Our Trivialized Cuba Policy

In the latest attempt to trivialize America's Cuba policy, the indefatigable House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, a Democrat of New York, and Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat of California, directed the Government Accountability Office to examine federal enforcement of American policy towards Cuba.

The GAO's report, which was published last month, is a disservice to U.S. foreign and national security policy. It ingeniously discredits the two agencies actively enforcing American sanctions that Congress wrote into law in 1996 — pursuant to the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act — and praises three other agencies for making only token efforts to enforce the law.

The GAO criticizes the "secondary inspection" of the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection division and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control at Miami International Airport, where the agencies screen about 20% of the passengers arriving from Cuba. The report claims that inspections are "straining CBP's capacity to inspect other travelers according to its mission of keeping terrorists, criminals, and inadmissible aliens out of the country."

Considering that Miami International is the only American airport with regular, direct flights to and from Cuba, the Miami offices of Customs and the Treasury ought to be applauded for focusing on what's going in and coming out of Cuba — not criticized. It makes sense to focus enforcement actions at airports where planes fly to and from the countries under sanctions. Theirs is efficient, risk-based enforcement.

The wording of the GAO report also irresponsibly implies that there are no terrorists, spies and/or criminals coming into this country from Cuba, as if the GAO had been tasked with producing national security and intelligence estimates.

The report takes no notice that, of the five nations remaining on the American list of countries that sponsor terrorism, Cuba is the only one in the Western Hemisphere and by far the closest to America.

In its "Country Reports on Terrorism," the State Department writes that "the government of Cuba provided safe haven to members of ETA [Basque terrorist organization], FARC and the ELN [narcoterrorist organizations in Colombia] and maintained close relationships with other state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran. ... The Cuban government continued to permit U.S. fugitives to live legally in Cuba and is unlikely to satisfy U.S. extradition requests for terrorists harbored in the country."

In fact, in the last decade, there have been more convictions in U.S. federal courts of individuals conducting espionage activities for the regime in Cuba than for any other country on that list. These include a senior analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and various efforts to penetrate the Central and Southern Command of the U.S. Armed Forces. Furthermore, American indictments accusing Cuban regime officials of crimes ranging from narcotics trafficking to the murder of American citizens are also outstanding.

Conversely, the GAO praises the Bureau of Industry and Security in the Commerce Department, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, and the Department of Justice for not trying to enforce the law. It cites "divided U.S. public opinion about the embargo" as a rationale for redirecting agency resources away from enforcing sanctions.

This backwards logic suggests that when it comes to issues of national security, public opinion should guide enforcement. If that's to become the GAO barometer, then its auditors may as well write and issue their reports in Cuba where Fidel and Raul Castro's government will — with the barrel of their guns — ensure 100% public support.

Indirectly, the GAO report does raise two concerns that should be of importance to every American:

First, the report unwittingly provides criminals and terrorists from Cuba and other countries with valuable information about American enforcement practices that will only serve to help them elude detection and arrest.

Second, the report's advocacy of the non-enforcement of U.S. law — from its perceived "well respected" perch within the government — creates a dangerous precedent.

Failing to enforce the law leads to disrespect for it — and then refusals to comply. Yet the rule of law, affirmed in the U.S. Constitution, is the very basis for our democracy. The Constitution grants the executive branch the powers to enforce laws enacted by the legislative branch, it does not authorize the executive branch to pick and choose, for its own purposes, which laws it wishes to enforce.

With this report, the GAO betrayed the trust of Congress, as an institution, in order to kowtow to the policy goals of two members. The report is a disservice to U.S. foreign and national security policy and — not least of all — it denies the full support of U.S. law to Cuban opponents who daily battle the repressive, totalitarian regime of the Castro brothers.

Mr. Claver-Carone is a director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC in Washington, D.C. He is an attorney who formerly served with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and has served on the full-time faculty of the Catholic University of America's School of Law and adjunct faculty of George Washington University's National Law Center.