[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 16]
[Senate]
[Pages 21943-21944]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       GOVERNMENT AGENCY RUN AMOK

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I brought with me to the floor a picture 
of a woman named Joan Slote. Joan, as you can see, is a bicyclist, 
standing there with a bicycle helmet and a bicycling outfit. She is a 
senior olympian. She is a 74-year-old grandmother of six and a champion 
cyclist. She rides about 100 miles a week, and has pedaled her bicycle 
through 21 countries.
  I am showing a picture of Joan Slote on the Senate floor because she 
is in trouble with the Federal Government. Joan Slote never sought to 
deceive the U.S. Federal Government. She responded to a Toronto-based 
adventure catalog for a bicycle trip to Cuba. It intrigued her. It 
said, incorrectly, in the advertisement that U.S. law does not bar 
citizens from visiting Cuba as long as they fly there through Canada. 
So Joan Slote, this grandmother cyclist, joined a cycling trip through 
Cuba.
  When she returned to the United States through Canada, they asked her 
where she had been. She said she had been in Canada and prior to that 
had been in Cuba. So she was not attempting to deceive anyone.
  Guess what happened to this grandmother? She went from her home on 
the west coast to Europe on a bicycling trip. While she was gone, she 
learned her son had a brain tumor. She rushed back, packed some clothes 
in her place in Oregon, and rushed to her son's side. He died of this 
brain tumor. She finally got back home and she saw letters from OFAC, 
the Office of Foreign Assets Control, at the U.S. Department of 
Treasury. OFAC was upset because Joan Slote had been to Cuba. They told 
this 74-year-old grandmother the Feds were hot on her trail and that 
the Feds wanted a $7,600 fine from her. The Feds wanted $7,600 dollars 
from this grandmother because she violated American laws by travelling 
to Cuba.
  We have people down here at the Department of Treasury looking after 
Joan Slote and people like her.
  They fined her $7,600 because she visited Cuba and spent $38 there. 
Since that time, OFAC added penalties and interest until the total was 
almost $10,000. Then a few months ago in July, Joan Slote received a 
collection letter saying she would pay up in 10 days or they would 
start attaching her Social Security payments. They say, we are slapping 
you with a big fine; you are obviously a problem for this country.
  Let me remind listeners, this is the Office of Foreign Assets 
Control. This is the office that is supposed to be tracking terrorism 
in the Department of Treasury. This is the office that ought to be busy 
full time tracking the movement of terrorist funds across this world. 
As a matter of fact that is what most of the employees in the Office of 
Foreign Assets Control do. But not all of them.
  Some of them are taken off those duties to make sure Joan Slote does 
not undermine this country's interests by visiting Cuba. They are 
chasing a retired schoolteacher riding a bicycle in Cuba trying to slap 
her with a fine. They cannot find Osama bin Laden but they can sure 
find this retired grandmother. They are determined to levy a fine on 
this grandmother.
  I learned about that. They wanted to take it out of her Social 
Security payments if she did not pay the fine. Her monthly income, by 
the way, is $1,200, so she is no match for the Feds.
  The Feds are a big, strong, bulky group of people going after this 
lady. Earning $1,200 a month income, she is no match for the Feds. She 
called OFAC and told them she had not been home to get her mail and she 
had not responded to their notice because her son had brain cancer and 
died. She asked if they would give her a hearing. Absolutely not, they 
said. Wouldn't

[[Page 21944]]

give her a hearing and would not reduce her fine by one cent.
  I met Joan at a conference and I got involved in her case. I called 
OFAC and said: You ought to be embarrassed.
  I know there is law against U.S. citizens traveling in Cuba. It is a 
foolish law that ought to be repealed. The House of Representatives has 
now, incidentally, voted to prohibit the enforcement of that law. But 
the fact is this country long ago decided to try to punish Fidel Castro 
by limiting the ability of the American people to travel. The nuttiest 
idea I ever heard of. So we end up saying to Joan Slote that you have 
to pay a fine.
  Well, I got involved and said to the OFAC folks: You ought to be 
ashamed of yourself and you ought to be embarrassed. They agreed to 
reduce her fine to $1,900. I don't think she should have paid a cent, 
but they reduced it to $1,900. So Joan paid $1,900 with two checks. She 
paid the $1,900. She lives on $1,200 a month.
  Then this morning I received this email from her:

       I sent the settlement money in two payments, one in July 
     and paying it all by the end of August. I checked with the 
     bank and the bank said the checks have not been cashed as of 
     a week ago. Two weeks ago I got a letter from a collection 
     agency asking for about $10,000 and a letter from the Social 
     Security system telling me they will start reducing my Social 
     Security payments in November.

