Information Embargoes Harm Us
by Betty Jean Craige
In enforcing an economic embargo, the U.S. Treasury Department has prohibited the editing of manuscripts from Iran for publication in the United States, on the grounds that such editing constitutes trading with the enemy. In effect the government is blocking Americans' access to Iranian literature, science, scholarly thought, and journalism.
The Treasury Department's ruling, expressed in a September 26, 2003 letter by Richard Newcomb, Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, renders illegal the "editing and preparation for publication of manuscripts or such services by a person in Iran for a U.S. person, including activities such as reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax, grammar, and replacement of inappropriate words," because such editing "would result in a substantively altered or enhanced product."
On March 3, 2004, Representative Howard Berman of California protested the decision, pointing out that the Berman Amendment (1999) exempted informational materials from economic embargoes authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He wrote that the Berman Amendment ensured "the right of American citizens to have access to a wide range of information and satisfy their curiosity about the world around them."
Americans should recognize the impact of the Treasury Department's ruling on our pursuit of knowledge. The ruling prohibits American scientists from working with Iranian scientists in the peer review process for publication of papers, because such collaboration "would result in a substantively altered or enhanced product." For the same reason, it prohibits American humanities scholars from soliciting, editing, and publishing previously unpublished essays and book manuscripts from Iranian writers, unless they publish those texts without "corrections," with all the grammatical errors, great and small, that non-native writers of English may accidentally produce. It obviously prohibits the translation into English of poems, plays, novels, and essays, as well as scholarly articles and newspaper stories. The ruling appears clearly to violate the intention of the Berman Amendment.
Economic embargoes harm our enemies, but information embargoes harm us.
Waging war by obstructing communication between Iran's thinkers and our own presupposes that Americans need protection from the ideas of our enemies. But when is less knowledge better than more knowledge?
Whatever the motive for the information embargo, the policy disadvantages Americans in our global society. Iranians will publish their work in other countries, and the residents of other countries will read their work. The United States isolates itself from the rest of the global intellectual community when it refuses entrance to the ideas of anyone.
P.E.N., an international association of writers established in 1921, has denounced the Treasury Department's ruling. Its charter proclaims that "Literature, national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency between nations in spite of political or international upheavals." So should information of all kinds.
Better intercultural understanding cannot hurt.
Betty Jean Craige (Tel: 706-542-9265 office; 706-549-6243 home)
University Professor of Comparative Literature
The University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30605
Author of American Patriotism in a Global Society (1996)
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