State to miss deadline for terrorism report, will not change Cuba status

By Pete Kasperowicz

From The Hill

The State Department is expected to release its annual Country Report on Terrorism in the latter half of May, missing today’s deadline by a few weeks, according to a State Department spokesperson.

The much-anticipated annual report was released much later last year — in July.

And while several news outlets have reported that the annual report may include a new finding on whether Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism, those reports are incorrect — the report will in fact make no changes to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, the report will remain a snapshot of the prior year, 2012 in this case.


“We don’t use this report to announce designations,” the State spokesperson said.

As such, the report will continue to list Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria as state sponsors of terrorism. “They won’t be coming off the list,” the spokesperson said.

Under current law, the president has the authority to make the case to Congress that a country should be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. But he may do this at any time, and it has nothing to do with the April 30 deadline for State’s Country Report on Terrorism.