State Department Three Years Late Sanctioning Iran, North Korea, and Syria Collaborators, Says Ros-Lehtinen

Press Release

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, made the following statement at a subcommittee hearing entitled, "The Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act: State Department's Non-Compliance." Statement by Ros-Lehtinen (as prepared):

"As part of this subcommittee's continued efforts to perform our oversight functions of the State Department and of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, we're convening this hearing to take a look into State's compliance with the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA). INKSNA, by State's own admission, is an extremely important and effective tool to address the threat of the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles. It could be even more effective if we pass an updated version, like the INKSNA Reform and Modernization Act I authored in 2011 -- which passed the House overwhelmingly with a 418-2 vote.

This law requires the President -- who has delegated the authorities in INKSNA to the State Department -- to provide a report to our committee every six months, identifying individuals who are believed to have sent or received certain items or technology to or from Iran, North Korea or Syria. These individuals are then subject to specific sanctions, as detailed in the law.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked by Chairman Royce to examine State's implementation of INKSNA, review its reporting processes and identify the impact of that process on the imposition of sanctions against the Iranian regime. What the GAO found was that the State Department has been extremely delayed in providing the requisite reports to Congress. Of the 18 legislatively mandated reports the Department was to issue to date, it has only issued 6 of these reports. The latest report we received was not only late -- it took State almost three years to prepare the 2011 report that we received in December 2014 -- but this report sat awaiting approval on the Deputy Secretary of State's desk for over a year.

State repeatedly told GAO that one of the major causes for delay is the vetting process of the individual cases. Each cycle, State has unilaterally made the decision to package cases together and move them through the process at the same time. So what ends up happening is, one problematic case can hold up the process for all of the others. Instead of pulling that case aside and processing it in the next cycle, State holds up the entire package until all the cases are cleared -- thus holding up indefinitely the sanctions on all of the individuals. And why is that important?

While we're waiting for an entire group to be processed because of one problematic case, we're allowing these other individuals to continue to help Iran, North Korea or Syria skirt sanctions and proliferate WMD. This is a huge blow to the intent of the sanctions and their effectiveness, as well as our national security. But let's look at the timeline of that last report for a moment:

We received the report in December 2014, and it sat on the desk for over a year. In November 2013, President Obama announced that the P5+1 had reached an agreement with Iran and were ready to implement the Joint Plan of Action while they continued to pursue a final agreement. If we connect the dots here, the administration had actionable intelligence -- and a legal obligation, let's not forget that -- to sign off on the report and sanction these individuals. But the administration sat on this and did not file the report and sanction these individuals.

This flies in the face of all of the times the President -- and his administration officials - has said that the U.S. will continue to fully enforce all of the sanctions on Iran while the negotiations were ongoing. Each and every one of those times, they knew that this was less than truthful. The reporting requirement of the law is clear: State is required to submit INKSNA reports to Congress every 6 months, yet the Department took it upon itself to ignore this requirement. This requirement was not a suggestion, it is the law.

And as the Iran nuclear negotiations continue, we're also left to wonder what other sanctions is the administration not enforcing that it should be? We already had the recent report from the UN Panel of Experts that said that the U.S. and other nations were not reporting Iran's sanctions violations to the Sanctions Committee. Ambassador Power was here yesterday and I asked her about that, and she too stated that the administration has been above water and has been fully enforcing all of the sanctions. But when it comes to the nuclear negotiations and Iran, I'm more inclined to believe that the administration is purposefully misleading Congress and is, in fact, not following the intent and letter of the law.

This GAO report should be just the tip of the iceberg, and I commend Director Melito and his team for their hard work in putting this report together."

Source