Yesterday, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) added the over-fed Nork dictator, Kim Jong Un, to the List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons. Adding heads of state to the SDN List is not only unusual but also largely symbolic and pointless. The effect of putting the Norktator on that list means that no U.S. persons can engage in any transactions with him and that any property or interest in property by him that comes into the control of a U.S. person must be blocked. So, yeah, all of Kim Jong Un’s bank accounts in the U.S. (all zero of them) are blocked. And if Kim Jong Un had plans to visit Disneyland (and get a new coif at Star Cuts on the way), those plans now have to be put in hold.

The largely ineffectual nature of the U.S. move, of course, did nothing to moderate the hysterical overreaction of the Nork Government, which immediately characterized the designation as “a declaration of war” and a “hideous crime.” Uh huh. Right. Arbitrary imprisonment, slave labor, torture, extrajudicial executions are harmless local Nork customs; interfering with Kim Jong Un’s trip to Disneyland and access to Netflix is a “hideous crime.”

An announcement by a Florida company that it will issue a MasterCard that American travelers can use in Cuba has, not surprisingly, caused the usual suspects on the Hill as well as all the pro-embargo bloggers to have a major conniption fit. The claim is that if the card is used in connection with confiscated property it will violate section 103 of the Helms-Burton Act. Buy a mojito made with Havana Club and pay with a credit card, and, they claim, the credit card company has violated the Act.

So, according to these folks, credit card companies must put procedures in place to prevent that from happening, knowing full well that there are no possible procedures that could ensure that. Not surprisingly, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), which is in charge of enforcing the Helms-Burton act and the Cuban embargo, thinks this argument is bunk, writing to El Nuevo Herald: OFAC “does not consider the use of credit cards by authorized travelers in Cuba to be transactions subject to the prohibition in Section 103.”

Section 4(13)(B)(iii) of the Helms-Burton act exempts from the definition of “traffic” all “transactions … incident to lawful travel to Cuba.” Whether this limits the application of section 103 is not entirely clear, since section 103 does not prohibit trafficking in confiscated property, rather it prohibits “financing transactions involving any confiscated property.”

Embargo cheerleader-in-chief Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart told the Miami Herald that “the use of credit cards by authorized travelers is allowed, but would violate Section 103 of the 1996 Helms-Burton law if the transactions involve properties seized by the Cuban government from U.S. owners.” But he is leaving out a key part of section 103 which only prohibits doing this “knowingly … for the purpose of financing transactions involving any confiscated property.” Of course, there is no way that MasterCard, or any other credit card company, is going to know what is being purchased when it authorizes the transaction, much less whether it is confiscated property or not.

Photo Credit: Havana Club on the Road to Havana by Richard Smallbone [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/nxC2Pr [cropped and processed]. Copyright 2013 Richard Smallbone

I don’t know what’s going on but it seems I can’t escape my job even during seemingly harmless activities.   I watched the excellent AMC/BBC miniseries The Night Manager and it turns out to be about an illegal arms deal, and one of the major characters is from, get this, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.   DDTC on TV?  Really?  Who knew?

So now I’m reading Before the Fall, a mystery/thriller by Noah Hawley, best known, perhaps, for his role as the screenwriter for the television miniseries Fargo.  The novel, which has been well-reviewed and which is hard to put down, has, as a plot point . . .

CAUTION:  VERY MINOR SPOILERS AFTER THIS

. . . has, as a plot point, an investigation of sanctions violations by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.  But, sadly, popular novels are poorly edited these days, and there is an unfortunate whopper of an error.   The whopper is not the hilarious and continual references to “the OFAC” as in “Agent Hex and his superiors at the OFAC.”  (I suspect that Hawley is thinking that you say O-F-A-C and not OFAC.  Sigh).

No the whopper is that, in 2015, OFAC still thinks that Libya is sanctioned.   An indictment at issue involves a character engaging in financial transactions with Libya, even though those sanctions were lifted in 2011 with the only remnants remaining being the blocking of certain people who were once part of the Muammar Gaddafi regime.  Still, although I haven’t finished the book, it’s an enjoyable read.  Perhaps I’ll learn as I read further on that it’s actually an alternative history novel like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Last week the State Department and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) designated under Executive Order 13224, Musa Abu Dawud, one of the leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. E.O. 13224 requires actions by both State and OFAC for such a designation.

This designation led to a story by the American Media Institute headlined “Dead terrorist listed as active threat.” Talk about click bait! Indeed, upon reading the headline, the entire editorial staff of Buzz Feed resigned knowing that they could never equal, much less surpass, such a glorious example of click bait, not even today’s soon-to-be-legendary click bait listicle “22 Cartoon Guys Who Sexually Awakened You.”

Problem is, notwithstanding whether the story on cartoon guys has a kernel of truth, the accuracy of “Dead terrorist listed as active threat” was even more dubious. So the AMI story silently disappeared. (The link to the story in the previous paragraph comes from the Google cache, illustrating that old web posts don’t even die or fade away but live forever, rather like, it would seem, Musa Abu Dawud.)

There was a tweet (of all things!) from TracTerrorism.org that Musa Abu Dawud was killed in an Algerian military operation in March that AMI apparently used as a source, but I could not find any other corroboration of Musa Abu Dawud’s alleged death. Apparently, neither could the grown-ups at AMI who finally pulled the story. I tend to think that if both State and OFAC think this guy is alive that he probably is.

Photo Credit: AQIM Touareg Brigade By Magharebia [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons http://bit.ly/1T78Y7E [cropped and processed]