Editing the Enemy
President George W. Bush has said that Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Prize-winning Iranian activist, is proof of the demand for democracy and free expression in Iran. Too bad, then, that she is forbidden from publishing her story in the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is tasked ...
President George W. Bush has said that Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Prize-winning Iranian activist, is proof of the demand for democracy and free expression in Iran. Too bad, then, that she is forbidden from publishing her story in the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is tasked with preventing U.S. citizens and corporations from trading with enemies of the state, apparently considers the memoirs of the human rights activist contraband. And she is not alone. Cornell University Press's Field Guide to the Birds of Cuba has also been caught in OFAC's dragnet.
President George W. Bush has said that Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Prize-winning Iranian activist, is proof of the demand for democracy and free expression in Iran. Too bad, then, that she is forbidden from publishing her story in the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is tasked with preventing U.S. citizens and corporations from trading with enemies of the state, apparently considers the memoirs of the human rights activist contraband. And she is not alone. Cornell University Press’s Field Guide to the Birds of Cuba has also been caught in OFAC’s dragnet.
Why the sudden crackdown on the written word? Because, in a series of recent rulings, OFAC has decided that the editing of works from sanctioned countries — such as Cuba and Iran — that results in a "substantively altered or enhanced product" is prohibited without a license. This development has set off alarms among editors at U.S. publishing houses, who fear that they could be fined up to half a million dollars or imprisoned for 10 years for breaching these regulations. In response, a collection of publishers and a literary agent who hopes to represent Ebadi are now suing OFAC for what they claim is a violation of First Amendment rights. Edward Davis, the plaintiff’s attorney, believes that the current situation is silencing foreign dissidents and fumes that "the people [that the United States] wants to hear from are the very people [the United States is] silencing."
Of course, even OFAC can sometimes make an exception. Although the Treasury’s sanction shop has been getting tough with academic journals and university presses, the fines levied against corporations doing business with state sponsors of terror have fallen. A recent Associated Press investigation revealed that the average fine for doing business with these countries has dropped from more than $50,000 in the five years before the September 11 attacks to less than $19,000 today.
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