The report, which examines terrorism trends worldwide, says Venezuela established weekly flights with Iran and Syria in March of last year and passengers arriving at the Simón Bolivar International Airport were ``not subject to immigration and customs control.''
It was unclear if passengers are still skipping screening procedures but Venezuela's ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, denied the accusations.
''Everybody who enters Venezuela must present documents,'' he said. ``I am the ambassador of Venezuela and when I go to Venezuela, I go before a booth that clears me to come in and to leave.''
The Venezuela-Iran-Syria flight has raised alarm bells among U.S. officials given that Venezuela, unlike Canada, Mexico and many Caribbean nations, refuses to provide advance lists of passengers so U.S. authorities can cross-check them with U.S. terror suspect lists.
The State Department has long complained that Venezuelan officials have refused to cooperate with their U.S. counterparts, and the 2007 Country Report on Terrorism released Wednesday maintained the designation of Venezuela as a non-cooperating nation, falling short of the more draconian designation of state sponsor of terrorism.
There was no change in the list of countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea.
The report says on June 1, one of the JFK Airport bombing suspects, Abdul Kadir, was arrested in Port of Spain, Trinidad, with a ticket to fly to Tehran via Caracas. Venezuela is ''a potentially attractive way station for terrorists'' given its lax controls of identity and travel documents, the text says.
The report does not provide further details and the State Department did not elaborate. Alvarez said Venezuela had ''problems'' with its passports but that new documents based on biometric identification technology are now being issued.
Alvarez said the State Department designations were often used for ''political reasons'' and that the United States had no moral authority to go after Venezuela given its refusal to extradite anti-Fidel Castro activist Luis Posada Carriles, who lives in Miami and is accused by Cuba and Venezuela of masterminding a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner.
Dell Dailey, the coordinator of the State Department's Office for Counterterrorism, was asked at a press briefing if Venezuela should be added to the list of nations that sponsor terrorism. ''At this point,'' he said, ``we don't think we have enough proof.''
Talk of adding Venezuela to the list picked up after Colombian security forces seized several computers in a March 1 raid into a camp in Ecuador allegedly belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The files, according to Colombian officials, suggest links between the FARC and Venezuela that are deeper than previously believed.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a sharp critic of U.S. policies, has said he sympathizes with FARC aspirations but Venezuelan officials say any links with the FARC were aimed at securing the release of hundreds of hostages in FARC hands.
Without referring to the computer files, Dailey said that ``as indicators present themselves, we'll take a look at it and analyze it and compare it, and if we think it's appropriate then we will move them towards a state sponsor of terrorism. But we're not there yet.''
On Cuba, Dailey said there ''was no change'' in the behavior of Havana on terrorism and counterterrorism issues after Fidel Castro was replaced by his brother Raúl Castro and head of state.
The report says Cuba ``remained opposed to U.S. counterterrorism policy, and actively and publicly condemned many associated U.S. policies and actions.''
The report also says Cuba continues to provide safe haven to more than 70 U.S. fugitives and to members of the Spanish group ETA and the Colombian rebels groups FARC and ELN.
The report, however, notes that Havana returned one U.S. citizen wanted on fraud charges in Utah who sailed into Cuban waters. In 2006, Cuba announced it would no longer receive new U.S. fugitives entering Cuba.
