U.S. LICENSING HIGH-TECH EXPORTS TO SYRIA

U.S. Licensing High-Tech Exports to Syria Under U.N. Development Program (FoxNews)
After years of harsh talk and escalating rounds of sanctions against Syria for supporting terror and seeking weapons of mass destruction, the United States is quietly supporting a United Nations program to supply the Syrian regime with sophisticated surveillance equipment and computers to monitor its borders.

That surreptitious support emerged in the course of a FOX News investigation that began after a surprise Israeli air strike on September 6 destroyed a mysterious Syrian facility that many experts believe was a North Korean-style nuclear reactor.

The gap between the Bush Administration’s anti-Syrian rhetoric and reality emerges in the book-keeping of the $5.2 billion United Nations Development Program, the U.N.’s flagship development agency, which has come under heavy fire for its improper funneling of cash to the regime of North Korean dictator and nuclear proliferator Kim Jong Il.

This time the issue is UNDP’s ties — and those of the U.S. and the European Union — to the Baathist regime of Syrian President Bashir Assad, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. for its sponsorship of international terrorism, destabilization of Lebanon and its shipping of terrorists and weapons to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Syria’s own ties to North Korea and its clandestine attempts to gain weapons of mass destruction were dramatically underlined on Sept. 6, when Israeli Air Force F-15s blasted the secret nuclear facility.

According to Bush Administration statements, Syria is a pariah state. It has been under escalating forms of U.S. economic, financial and trade sanctions since 2003, culminating in a broad ban on the export of U.S. goods to the Assad regime in May 2004, as a result of its alleged terrorist activities. Export controls on goods intended for Syria are in the same category as those on exports to Iran, North Korea and Sudan, likewise designated for their support for international terrorism.

They are backed up by other presidential executive orders that slapped U.S. financial sanctions on a variety of Syrian government officials, banks, and companies for being involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, association with al Qaeda, and destabilizing activities in Iraq and Lebanon. The most recent order was signed in August.

All of which makes especially mysterious UNDP’s purchase and supply to Syria of more than $2.1 million worth of computers, servers, local and wide area networking equipment, networked surveillance cameras and other high-tech goods, under the bland heading of “Modernization of Syrian Customs Directorate.”

Included among the goods are network routers and other equipment manufactured by Cisco, a longtime UNDP partner, which are U.S. manufactured equipment that would be covered under any export ban.

The money for the goods comes from the Syrian government itself, part of an $8.1 million construction and equipment deal that has been going on quietly since Feb. 1, 2005. UNDP is spending some $480,000 of its own on the deal, and it expects to refund nearly $1.6 million in unspent funds to the Syrian government.

The deal also involves the purchase of some $2 million worth of specialized software from another U.N. branch, the Geneva-based United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).