  Shame on the Federal Government. Do we have completely and totally 
incompetent Federal agencies? No. 1, they are chasing old ladies riding 
bicycles when they ought to be chasing terrorists. She may not like me 
calling her an old lady, but she is a 74-year-old senior bicyclist. She 
is proud of what she does. She bicycles in the Olympics. And she has 
the Federal Government after her. They ought to be chasing terrorists, 
not retired schoolteachers biking in Canada. What are they thinking? Is 
there no common sense at all at the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
  I had the Secretary of the Treasury in front of a committee a year 
and a half ago. He got in trouble because he answered the question 
honestly. I liked him. He was a guy who said what was on his mind. I 
said: Let me ask you a question. Don't you think if you could use your 
assets the way you want to use your assets in the Office of Foreign 
Assets Control, you would pull employees off of tracking little old 
schoolteachers and others from bicycling in Cuba and instead use all of 
your muscle and all of your energy and all of your resources to track 
terrorism? Don't you think that is where the priorities ought to be?
  Well, he did not answer. I asked again. He didn't answer. I asked 
again and finally he said: Of course. Of course I prefer that be the 
case. But he got in mighty big trouble, according to the press, with 
the White House because there is a political correctness about this 
issue of travel to Cuba and they want the Office of Foreign Assets 
Control to clamp down on the folks. Go get them.
  Let me tell you who they are getting: Joan Slote. She should not have 
had to pay a penny. Not a penny.
  How about Cevin Allen, Washington State. He traveled to Cuba to bury 
the ashes of his late father, a Pentecostal minister of 
prerevolutionary Cuba who wanted his ashes buried on the grounds of the 
former church he had in Cuba. OFAC tried to slap his son with a $20,000 
fine for taking his father's ashes to bury them on the church grounds 
in Cuba.
  He told the hearing that I chaired on this subject that the trip to 
Cuba let him deal with the pain of losing his parents. But he said the 
good feelings from giving them the burial he knew they wanted and 
reuniting with friends from his childhood when his parents were 
missionaries in Cuba were crumbled when he came home to face hostile 
officials and the fine for traveling to Cuba illegally.
  Then there is Tom Warner who is 77 years old. Tom Warner has not even 
traveled to Cuba. He is a World War II veteran. He posted on his Web 
site the schedule for the February 2002 annual meeting of the United 
States-Cuba Sisters Cities Association in Havana. What happened to him? 
This 77-year-old World War II veteran heard from OFAC. OFAC accused him 
of organizing, arranging, promoting, and otherwise facilitating the 
attendance of persons at a conference in Cuba without a license. Mind 
you, this World War II veteran never went to Cuba. He simply posted on 
a Web site the information he had about a Sisters Cities meeting in 
Cuba. Warner got a letter from OFAC giving him 20 days to tell OFAC 
everything he knew about the conference and the organizing folks who 
participated in it. He has since, of course, hired a lawyer.
  I just don't understand. We can travel to Communist China. We can 
travel to Communist Vietnam. We can travel virtually anywhere in the 
world except for three countries: Cuba, Libya, and, for now, Iraq.
  The fact is, other Communist countries, we are told, will move in the 
right direction through engagement: engage them in trade and travel and 
that is the way to persuade them to move in the right direction towards 
greater human rights, towards democracy.
  With Cuba, for 40-some years, we have been telling people: Well, you 
cannot travel there, you cannot trade there, because somehow that would 
be giving aid and comfort to the Castro government.
  Well, the best way to give aid and comfort to the Castro government 
is to continue this embargo. The best way to undermine the Castro 
government is through trade and travel. It is what we do in China. It 
is what we do in Vietnam. It is what we ought to do with respect to 
Cuba. But the reason I came to the floor today is to say this poor 
woman ought not to be chased by the Federal Government. She has done 
nothing wrong. She made a mistake by responding to an advertisement in 
a magazine that said what she was going to do on this bicycle trip was 
not illegal. She did it in good faith and now comes home to have the 
Federal Government chase her.
  What is galling to me is the agency in the Federal Government--the 
Treasury Department and this little organization called OFAC, which we 
require to track terrorists--is using their resources to chase Joan 
Slote. Shame on them.
  We are going to try to change the law in the Senate. I am going to 
offer an amendment to the Treasury appropriations bill that is 
identical, word for word, with every punctuation mark, that was in the 
House bill. I think it passed the House by 40 votes. My expectation is, 
if we have a chance to vote on it, it will pass the Senate as well.
  It simply says this travel ban makes no sense. We ought not enforce 
the travel ban. No one ought to be chasing a retired schoolteacher or a 
bicyclist or someone who takes their father's ashes back to bury in 
Cuba.
  I don't know. Maybe the folks at Treasury can be just embarrassed 
into doing the right thing. But it is inexplicable to me that we talk 
about homeland security, we talk about fighting terrorism, and then we 
have an agency of the Federal Government that is using its resources to 
do this.
  Yes, I know what the law is. But I also know what the priority is: to 
use scarce enforcement dollars to track terrorists. Common sense would 
tell you not to divert those dollars to try to take part of the Social 
Security payments away from this retired woman because she went on a 
bicycle trip in Cuba.
  That is the kind of heavy-handed Federal Government I do not want to 
be a part of. I believe we ought to do something legislatively to 
address that situation, and I intend to do that when we have the right 
appropriations bill on the floor of the Senate.

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