Articles

Hamas may have been whitewashed: a clarification

After publishing the article ’Hamas may have been whitewashed, but it is no cleaner than before’ here three days ago, a friend who is also professionally involved in counter-terror finance messaged me to say that the information on which I had based the article was inaccurate: the US Treasury continues to blacklist the main leaders of Hamas and to ban any transaction with them.

Indeed, the US Treasury blacklist of Palestinian Legislative Council members, which was last updated in April 2006, names the full Hamas leadership, from ’HANIYA, Ismail (a.k.a. HANIYA, Ismail Abdul Salah; a.k.a. HANIYYA, Ismaeel)’ down, on 11 pages, not just Musa bu Marzouk, as I mistakenly wrote.

Avi Trengo, the Israeli journalist quoted in the Israel National News report that was my source, says that INN simply didn’t understand him correctly; and I apologise for being misled in turn. But the real fault actually lies with the US Treasury itself, whose explanatory notes to the blacklist of PLC members are a typical example of opaque American bureaucratic gobbledygook:

Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) list - (This list is NOT part of the Specially Designated Nationals [SDN] List)

Section (b) of General License 4 issued pursuant to the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations (31 C.F.R. Part 594), the Terrorism Sanctions Regulations (31 C.F.R. Part 595), and the Foreign Terrorist Organizations Sanctions Regulations (31 C.F.R. Part 597) authorizes U.S. financial institutions to reject transactions with members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) who were elected to the PLC on the party slate of Hamas, or any other Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), Specially Designated Terrorist (SDT), or Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), provided that any such individuals are not named on OFAC’s list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List).

The individuals in the following list are PLC members who were elected on the party slate of an FTO, SDT, or SDGT. They do not, however, appear on the SDN List. As indicated above, transactions involving these individuals must be rejected.

In order to uniquely identify these names, OFAC has created the program code [NS-PLC]. The prefix "NS" stands for "non-SDN".

What all this means, it seems, is that all the Hamas leaders named in the NS-PLC list are actually completely benevolent, or at least morally neutral, individuals who are only banned because of their association with Hamas, which actually is recognised as a terrorist group. This is clearly nonsense, since Ismail Haniya and his merry men continue to preach the violent destruction of Israel on every possible occasion, even if for tactical reasons they are currently keeping to a minimum the level of rocket fire against Israeli civilian targets.

But what is more nonsensical is the whole way the US blacklist -- and by extension, the global sanctions regime that it underpins -- is designed. There is no clear justification for the distinctions between SDN, SDT and SDGT (see above). ’Counter-Terrorism Sanctions’ are followed immediately by ’Cuba Sanctions,’ as if the sanctions against the Cuban regime (however unpleasant it may be) were really anything more than a political sop to the Cuban emigres in the USA and to the remains of anti-Communism. Alexander Lukashenko, the undemocratically-elected President of Ukraine, is listed (in dozens of alternative spelling variations) in the same document as al-Qa’eda and the Swiss-based Relief Association for Palestine.

Basically, the blacklist is meant to serve a very important purpose: to cut off the most dangerous and undesirable people and organisations in the world from the financial system that they need in order to function. There is even some logic in lumping together drug-smuggling barons, terror groups, dangerous states such as Iran, and the political leaders of odious regimes (whether or not they have also carried out war crimes), because to a considerable extent, they all cooperate, through finance, intelligence, weapons and operational support, in trying to subvert or conquer the free world. But the blacklist doesn’t work, partly because everyone listed there will find a way to operate through straw men, shell companies and the like; and partly because it is so huge and clumsy that the banks and other businesses that are forced by international and national regulations to use it inevitably end up with lots of ’false positive’ matches on perfectly innocent customers or would-be customers, which in turn lead to a tremendous waste of time and resources, and to the bombardment of national Financial Intelligence Units with valueless reports that divert their limited resources from real investigations.

Clearly, there do need to be rules about which organisations in the world are to be defined as ’terrorist,’ since sometimes, to be completely frank and cynical about it, we in the free world need the support of ’our terrorists,’ an uncomfortable fact that somewhat threatens the legitimacy of the global counter-terrorism regime. But there should be a clearer distinction between these groups, all of which have political aims and a few of which even have a reasonable pretext for calling themselves freedom fighters, and the drug gangs of Mexico and Colombia, to say nothing of the never-never-land regime of Raoul Castro. It’s high time that the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate took a more proactive role in trying to put pressure on the USA and the Financial Action Task Force to improve the system and make it more rational. And, considering that the increasingly heavy burden of financial system regulation is making both institutions and customers look for ways round it, it would also be valuable for the largely invisible and unknown leaders of the regulatory regime to come out of the shadows and explain to the public why we all have to suffer from this burden.