DORGAN: ADMINISTRATION WASTING FUNDS CHASING CASTRO AT EXPENSE OF WAR ON TERRORISM

Friday, April 30, 2004

CONTACT: Justin Kitsch
or  Brenden Timpe
PHONE: 202-224-2551

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) --- U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, says he will act to cut funds for the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) unless it devotes more agents and other resources to tracking the flow of terrorist funds to groups like Al Qaeda and less to tracking down American citizens who travel to Cuba.

Dorgan, who authored the law that lifted the ban on selling food and medicine to Cuba, said he finds it “ludicrous” that the Bush Administration has six times as many Treasury agents from OFAC tracking people traveling to Cuba as it does tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein combined.

“This is really astounding,” Dorgan said. “I hope somebody in the Administration will soon come to his or her senses and start directing our resources where they are needed. Politics is clearly diverting precious time, money and manpower away from the war on terrorism here. This is absurd.”

On April 20, Dorgan pressed Treasury Secretary John Snow for information about how many OFAC agents and other resources were being diverted to the effort to stop trade and travel to Cuba, but Snow claimed not to know. An Associated Press report Thursday, however, quotes a letter from OFAC revealing for the first time that OFAC has just four agents tracking Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s finances but nearly two dozen agents tracking finances involving Cuban trade and travel.

“I think we all agree that Fidel Castro is a dictator,” Dorgan said, “but no one would even attempt to argue that he represents a greater threat to our country or our national interest than Osama bin Laden. We need to focus our resources on what’s important, and we need to do so urgently. If OFAC will not use the resources it has wisely, then I think we ought to take those resources away and put them to work elsewhere where they will be used to fight the war on terrorism. The Cold War is over. The new threat is terrorism.”

Despite numerous congressional votes to allow travel and the sale of food and medicines to Cuba, the Bush Administration has continued to enforce the travel ban and vigorously used red tape to shackle efforts by farm groups and others to sell U.S. farm products to Cuba.

The Administration has made much of its effort to block trade and travel to Cuba in Florida, which played a key role in deciding the 2000 presidential election and is expected to play a key role again in 2004.

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