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“INSUFFICIENT” PERSONNEL
OFAC not dealing with travel
applications to Cuba
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD
—Special for Granma International—
THE
Treasury Department’s Office for Foreign Assets
Control (OFAC) does not currently possess the
staffing levels required to process applications for
licenses for the thousands of Cuban-Americans who
wish to carry out their “right” to travel to Cuba
once every three years, but it does in fact have
dozens of officials to harass people who dare to
travel to the island from U.S. territory without
that nation’s blessing.
Given that combating Al-Qaeda terrorists leaves him
enough time to deal with those Cuban-Americans who
are “guilty” of loving their families, Juan Zárate,
Treasury deputy assistant secretary in the battle
against financing terrorists, personally visited
El Nuevo Herald during the last few days and
revealed OFAC’s bizarre incapacity to deal with the
public’s requests.
The
OFAC “does not have the personnel at the moment to
process license applications” revealed Zárate,
confirming that the organization responsible for
approving or rejecting each one of the travel
requests, is accumulating the applications that were
handed out, not without delay, after the application
of the new anti-family dictates from Bush and his
mafioso advisors.
It
has not as yet authorized one single license to
visit relatives in Cuba, the high-ranking Treasury
Department official shamelessly confirmed,
apparently content at having satisfied the wishes of
Lincoln Díaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the
capos of the Cuban Liberty Council, whose terrorist
past – widely documented by the FBI – does not seem
to have come to his attention.
The
OFAC’s self-confessed delay – which could last
another eight weeks – is occurring during the summer
season when the majority of those who requested
permission to travel were hoping to use their annual
vacations to visit relatives on the island.
Thousands of Cuban-Americans are already in the line
that has been forming since the anti-family measures
came into effect last June 30; anti-family measures
that were set out by a president who fought his 2000
election campaign as the “family values candidate”.
Juan
Zárate, who heads the Treasury Department’s
Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and
Financial Crimes (EOTF/FC) was accompanied on his
stroll through the mafioso publication’s offices by
Molly Millerwise from the Treasury’s Public
Relations Office, who is equally unconcerned over
the war on terror and instead devotes her time to
terrorizing U.S. grandmothers who make cycling tours
in Cuba, threatening them with fines.
The
U.S. news agency AP recently revealed that the
Treasury Department has just four staff to
investigate the economic interests of international
terrorist Osama Bin Laden, but 24 to pursue U.S.
citizens who travel to Cuba. That information was
published at a time when a new best-seller
confirming Bush’s financial links with the royal
families of Saudi Arabia – and in particular with
the Bin Laden family - went on sale in U.S.
bookshops.
The
Bush family has interests in companies that
benefited from contracts worth some $1.4 billion
with the Saudis.
Between 1990 and 2003, OFAC agents carried out just
93 investigations into terrorism and since 1994 have
collected only $9,425 worth of fines related to the
violation of regulations against financing such
activity. However, during the same period, they
initiated 10,683 investigations in relation to Cuba
and collected more than $8 million in fines.
Juan Zárate is the Treasury Department
representative who personally attends to the Saudis.
With much cordiality.
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