License to deal: how Uncle Sam helps weapons merchants arm the world

Common Cause Magazine, Summer, 1994 by Deborah Lutterback

The boxes are labeled "above-ground swimming pool" or "airconditioning equipment" and have innocuous sounding destinations like a ministry of eduction or a children's hospital in some other part of the world. What these boxes contain, however, are the arms that end up in munitions depots from Baghdad to Bosnia.

Just as America's streets are bristling with weaponry, so is the global market-place. From the American-bought hand-gun that killed a Mexican presidential candidate this year to the American-made night vision equipment used by Iraqi forces during the Persian Gulf War, weapons of every variety are moving undetected across U.S. borders.

Here in the United States, violence-weary Americans have begun standing up to the once all-powerful gun lobbies. Although the Clinton administration has made gun control a centerpiece of its crime control package, it is actively promoting weapons exports as an economic panacea, experts say.

In fact, the same administration that highlights domestic arms control is rapidly deregulating the international arms market. As Congress reconsiders the Export Administration Act, which expired in June, the Clinton administration has offered proposals to make it easier to sell so-called dual-use items, ranging from machine tools to computers. These goods were restricted in the past because they can be used to make weapons of mass destruction. The White House, however, is now asserting that many of these high-tech electronic devices and chemicals are already widely available on the world market and that export restrictions merely handicap U.S. manufacturers.

Inside the administration, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, whose agency helps regulate the arms industry, has pushed to loosen restrictions of dual-use exports. While some argue that Brown's role as both industry advocate and regulator represents a conflict of interest, Brown says his policy "strikes the critical balance between nonproliferation concerns and economic interests."

Critics of America's arms export policy point to three problems. On the simplest level, our borders are minimally patrolled, making weapons smuggling an easy and lucrative pursuit. On the regulatory side, the licensing process designed to monitor arms exports is filled with loopholes that allow illegal arms dealers to circumvent the law. And against this backdrop of permeable borders and laissez faire licensing stands a foreign policy that puts U.S. economic interests ahead of arms control, a policy that in the past has resulted in U.S. troops facing an enemy armed with American-made weapons.

Fewer than 500 of the Customs Service's 18,000 employees are detailed to watch exports along the nation's borders, says Richard mercier, director of the Strategic Investigations Division of the Customs Service. That compares with some 4,000 agents on patrol for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). As former Customs chief William Von Raab explains, "It has always been anathema in the United States to somehow prohibit stuff from going out, and so I must say it was always very difficult to enforce the export [laws]." The lion's share of Customs' resources focus on illegal imports. "With all the inspectors at the border looking at drugs that are coming in, very few people are looking at what is going out," says a Customs agent. "We don't have the time or the manpower."

There are also the legal hurdles. The Commerce and State departments share responsibility for the arms trade, screening export applications to ensure they pose no threat to national security. Each year they grant more than 75,000 licenses for weapons, weapon parts, equipment used to make weapons and items ranging from high-speed computers to ballistic missiles.

The licensing process is supposed to serve as a key checkpoint to prevent violations of the Export Administration Act, which prohibits arms sales to terrorist nations, and the Arms Export Control Act, which controls arms exports in general. The process has been deemed "haphazard and often ineffective" by numerous inspectors general's offices, which investigate government agencies. "This bungling would be one thing if you were talking about rice exports, but this stuff kills people," says an aide to a committee overseeing arms exports.

The system's inadequacies became painfully clear after the Gulf War, when United Nations weapons inspectors found U.S.-manufactured weapons that had been legally sold to Iraq. But these discoveries have not produced any tightening in U.S. arms control policy.

DEAD END

Even a single American-supplied weapon can change an entire contry's history. Luis Donaldo Colosio, the 44-year-old heir-apparent to the Mexican presidency, was killed in March by two bullets fired from a .38-caliber Taurus. The gun was originally purchased in 1977 by a security firm executive in San Francisco and had crossed the Mexican border some time later without a legal trace, say authorities from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF).

Yet the problem of illegal arms exports extends far beyond handgun smuggling. Every year $2 billion to $10 billion in illegal arms are traded, experts say, the demand for them fueled by regional conflicts around the world.