"There has been a lot of hyperventilated rhetoric," said Bill McLaughlin, a spokesman for the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, one of six U.S. ports to host a P&O terminal. The others are New York, New Orleans, Baltimore, Miami and Newark, N.J.

"It seemed like there is too much of a big deal being made" of the Dubai deal, agreed Sean Duffy, general manager of the New Orleans-based Steamship Association of Louisiana, a trade group for maritime companies. "I don't see it as potential security breach.". . .

Some experts said that the biggest maritime security threat isn't at the dock but at factories and warehouses that could be located thousands of miles away. That is where the metal cargo containers being shipped to the United States are loaded and locked before crossing the oceans.

"The real issue is not so much what comes into the country, but where it starts," said Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser on national security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Security concerns shouldn't be an issue in the Dubai deal, Ullman said, because terminal operators like P&O and Dubai are relative bit players in port security.

"It doesn't make any difference" if they are owned by Americans, Europeans or Arabs, he said.

Ullman said politicians are responding to the post-9/11 fears of their constituents, which are "understandable but emotional." Still, a lot of the criticism has been hyperbolic, implying that U.S. ports were being taken over, he said.