Should a final deal emerge from the Iran nuclear talks, now nearing a June 30 deadline, Congress will expect reports from the President every six months on whether Iran is in compliance. These reports would not be optional. They would be required under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, signed into law last month by President Obama.
In theory, these reports would help ensure that a President eager to preserve his long-sought deal with Iran would find it hard to bury the evidence if Iran cheats. The President would have to inform Congress.
But would it really work that way? The President is already required under various laws to submit reports to Congress on such major international matters as human rights, terrorism and the proliferation traffic of Iran, North Korea and Syria. There are specific deadlines for all these reports, which contain information germane in some cases to vital policy decisions. With impunity, the Obama administration has been missing these deadlines, in some cases by staggering margins.
By some accounts, these delays have been politically motivated, reflecting efforts to avoid, or at least delay, offending Iran. Administration officials protest that the delays are due to to a brand of perfectionism that just takes time.
This Thursday the State Department finally clocked in with its annual compilation of Human Rights Reports for countries worldwide. This release was four months late; a record-breaking delay. At the accompanying press conference Assistant Secretary Tom Malinowski blamed the lag on Secretary of State John Kerry’s schedule, saying Kerry wanted to show his commitment to human rights by presiding along with Malinowksi at the release of the reports. But coordinating their schedules took a while. So Kerry’s commitment to human rights translated into State sitting on the reports until four months after the legally imposed Feb. 25 deadline.
Last week brought the tardy release of State’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, due out every year by April 30th, but not released this year until June 19th. The reason for that delay, according to a State spokesperson I queried in early June, was that the material was being reviewed for “accuracy and readability.” (Of the seven country reports on terrorism produced annually since Obama took office, only two have been released on time, in 2009 and 2014).
That followed the bombshell findings of a Government Accountability Office report, made public on June 17, that State is more than three years out of date in the reports it is required to submit to Congress under a law called the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act (abbreviated as INKSNA). The thrust of INKSNA is -- or at least it’s supposed to be-- to give Congress some leverage in stopping both proliferation-related and conventional arms traffic involving three of the world’s worst offenders: Iran, North Korea and Syria.
Under INKSNA, the President is required by law to submit reports every six months to Congress, identifying all foreigners credibly believed to be involved in weapons traffic to or from Iran, North Korea or Syria, including trade in conventional weapons, missile-related items and weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological and nuclear). Once Congress receives these reports, the President is supposed to impose sanctions on the alleged traffickers, or else required to explain to Congress, in writing, why he won’t.
In practice, the President delegates this INKSNA reporting to the State Department. And according to the GAO report, State has turned this sanctions tool into a process that can be delayed for years, whether by red tape or “a variety of political concerns, such as international negotiations and relations with countries involved in transfers.” State’s reports were already lagging under President George W. Bush. Under President Obama, State has further relegated this job to a bureaucratic netherworld akin to the tar pits that once swallowed dinosaurs.
Instead of reporting every six months -- every March 14 and Sept. 14 -- as required by INKSNA, State has reported to Congress only six times from 2006 through May, 2015. In total, State produced three reports during the last three years of the Bush administration, then began slowing its pace to produce just three reports during the first six years of the Obama administration. These reports have emerged at irregular intervals, with growing lags, extending most recently to 22 months.
The contents of the reports is by now even more out of date than those long lags might suggest. Rather than tip out the most timely information, State breaks the reporting periods into calendar years, then delays the release of each report, in sequence, until any and all problematic cases have been resolved.
The result has been a growing backlog. The most recent report, released in Dec. 2014, took almost three years to complete, including more than a year spent waiting for approval by the Deputy Secretary of State. It covered no cases later than 2011.
This means that with an apparent shrug toward U.S. law, the State Department has sent Congress no INKSNA reports covering any arms or proliferation traffic to or from Iran, North Korea or Syria that’s taken place since the beginning of 2012.
That now adds up to a reporting backlog of three-and-a-half years. During that interval, all three of the countries targeted under INKSNA have been involved in ventures -- in some cases with each other -- that should have prompted timely reports by State to Congress.
Syria’s Assad regime, engulfed since 2011 in civil war, has been a vortex of weapons traffic, including arms from Russia, Iran and according to some press accounts, North Korea. In 2013, Assad got caught using chemical weapons to kill his own people. In 2014, Israeli commandos intercepted a ship in the Red Sea, the Klos C, which was smuggling munitions loaded aboard in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and alleged by the Israeli government to have originated in Syria.
North Korea since the beginning of 2012 has tested numerous ballistic missiles, carried out its third nuclear test and paraded road-mobile missile launchers. North Korea has also restarted its plutonium-producing reactor and visibly expanded the uranium enrichment facilities unveiled in 2010 at its Yongbyon nuclear complex.
In 2013, a North Korean ship, the Chong Chon Gang, was caught trying to smuggle arms from Cuba through the Panama Canal. And a report released this past February by the United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea sanctions is stuffed with references to additional North Korean arms traffic in recent years, including arms shipments to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; an arms smuggling shipment bound for Yemen from Iran, which included ammunition that appeared to be North Korean; “foreign-sourced components” found in the debris of a test-launched Unha-3 long-range rocket; and nuclear-related items (aluminum alloy rods) likely manufactured by North Korea and seized, enroute to Burma, by Japan.
Iran remains a weapons hub with a missile program (abetted for decades by North Korea) that it is refusing to give up as part of any nuclear deal. According to the State Department’s own Country Reports on Terrorism, released (almost two months late) last week, Iran has carried on as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, supplying weapons to the Assad regime in Syria and the terrorists of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has stressed Iran’s military support for Palestinian terrorist groups, including the Hamas overlords of Gaza.
And of course Iran deserves close scrutiny because after ramping up its illicit nuclear program, Iran in Nov. 2013 entered into the Joint Plan of Action for the nuclear talks which, with two extensions, have been going on since early 2014. In this context, any credible information about nuclear-related traffic to or from should be of extreme interest.
But if the Obama administration has identified any specific foreign weapons traffickers amid all this busy scene -- whether dealers working from Iran, North Korea, Syria or elsewhere -- State has done nothing to comply with the law that requires reporting the identities of any such individuals to Congress. Any sanctions that might apply under INKSNA must wait for State to clear its three-year reporting backlog.
There are of course other routes, such as Treasury designations, by which the Administration has a history of imposing sanctions in a somewhat more timely manner. But if the necessary information is available within the executive branch, that raises the question of why it now takes years, despite the requirements of law, for State to relay the relevant portions to Congress.
All this bodes poorly for the enforcement of any nuclear deal with Iran. The Obama administration has been assuring lawmakers that there can be prompt reporting and measures such as “snap back” sanctions if Iran cheats. By now, the record goes far to suggest that in the time it takes State to transmit a legally required report to Congress, Iran could violate its way to a nuclear breakout.
Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project.
