Ted Cruz introduces Senate bill to re-list N. Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism

Ted Cruz, who has emerged as a leading advocate for a harder line against North Korea, has introduced a Senate companion bill to Rep. Ted Poe’s bill, calling for North Korea’s re-listing as a state sponsor of terrorism. According to a press release from Senator Cruz’s office,* Cruz’s bill has six original co-sponsors: Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Marco Rubio (R-Fl.), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).

Compared to the House bill, the Senate bill has a shorter list of North Korean conduct justifying a re-listing, relying almost exclusively on conduct in which U.S. or South Korean courts found the North Korean government responsible for acts of international terrorism. The obvious exception is that the Cruz bill raises the murder of Kim Jong-nam with VX, a persistent nerve agent, in that crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur, which would be the first state-sponsored terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction.

The bills also differ in their approaches. The Cruz bill (still no number, but here’s the text) simply asks the Secretary of State to make a determination whether North Korea has repeatedly sponsored acts of international terrorism. The Poe bill (H.R. 479) forces the administration to go through a series of alleged North Korean acts, and then say whether (1) North Korea did it, and (2) whether it’s international terrorism.

Both bills, however, omit the case of the Rev. Kim Dong-shik, a lawful permanent resident of the United States with a family in Illinois, whom North Korean agents kidnapped from China in 2000, and starved or tortured to death (or both) a few months later. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that, despite the fact that there were no direct witnesses to Rev. Kim’s death inside North Korea, the evidence was still sufficient to support a judgment against the North Korean government (case number 13-7147), and remanded the case back to the District Court. The District Court then entered a $330 million judgment for Rev. Kim’s family (case number 09-648). In 2005, of Rev. Kim’s kidnappers, Ryu Young-Hwa, was caught and convicted by a South Korean court for his role in the kidnapping. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. Click here to see where Senator Obama signed a letter promising that he would not support removing North Korea from the list until North Korea accounted for Rev. Kim’s fate. Click here to see where presidential candidate Obama reneged on that promise.

Overall, however, both bills make a strong case in favor of a decision that ought to have been made years ago as a matter of the evidence, the law, and the policy reason behind the list — to discourage and deter states from sponsoring terrorism. Indeed, as I argued here, North Korea never convincingly renounced terrorism and never should have come off the list to begin with.

The bills aren’t identical, so there are two ways to reconcile them. If one of the bills passes its respective chamber, the other chamber can pass that bill and send it to the President (easier, and overwhelmingly more likely for a simple bill like this). If both chambers pass their respective bills, they could resolve the differences at a conference committee. The most likely alternative, however, is that the Secretary of State will put North Korea back on the list before either chamber passes its bill. When Congress this clearly wants the Secretary of State to take an action within his discretion that’s well justified by fact, law, and policy, the Secretary of State usually takes that action. John Kerry might not have wanted to do this as a matter of policy, but I doubt Rex Tillerson shares that view. Now that Tillerson is back from his visit to Seoul and Beijing, I’d guess that diplomatically speaking, the decks are clear for this.

While I’m on this topic, I have a few things to say about former State Department official Joseph DeThomas’s 38 North post, arguing against a re-listing. DeThomas starts by conceding that the VX attack on Kim Jong-un might have been an act of state-sponsored international terrorism, which goes a step beyond what another former State Department official said here:

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the US State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator under the Obama administration, says the murder lies in a “gray zone.â€

While the suspected use of the deadly VX nerve agent is within the legal parameters of designating the North as a terrorist state, Mr. Benjamin told Voices of America, assassination by itself cannot be interpreted as an act of terrorism.

“So this is a very unusual case,” said Benjamin, now director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. [Christian Science Monitor]

Well. If directing your diplomats and clandestine agents to murder a nonviolent political critic with a persistent nerve agent in an airport terminal crowded with mothers, fathers, babies, and children in a friendly country doesn’t qualify as international terrorism, your definition needs some adjustment.

