Biden Admin Stops Telling Americans Which Foreigners They Can Debate

The Treasury Department tried to stop an overseas conference that included politicians under sanctions. Now they’re backing down.

Can the U.S. government use counterterrorism as an excuse to stop Americans from talking to foreigners? Until this week, the Biden administration seemed to think so. When the New York-based nonprofit Foundation for Global Political Exchange tried to hold a conference in Lebanon, the U.S. Department of the Treasury argued that it had to bar certain Lebanese speakers because they were on the terrorist list or under other U.S. economic sanctions.

Even though no money or goods were changing hands, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) wrote in 2022 that "the provision of a platform for [the sanctioned individuals] to speak" was considered a "service," and therefore illegal for Americans.

But after a lawsuit, the Treasury backed down. On Tuesday, as part of a settlement agreement, OFAC published a letter stating that merely hosting a speech "is not a service prohibited by U.S. sanctions and thus no authorization is necessary."

The decision came the same day as Congress shot down another attempt to give the Treasury censorship powers in the name of fighting terrorism. On Tuesday night, HR 9495 failed to win the two-thirds majority it needed to pass the House of Representatives. The bill would have allowed the Department of Treasury to declare any nonprofit a "terrorist supporting organization" without providing evidence.

The Foundation for Global Political Exchange grew out of the Beirut Exchange, a conference series started by American researcher Nicholas Noe in 2008, when Lebanon was on the brink of civil war. The Exchange attracts a who's who of Lebanese political figures from across the political spectrum, and the Foundation has since set up sister conferences in Armenia, Tunisia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Libya, and Yemen, all countries suffering extreme political divides.

Although many of the Exchange events have dry, academic titles—things like "Interrogating the Concept of Negligence and Accountability" or "Sectarianism and the Ecumenical Frame"—the conferences have allowed some serious rivals to debate their positions nonviolently. The Beirut Exchange has brought in speakers from Hezbollah, a Lebanese political party and militia that the United States considers a terrorist group.

It has also hosted fierce rivals of Hezbollah, including former Maronite Christian militia commander Samir Geagea, and people who were later believed to be murdered by Hezbollah, including journalist Lokman Slim, who was shot in 2021 while allegedly trying to put a Hezbollah defector in touch with the U.S. government, and former Finance Minister Mohamad Chatah, who was assassinated by a car bomb in 2013.

So it went across the Middle East. The Yemen Exchange, held on Zoom, included both the Saudi ambassador to Yemen and representatives from the Houthi movement fighting Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials and other foreign diplomats have also reportedly been frequent visitors at Foundation for Global Political Exchange events.

"The crucial thing is we don't do love fests," Noe tells Reason, listing all the rival political figures he has hosted. "I would say 20 percent of our speakers are in jail or have been assassinated and a third of our speakers blame the other third for the hardships and violence that they, their party, and their country have suffered over the years."

Noe's organization believed that these conferences were protected by the First Amendment, but "became concerned about how broadly OFAC might interpret its regulatory authority when reports emerged that the video conferencing service Zoom abruptly shut down several academic events involving Leila Khaled," a former Palestinian hijacker, according to the lawsuit.

So they asked permission. The Foundation for Global Political Exchange informed OFAC that its 2022 conference in Beirut would feature five speakers under U.S. sanctions: former Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, member of parliament Jamil Sayyed, Hezbollah member of parliament Ali Fayyad, former Hezbollah member of parliament Ammar Moussawi, and Hamas spokesman Usama Hamdan. Bassil and Seyyed are under corruption sanctions, and the others are under terrorism sanctions.

"While we believe that our proposed activity is not prohibited by any of [sic] sanctions regulations, an officer in the Licensing Division instructed us that we should apply for a specific license," the foundation wrote in an April 2022 letter asking for such a license to be granted. OFAC turned down the request.

It wouldn't be the first time that U.S. authorities used economic sanctions to censor speech. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that a group of American peaceniks would not be allowed to meet with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Tamil Tigers, two foreign rebel groups considered terrorists by the U.S. government, to teach them to "peacefully resolve disputes." Any kind of advice, the government successfully argued, would count as training terrorists.

And in 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the websites of 33 foreign news outlets, arguing that the outlets were attached to the Iranian government, so hosting them on American servers would violate sanctions. (As I uncovered, some of the news outlets were actually at odds with the Iranian government, but there's no transparency or real due process for this kind of action.)

However, the Biden administration introduced a new line of thinking in the Beirut Exchange case. The foundation wasn't planning to give the speakers any money, goods, or training, only a chance to sit in a chair and answer questions. Rather, OFAC argued that an American audience itself was something of value, and therefore covered by sanctions.

The implications for freedom of the press were pretty disturbing. In theory, the government might even be able to gag American journalists from speaking to undesirable foreigners. I myself published a major scoop in 2021—that the U.S. military likely met with PKK fighters in Iraq—based on a PKK commander's response to my questions.

The work of journalists and academics requires talking to "torturers, murderers, terrorists, despots, gang members, thieves, and other miscreants" and "hearing views that many (often even us ourselves) find vile, objectionable or abhorrent," says Monica Marks, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at New York University and a member of the foundation.

The foundation sued the Biden administration in January 2023, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University took up the case. The Biden administration filed several motions for an extension of time, then gave in. It walked back its claims in a Friday letter, then settled the case on Tuesday.

"This settlement is an important victory for free speech at a moment when governments around the world are exploiting national security laws to suppress legitimate political discourse. The First Amendment protects the right of Americans to engage with people from other countries—to talk with them, hear from them, and engage them in discussion and debate," Knight Institute lawyer Anna Diakun said in a statement. "The government has no authority to dictate which voices and ideas Americans are permitted to hear."