September 3, 2010-Jennifer Rubin, Tom McInerney & Claire Lopez

On this edition of Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney, Frank is joined first by Jennifer Rubin with Commentary magazine on the recent peace process, Tony Blair’s thoughts on Iran and the Gates replacement. Next up is retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, who will be speaking on the presiden’ts speech concerning Iraq and another military officer who is refusing to deploy on the grounds that Obama is not the rightful Commander-In-Chief. Finally, Frank will be joined by Claire Lopez who will be speaking on Iranian intelligence.

September, 3 2010 Monologue

General Jim Jones, the president’s National Security Advisor laid out earlier this week in the wall street journal, an initiative that is apparently imminent to streamline what are know as export controls. As General Jones put it in a wall street journal editorial, these are legacies of the cold war. A point of fact, what export controls are all about, is trying to ensure that our enemies, whether the Soviet Union in days of old or contemporary advisories like China, Iran, North Korea or perhaps Venezuela, are not able to take advantage of military relevant technologies that are vital to specific capabilities like ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons and the kind of super computing that is vital for both.

            What President Obama is planning on doing, is dramatically simplifying the export control process, reducing the number of good, products, technologies that are continued to be subjected to export controls and streamlining the mechanisms by which applications to export even those technologies are considered and adjudicated. I’m the first to admit there have been some ponderous some regulations and processes that have in fact encumbered the export control process and efforts to move sophisticated but not dangerous technology overseas, especially to friends and allies of his country. So in principle efforts to simplify all of this is unobjectionable, but in practice what he have seen again and again from the advocates of export decontrol are companies that are anxious to expand their export market’s some in the defense sector some not. Also people who seek to make a buck by facilitating in the sales of sensitive technologies.

Hey! Let’s just put a bigger fence around smaller number of these technologies sounds seductive but we have been doing that for years. What is left in the export control arrangement is not an accessible large amount of technologies that we can simply pare down in the beliefs that as long as it is not cutting edge it doesn’t matter if our enemies have them. I strongly suggest that this is an opportunity, this new Obama initiative, to do some serious stocktaking on Capitol Hill, in out to be done in several respects.

We need a mechanism that evaluates the costs of the decontrols are being proposed, not just the punitive benefits, in terms of sales of products and earnings by companies. I have argued before and I argue again and I hope congress will give a serious look at this, let’s have a national security impact assessment for each of these. We find that in the past some of these technologies are materially helpful to our enemies, the costs to our national security will vastly exceed the punitive benefits. We also, I’m afraid, face the prospect that if we decontrol some of these products, we will ultimately encourage companies that manufacture products here to go elsewhere, maybe China, perhaps gaining access to rare earth minerals that the Chinese are keeping from the rest of the world. When I asked Gordon Chang, he said simply ‘Yes!” Our congress, when asked to consider these set of proposals by the Obama administration, needs to think hard about this and so do you because in the end it might be your lives, your security and your nation on the line.