Companies With Permission to Bypass Sanctions

NYtimes
December 24, 2010

Over the last three presidential administrations, the United States government has granted nearly 10,000 special licenses allowing almost 4,000 American companies to enter into transactions that would otherwise be prohibited by trade embargoes and sanctions rules. Most of the licenses were issued under a broadly defined “humanitarian” exemption mandated by Congress that has allowed companies to do billions of dollars of business in countries that the United States has blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism including Iran, Sudan and Cuba