DeThomas then muses whether North Korea’s sponsorship is “repeated,†a question he could have resolved easily with more careful research. He’s welcome to mine, in fact, but he did cite Bruce Klingner’s excellent summary, which is more than sufficient. But DeThomas’s argument really comes down to this:

However, strategically, there should be no rush to designate Pyongyang. In the larger regional context, the North Korean issue does not need any additional ignition points. Tensions are already running high on the North Korean missile front with its tests of ballistic missile strikes on Japan and with both US and Japanese sources floating stories about preemptive military options to deal with it, not to mention the somewhat more rapid deployment of THAAD than outside observers expected. [….]

While Pyongyang may richly deserve the designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, it would be no sin to follow a deliberative pace in the designation process. A little over a hundred years ago, a state sponsored international terrorist political assassination in a strange city far away lit a spark among major powers that were absorbed in other domestic and international concerns. They unwittingly followed the logic of their responses to the assassination into a global war totally disproportionate to the crime. That war led to the fall of three empires, the death of millions and the end of Europe’s golden age. In the current environment on the Korean peninsula, taking a few weeks or months to sort things through on a terrorist designation will play to the US long-term advantage. [Joseph DeThomas, 38 North]

In other words, let’s not call North Korea a sponsor of terrorism because we’re terrorized. One could make the same argument about the military exercises underway now — those certainly rile Pyongyang. So does the enforcement of U.N. sanctions. So does accepting North Korean refugees and defectors. So does enforcing U.N. sanctions. So does seizing its smuggling ships. So does missile defense. And most of all, so does talking about human rights in North Korea — another issue the State Department spent years trying to downplay or sideline. If all discussions about North Korea policy begin and end with “let’s not rile them,†and if every potential North Korean victim is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the message Pyongyang will hear is, “Send Gavrilo.” It’s only one example of what Marcus Noland calls “North Korean exceptionalism,” the unique excusal of North Korea from the standards of civilized humanity. If Pyongyang isn’t willing to disarm and you’ve exempted it from consequences that rile it, then your policy is paralyzed at “strategic patience.â€

Lest I be accused of taking the views of two former officials as speaking for a department they no longer represent, let’s add this atrocious performance by a State Department witness at a congressional hearing. And for years, the State Department’s argument against a re-listing was, simply stated, a lie: that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.”

If the State Department now searches in angst for reasons why its influence (and budget) are diminishing in Washington, the opinions of DeThomas and Benjamin are as good an illustration as any. Based on conversations I’ve had with State Department people (in settings that weren’t appropriate for attribution) Foggy Bottom overwhelmingly opposes re-listing North Korea. State Department officials have told me to my face that North Korea doesn’t sponsor terrorism, despite the overwhelming evidence that it does (and there is no excuse for them not to know this). In some cases, they apply a conveniently narrow definition of “international terrorism†that’s at odds with past State Department precedent and with the legal definitions of the term. Or, they say that re-listing North Korea would be merely symbolic.

But if a re-listing would be merely symbolic, why do its opponents think North Korea would care so much? (DeThomas makes both arguments without reconciling the tension between them.)

The first answer is that a re-listing would be financially significant. It would require U.S. representatives to oppose benefits for North Korea from international financial institutions. It would trigger stronger financial sanctions and close an important loophole left by the Treasury Department’s failure to update and republish the outdated North Korean sanctions regulations a year after the passage of the NKSPEA. It would strip North Korea of its immunity from suit for its acts of terrorism. It would trigger SEC “material risk†disclosure requirements for companies that issue stocks and have investments in North Korea, which would trigger divestment by companies fearing shareholder protests.

A second and more significant answer is that North Korea is a state built on symbolism, and on propagating the idea that it holds the world in awe and terror. It tells its people that the world lives in awe and terror of their leaders to send the message that they should live in awe and terror of their leaders. It sends that message because it gives a terrorized, deprived, and shrunken people a reason to draw a sense of esteem, even greatness, from the state that oppresses them. North Korea is obsessed with the power of symbols because it is built on the power of symbols that maintain that awe and terror. That’s why Pyongyang denounced my report with such venom. That’s why it so strongly to “The Interview.†That’s why KCNA is filled with tributes from Juche Study Societies in Equatorial Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Northumberland. It cannot afford for its subjects to know that the world views its leader with contempt and ridicule.

Lastly, re-listing matters because North Korea has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism. Americans should not allow their government to lie to them. That principle may be the most important one at stake here.