Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.
At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has granted nearly 10,000 licenses for deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.
Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law mandating that agricultural and medical humanitarian aid be exempted from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley’s gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.
Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, among them deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.
The article goes on to document a number of confusing deals through this massive humanitarian aid loophole, quite literally one large enough to sail a container ship full of goods through. A few companies have come clean or backed out, but for the most part at the same time we were slapping sanctions on places like Iran, we were selling them cigs, internet, and soda...and still are.
Given the state of the economy right now, I can see why the Obama administration would want to look the other way on some of the licenses they supplied for exemptions for exports. Those do equal jobs back here in the states. But this exemption law has been in place since 2000, and that's a whole lot of moral ambiguity to push during and including the entire Bush administration's duration and the good years we had. Apparently they didn't mention any of this.
Yet another place where we play both sides of the game. Funny how that works.
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