When a group of over 70 U.S. charities, foundations and legal experts wrote to the Department of Treasury on Nov. 8 ending a fruitless seven year dialog over the utility of Treasury’s Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines: Voluntary Best Practices for U.S.-based Charities (Guidelines), the agency had an opportunity to acknowledge that, despite differences in opinion, it understands the vast majority of U.S. charities do good work in good faith.
Instead, Treasury chose to take a swipe at the integrity of the entire sector when it told the Chronicle of Philanthropythat the “fact remains that terrorists and their support networks continue to rely on charities as a primary source of financial and material support.”
That Treasury could make such a baseless, sweeping accusation is disappointing, but not surprising. It is the same kind of hostile rhetoric we have been hearing for years, despite all the factual information nonprofits have provided agency officials. For instance, Treasury should be well aware that:
But, you may ask, what about the actual dollar amounts? Financial crimes experts believe most terrorist funding comes from organized crime, film piracy, illegal drug sales, and the like. Treasury is well aware of this. In October 2009 David S. Cohen, the Treasury Department’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing noted “terrorist organizations’ reliance on crime to finance their operations appears to be expanding.”
When challenged about their broad brush claims about charities and terrorist financing, Treasury retreated to a vague complaint that charities are subject to “exploitation and abuse” by terrorists. But the agency has never defined what this means, and their examples, provided in the Annex to the 2006 version of the Guidelines and this year’s Frequently Asked Questions document, refer almost exclusively to foreign charities.
What are U.S. charities and foundations to make of Treasury’s inability to distinguish legitimate U.S. organizations from front groups or social wings of terrorist groups? As Rob Buchanan, President of the El Hibri Foundation and former Director of International Programs at the Council on Foundations noted in a May 2010 panel, “we would say to them as we often did, if it’s happening here in the United States we don’t see it. If you know something we don’t know you should be telling us about it because we want to correct that problem.”
Treasury’s response to these overtures has been to repeat, often at great length, the same old line it gave the Chronicle. That leaves me to wonder whether a.) they are incapable of understanding what they are hearing, or b.) the unstated policy is to limit international charity.
Either way, after seven years, it makes sense for charities and foundations to end this fruitless effort. Continued meetings would only create the appearance of a dialog that does not exist. In the long run, if the Obama administration wants to fix the problems national security laws create for international charity and philanthropy, it will have to bring in people who are willing and able to listen and work cooperatively with the sector. For now, we are tired of what amounts to insulting accusations, especially at a time when our aid workers are subjected to unprecedented levels of violent attacks by terrorist groups.
Buchanan was right when he noted, “As we said many times in our discussions with the Treasury Department, we’re all on the same side here, nobody wants to see charitable assets be converted to terrorists, but we just think your approach is not a very realistic, effective one.”