WASHINGTON – The State Department inspector general published a report on Tuesday criticizing the agency for taking inappropriate measures to reduce civilian casualties caused by U.S.-made bombs used by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the catastrophic Yemeni war.
The report, released 14 months after Congress asked the Inspector General to launch an inquiry into the role of the agency in arms sales, “found that the department did not assess risks and implemented mitigation measures to link civilian casualties and legal concerns with the “transfer” of precision-guided bombs to the Arab Gulf nations.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo postponed the $ 8.1 billion sale of that ammunition, mostly made by Raytheon, despite a two-year two-part congressional stance on the proposed transfer of weapons, consisting of 22 packages. Mr Pompeo did so by declaring a “distress” in May 2019 over Iran’s activities in the region. The move prompted Democratic lawmakers, who asked then-Inspector General Steve A. Linick to open an investigation.
Addressing the issue of civilian casualties, which is at the heart of Washington’s intense political debate over arms sales, the report shows that the investigation was much broader than previously known. The investigation was the first internal administration investigation into the impact of arms exports. In May, The New York Times published the results of its own investigation into how the Trump administration had contributed to civilian casualties in Yemen with the sale.
The report also highlighted how the State Department appeared to put an end to the Congress’ arms sales notification process.
Investigators found that by January 2017, the department had approved 4,221 arms transfers well worth $ 11.2 billion to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But because each was a relatively small package, the individual transfers did not meet the threshold for notification to Congress – although lawmakers had deployed the same types of weapons as technology, including parts of precision-guided bombs, when they were part of of a larger package.
Mr. Linick’s investigation into the arms sale was one of at least two that he began in Mr. Pompeo, the other center on potential misuse of taxpayer resources. Both received attention in Congress and among the public after President Trump fired Mr. Linick in May at the urging of Mr. Pompeo.
On one key question, the Inspector General’s report said Mr. Pompeo acted in accordance with a law regulating the sale of U.S. weapons and defense systems to foreign entities. But investigators treat that as a narrow procedural issue: the report said they did not investigate whether an actual “emergency” related to Iran existed or the policy decisions based on that.
The US-made bombs are central to the Saudi-led air war against Yemeni rebels, which has resulted in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crisis. Thousands of civilians have been killed since 2015, many of them women and children. Reports of mass killings have taken root in Republican and Democratic legislatures, leading to one of the biggest rifts between Congress and Mr. Trump, who strongly advocates for arms sales.
Congress last year adopted a measure to end government support for the war, but Mr. Trump opposed it.
The Inspector General’s finding that the State Department fell short in trying to reduce civilian casualties is likely to increase control by arms sales lawmakers. Lawmakers have held some other notable proposed arms packages, including to the Arab peoples of the Gulf, but U.S. officials are debating whether to end the decades-old informal review process of Congress to push through sales.
“The OIG report confirms concerns about Congress regarding the impact of these outlets on innocent citizens,” said Andrew Miller, a former State Department official who is deputy director of policy at the Middle East Project on Demo.
But the report also shows that investigators “on the main issue wise, that is whether the threat stream cited by the administration went up to the level of an ’emergency’,” he added.
The report included a letter dated August 5th. From R. Clarke Cooper, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, the Bureau that oversees arms sales, and responds to the findings. He said reducing civilian casualties and addressing legal concerns was “part of an ongoing interagency process” and that the department continued to perform due diligence on all sales.
The report has an unclassified section with some newsrooms, which was released to the public on Tuesday, and a classified annex, which some U.S. officials said was unusual for a report on a public action. The annex has detailed conversations about civilian victims and is heavily edited, meaning that even lawmakers and their staff cannot view the material. The report made one recommendation on the issue, which is in the classified section.
The report said the state department inspired the editors during a review in part because of “potential concerns about executive privilege” – a reason that was criticized by congressional assistants.
On Monday night, pending the report, Representative Eliot L. Engel, New York Democrat and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement, “We will review the entire product with a view to ensuring that the classified annex is’ has been used to bury important or potentially shameful information. ” He wrote in a letter to other lawmakers on Tuesday that the State Department “may have invalidated certain sections of the classified annex sent to Congress.”
The State Department tried to obscure the findings of the report on Monday, the day before the release, by issuing a statement focusing on three short phrases on one page of the report that said Mr. Pompeo took the right technical steps took the lead in issuing his “certificate of emergency” – an exemption from his action, in telling the agency. The statement from the agency’s spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus, made no mention of the harsh criticism of the agency. the section on civilian casualties, which usually appears at the top of the report directly after the one on the certification, nor did it say that the only recommendation of the report was on this issue.
A State Department official also gave journalists an anonymous briefing to try to cover news prior to the report’s release, and the journalists pointed out the absurdity of hearing over a report they did not see.
In a blistering statement, Mr Engel identified the official as Mr Cooper and said the department’s effort was “pre-spin” that “series of an attempt to distract and mislead.”
“Mike Pompeo pulls right out of the Bill Barr playbook,” Mr Engel said, referring to Attorney General William P. Barr’s attempt last year to investigate the report of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who election interference of 2016 investigated by Russia, shortly before a redacted version of it was released.
An unedited version of the unclassified section of the State Department’s report, obtained by The New York Times, sets out two timelines that cast doubt on whether an “emergency” existed on Iran. Initially, investigators found that State Department officials first discussed on April 3 the use of a “emergency” statement to circumvent congressional attitudes. That was a month before the White House began issuing statements about troublesome signals about Iranian activity in the region. And Mr. Pompeo did not give his 24th certification to Congress until May 24th.
The second timeline includes the slow schedule of arms transfers. The researchers found that only four of the 22 packages were delivered at the time of their survey last year. They were told that five would not be delivered until 2020 or later.
That information was edited from the public report at the request of the State Department. Mr. Engel received the unredacted version and sent it to other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
“The truth is that there was no emergency security for national security,” Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Mr. Pompeo on Twitter, after Mr. Pompeo said that his department was “fully established” by the report. “Unless you count the cod of the Saudi crown prince as one.”
In a memo accompanying the report, Diana R. Shaw, who became acting inspector general last week after the successor to Mr. Linick suddenly resigned, writing that the State Department had “important information” withholding the classified portion from members of Congress that was necessary to understand the Inspector General’s conclusion that the department had not done enough to ensure that U.S. weapons not be used to harm civilians.
The memo outlined a week-long back-and-forth between the department’s legal office and the inspector general on what information should be withheld from Congress by executive privilege. Finally, Ms Shaw wrote, her office concluded that it could not exaggerate the State Department’s claims and instead had to “rely on the good faith of the department” in seeking to withhold the information.
The legal office that the editors sought was headed by Marik String, who closely oversaw the process of declaring the emergency in the spring of 2019 before he was elevated to become the State Department’s top attorney.
In a June congressional testimony, Mr. Linick identified Mr. String as one of two officials who tried to pressure him to drop the arms sales investigation. The other was Brian Bulatao, the under Secretary of State for Management and a longtime friend of Mr. Pompeo’s. “He was trying to bully me,” Mr. Linick said.
Edward Wong reported from Washington, and Michael LaForgia from Spokane, Wash.
