U.S. Seeks Iran Sanctions Enforcement After Assassination Plot

15 October 2011

Wendy Sherman said U.S. envoys around the world have been “meticulously and rationally laying out the facts” of the alleged assassination plot to their host government.

The United States is urging the international community to consider the ramifications of the alleged plot involving members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force to assassinate a Saudi Arabian diplomat. U.S. officials are asking other nations to join the Obama administration in implementing financial sanctions to further isolate Iran’s regime and pressure it to comply with international demands concerning its nuclear activities, support for terrorism and the repression of its people.

In testimony October 13 before the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman said the alleged plot that targeted Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir and could have killed Americans in the United States was “a flagrant violation of international law and a dangerous escalation of the Iranian government's longstanding use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism.”

“This conspiracy also violates the Convention on Internationally Protected Persons, including diplomatic agents, which Iran has agreed to, as well as U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Sherman said. Iran “must be held accountable for its actions,” she added.

Although Ambassador al-Jubeir was the target, Sherman said it was “in fact, a plot against all diplomats. And we will be asking all countries to consider appropriate actions, including denying Quds Force officers any platform to operate within their countries.”

Since the case became public on October 12, “we have instructed every one of our ambassadors to demarche the highest levels of their host governments to inform them about the facts behind this plot,” by “meticulously and rationally laying out the facts,” she said. The European Union and many countries, including Nigeria, Estonia, Poland, Croatia, the United Kingdom and Canada, have issued their own condemnatory statements in response.

The United Nations, the European Union, the United States and other countries have sanctioned Iran for its human rights abuses, support for terrorism and for violating agreements about its nuclear program. Those sanctions also have hit the Revolutionary Guard Corps and companies it controls, and many top Iranian officials are under visa bans for the European Union as well as the United States.

Sherman said sanctions are “most effective and they are strongest when they are internationalized and people throughout the world and governments throughout the world are enforcing those sanctions.”

U.S. officials, including President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and assistant secretaries of state, have spoken with governments in “every capital,” to encourage other countries to “enforce the sanctions that are on the books, to look at their own bilateral sanctions, to look at the designations that [U.S.] Treasury [Department] has made and make them themselves,” she said.

“We have encouraged them to make sure that the Quds Force stops doing business in their countries, to look at high-level visits that might be coming from Iranians to their country, and to consider, let's say, postponing, if not cancelling outright, those visits,” she said.

Sherman said during a conversation with one of her counterparts, she had told the official, “Think about what your country needs to do and think about it in terms of what you would have done and what the international community would have done if this [plot] had been successful.”

The various sanctions in place offer “many tools” that countries can use to apply pressure to Iran’s government, she said.  “[A]ll countries have to do is pick them up and make them real.”

Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen told the Senate committee that U.S. officials have met with banks, regulators and government officials in nearly 50 countries. The Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA) that President Obama signed in 2010 offers a clear choice, he said.

“A foreign bank can have access to the largest and most important financial sector in the world, the United States, or it can do business with sanctioned Iranian banks. But it cannot do both,” Cohen said.

“For the overwhelming majority of foreign banks, the choice has been a simple one. Those with potentially sanctionable relationships quickly elected to stop that business. And where we learn of potentially sanctionable activity under CISADA, we have actively investigated it, engaging in particular with foreign banks' regulators and their home government,” he said.

As a result of increased international cooperation, Iran has not been able to stop a steady erosion in the value of its currency, and increasingly has been unable to attract foreign investments, Cohen said. Iran faces a projected loss of $14 billion a year in oil revenues through 2016, he said.

“We are making progress, but there is still much to be done to prevent Iran from evading sanctions already in place and to apply sufficient additional pressure on Iran,” he said.

GLOBAL TARGETING OF IRAN’S CENTRAL BANK COULD HAVE POWERFUL IMPACT

In October 14 testimony before the House of Representative Foreign Affairs Committee, Cohen said the Obama administration is looking into designating the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) as a target for sanctions. He said that although U.S. financial institutions are already generally prohibited from doing business with Iranian banks, including the CBI, “further U.S. action against the CBI, if it attains multilateral support, could further isolate the CBI with a potentially powerful impact on Iran.”

As the bank already is essentially cut off from the United States, “the real question is can we, by taking another action against the CBI … either under our nonproliferation authority or under our counterterrorism authority — can we elicit multilateral respect for that action?”

“That work is under way,” Cohen told U.S. lawmakers.