckerhoff as part of a team drawing up a land use and transportation plan for the area surrounding Ground Zero. It turns out that Parsons has been involved in building power plants in both Saudi Arabia and Syria. While no one is accusing the firm of breaking the law, the company’s roster of clients has already outraged at least some members of families who those who lost their lives in the attacks of September 11.
Many will be quick to point out that it is perfectly legal for American companies to do certain kinds of work for the Syrian and Saudi regimes. But the work of repairing Lower Manhattan carries a certain resonance. It would be difficult for Parsons Brinckerhoff to feign ignorance of the records of the countries it has agreed to work for and accept money from. Syria is so blatant about its sponsorship of terror that it has been a regular on the State Department’s list of terror sponsoring nations. Saudi Arabia has been a bit — only a bit — more sly, but the evidence mounts that despite the Saudi ruling family’s supposed friendship with America, both the ruling family and its government ministers have been involved in funding anti-Jewish terror in Israel — it has even come out that a so-called “Saudi Committee for Support of the Al-Quds Intifada” has been cutting checks to the families of suicide bombers and other unworthies.
A Web site maintained by the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce notes that, “PB has provided services for clients in Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE and Yemen.” It’s unclear how recently the company worked in Iran and Iraq, two nations that President Bush has declared part of the Axis of Evil. In our opinion, New Yorkers deserve more than a curt no comment from Parsons.
