Jan
4
OFAC Uses Blog to Respond to NYT Critique
Posted by Clif Burns at 8:43 pm on January 4, 2011
Category: OFAC
The Treasury Department has a blog. Who knew? Well, if you look at it, you’ll understand the reason why no one knew. One reason might be today’s post reporting the exciting news that the tax filing season has just started. Or the recent post titled “Holiday Cheer in Kabul.” No, seriously. That’s the actual title. Apparently, Treasury doesn’t know that Afghanistan is a Muslim country and that Christmas isn’t celebrated there.
But the real reason for my bringing the Treasury blog, scintillatingly titled “Treasury Notes,” to your attention is that the newly-minted blog was used by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) to respond to the preposterous article recently published in the New York Times assailing OFAC for licensing exports of cake sprinkles and popcorn to Iran. The blog post from OFAC stated, quite correctly, that OFAC has no discretion under TSRA to refuse to license agricultural products, medicine and medical devices to Iran on the grounds that they aren’t humanitarian relief items.
Apparently, this post was also sent to the New York Times as a letter to the editor. Shockingly, the newspaper hasn’t gotten around to publishing it.
Of course, blog entries from OFAC would be particularly welcome if they were used to provide guidance to exporters in difficult and confusing areas. I scanned the few articles that have been posted so far and, sadly, did not see anything of that nature. If OFAC is only going to use the blog to respond to criticisms of the agency, well, I’m not going to bookmark it and neither should you. But the blog is in its relative infancy, so I will withhold judgment. And if I do discover any helpful posts from OFAC on it, you’ll hear about it here first.
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Copyright © 2011 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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5 Comments:
Is it a blog or a press release? Because it reads like the latter. Also, not really on topic, but does anyone else find the redesign of the OFAC/Treasury website to be terrible? The former site wasn’t an award winner, but now it takes so many clicks to drill down to things that used to be (relatively) accessible. Did they do any user-testing at all?
“Of course, blog entries from OFAC would be particularly welcome if they were used to provide guidance to exporters in difficult and confusing areas.”
But wouldn’t that take all the fun of it? just kidding…
I’m surprised they would even respond to the NYT article. Just goes to show you that in the golden age of social media everyone wants to get their two cents in.
The Times’ error was compounded this New Years weekend by an op-ed piece by a Georgetown law professor which referred to a “humanatarian aid exception” without reference to or any apparent understanding of TSRA and its separate carve outs for pure commercial transactions in food and ag products, medicine and medical devices. (I’m not sure exactly into which of those three categories bourbon and Tennessee sippin’ whiskey fall, but they are also excepted.) While the professor’s principal point, with which I agree, was that the Supreme Court had wrongly decided that the criminal statutes prohibiting material aid to terrorists could also restrict speech to designated terrorists without offending the First Amendment, the good professor appears to have conflated those statutory prohibitions with OFAC’s standard embargo and SDNL regulations and ignored the actual operation of TSRA. Even though the articles were directed toward a public largely unaware of trade law, one could hope that the country’s leading newspaper and a professor at a prominent within-the-beltway law school would try for a little more accuracy in their attempt to educate the public.
kind of laying on the snark extra thick today eh? the blog was about how the US Treasury officials in Afghanistan were celebrating the spirit of the holiday – by donating school supplies. nothing to do with celebrating Christmas with Afghans. Or maybe they were celebrating the Islamic new year or the day of ashura. Either way, it was actually a nice little post and I commend their efforts.
More to the point – in reply to Erich: agreed that there are a lot of people and institutions jumping on the twitter/blog/internets bandwagon, and often not providing anything useful (such as the first paragraph in this posting), but hopefully it results in a net gain of more information. And OFAC is one institution that I hope continues to add their “two cents” into the discussion.
Agreed that the new OFAC website format is an unwelcome departure from the old version, which did for the most part get the job done….
