Hands Off
Bush and Co. use trade rules to block the flow of science and culture from ¨rogue nations.¨ Jail time for editors? It could happen here.
[EDIT: Don't worry--the Bush admin really is working to keep jobs in this country. More jobs for US born academics now that those darned fureners (sp?) can't be edited here.]
by Stephanie Kraft - March 11, 2004
Also see cover art
COURTESY OF MIZAN PRESS
There are things all Americans, liberal and conservative, think just can´t happen here.
Not in a country with a sense of humor. Not in a country with a Bill of Rights.
One of those things, we think, is censorship. Not what we carelessly call censorship in semantic catfights about when eroticism becomes pornography, but real restrictions on the free flow of the spoken and written word. In the case of the written word, that free flow includes the freedom to edit for maximum clarity and enhancement, and then publish.
But more and more, what can't happen here is happening here. Under a policy the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control developed over a year ago, publishers and others who edit manuscripts from nations under U.S. trade embargoes -- including, at the moment, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Cuba -- may face criminal penalties, including fines of up to $500,000 and 10 years in prison, unless they are working under special licenses from the government.
I t took a while for word about the new rule to get around, and it was hard for many groups potentially affected by it to believe the government would actually enforce it. But by now, though no prosecutions have been reported yet, it's clear that the Bush administration is dead serious about the ban.
Treasury spokeswoman Tara Bradshaw recently told the New York Times that "collaboration on and editing of the manuscripts ... and facilitation of a review resulting in substantive enhancements or alterations" to them are illegal. The regulations, and correspondence elaborating them, are available for reading on the web site for the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The logic behind the new rule is that, while publishing is not forbidden under U.S. law, editing and enhancing manuscripts -- by illustrating them, for example -- makes them more salable, and therefore constitutes an economic service to an embargoed country.
Illustration in particular is forbidden by a part of the law stipulating that only "camera-ready copies of manuscripts" can be published.
The definition of "editing" is not clear down to the last detail, and the regulations are not clear on whether translation is considered a form of enhancement. Some publishers and others are still asking whether correcting typographical errors amounts to editing. But correcting grammar, rearranging paragraphs or even sentences, or replacing "inappropriate words," is specifically forbidden.
Also forbidden is the reviewing of manuscripts -- not reviewing in the sense of evaluating their quality, but reviewing them as many academic journals are reviewed, with the goal of communicating with the author about what changes or additions are needed. Under the law, that kind of review is considered a prohibited service, because it amounts to "collaboration."
In the vanguard of resistance to the law at the moment is, not the American Civil Liberties Union or another traditional champions of freedom of speech, but a less likely entity: the publications division of the American Chemical Society. Sixty percent of the 24,000 articles the ACS publishes each year come from abroad; the group's own ethical guidelines stipulate that quality, not country of origin, must determine what work is published in its journals.
The ACS has said publicly that it will continue to edit material from the countries on Treasury's bad list.
"I decided that the risks of damaging our publishing program now outweighed the risks of being in violation of the law," ACS publications division president Robert Bovenschulte has said in public statements.
As word about the new rule spreads to academic institutions, reactions vary from dismay to outrage. Some are baffled, too, because it's not as though there's big money to be made from the publication here of works rooted in Islamic culture -- and if there were, as UMass-Amherst Islamic studies professor Mohammed Jiyad pointed out, the rule would be relatively easy for a publisher to get around by having the editing done in Europe. As it is, many older books of the type that could not be edited here now under Treasury's regulations were produced in Britain, which gives Britain an edge on the Islamic studies market in publishing.
It's also hard to see how the rule makes the nation safer. As David Johnston, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Yale, put it, "What does this have to do with the national security?"
And in a democratic society, Johnson added, a rule like this is "a contradiction in terms."
"It's a very troubling development for the spread of ideas," he said. "Unless we can demonstrate that democracy is a lifestyle of sharing and cultural exchange, we're going to lose the battle for people's minds."
Walter Denny, an art historian at UMass who is an internationally renowned expert on Oriental carpets, was furious about the rule.
"The idea that the Treasury Department doesn't have anything better to do than police the publication of articles on Islamic art and Oriental carpets. ... Our government has gone completely looney," Denny said.
Denny has served on the boards of several journals in his field, including Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies. "We used to do whatever we wanted with no problem before the Bushies took over," he said. "If I were asked to send a photo of a carpet to a colleague in Iran, I'd say, go ahead and publish and be damned!"
"This is telling us that we are getting into a very dark age," said Mohammed Jiyad, a professor of Arabic in UMass's Judaic and Near Eastern Studies department, who was born in Iraq and is now a U.S. citizen.
But Jiyad added that, unlike Denny, he wouldn't dare challenge the rule.
"Walter was born here. I am naturalized," he pointed out. "They can take my passport any time they want."
Jiyad's attitude provides an example of the chilling effect the rule has had on scholars and others involved with the flow of information from so-called "rogue nations," even though no prosecutions under the Treasury regulation have been reported yet.
So does the response to the law of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which has stopped editing papers submitted by its members in the countries targeted by the law (of the IEEE's 350,000 members worldwide, 2,000 live in those countries, 1,700 in Iran alone).
The IEEE has even forbidden its member engineers in those countries to use their IEEE e-mail addresses or put the IEEE logo on promotional materials for events.
In the short run, the Treasury rule forces American editors and publishers who want to work with integrity either to risk prosecution or to adhere to a licensure rule that is startlingly close to censorship. In the long run, it may be harmful to the nation's standing in the world of science and culture, Jamal Elias, a professor of religious studies at Amherst College, told the Advocate.
"The U.S.'s reputation as a center of culture and higher education is based to a large degree on the eagerness of talented people from around the world to participate in our society," said Elias. "As we make it more difficult for good graduate students in the sciences to come to our universities ... and foreign scholars to publish in our magazines and journals, they will turn elsewhere.
"There is proof they are doing this already," Elias added. "Countries such as Canada and Germany have actively increased their attempts to court scholars and students who would previously have gone to the U.S."
The rule seems likely to set off a guerrilla war among freelance writers and editors of small journals. Stefania Heim and Jennifer Kronovet, the editors of Circumference, a poetry journal based in New York, have just announced that they will devote a "substantial portion" of their summer issue to translations from the countries on the Treasury Department's list.
Dan Mahoney is a poet and a guest lecturer in the English department at UMass. On a trip to Cuba five years ago, he picked up a small book of poems typed on paper towels by an author forced to keep a low profile under the Castro regime. Mahoney and a co-translator have translated 50 of the poems and are looking to publish them here complete with a preface, which would almost certainly be considered an editorial enhancement under Treasury Department's rule.
But if a publisher was willing to bring out the work, Mahoney said, he would defy the government.
"I would do it," he said. "I would make the book as presentable and as accessible to the bookbuying public as possible. If that included illustrating or adding a preface -- which one would have to do -- I would take the risk, if for no other reason than to call attention to the great disservice this rule does to a supposedly free and open democracy." skraft@valleyadvocate.com
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