MAN ARRESTED FOR REBROADCASTING HEZBOLLAH TV:

A New York man was arrested yesterday on charges that he conspired to support a terrorist group by providing U.S. residents with access to Hezbollah’s satellite channel, al-Manar. . . .

The U.S. Treasury Department in March designated al-Manar a “global terrorist entity” and a media arm of the Hezbollah terrorist network. The designation froze al-Manar’s assets in the United States and prohibited any transactions between Americans and al-Manar.

Iqbal’s attorney, Mustapha Ndanusa, said yesterday that the accusations against his client are “completely ridiculous,” according to the Associated Press. Ndanusa added that he is not aware of another instance in which someone was accused of violating U.S. laws by enabling access to a news outlet.

This raises some interesting First Amendment issues, but don’t blame the Patriot Act or the Bush Administration here. The statute in question, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA, pronounced “Aiyeepa”) predates the Patriot Act by decades, and has just been upheld in another context by the Second Circuit. IEEPA is very far-reaching — in a case that I used to teach back when I taught International Business Transactions, United States v. Spawr Optical Research, 685 F.2d 1076 (9th Cir. 1982) (doesn’t seem to be online anywhere), the defendants had violated the Export Administration Act. They thought that they had a pretty good defense, in that the Export Administration Act had actually expired before their actions. The court held that the President had lawfully extended the expired statute’s provisions by regulation, under his general powers delegated by IEEPA.

I don’t like that case, but it’s one of several reasons why I find claims that the Bush Administration is exercising unprecedentedly broad powers unpersuasive.

Personally, I’d favor exempting retransmission of news material, etc., from the statute, and I think there’s a pretty good argument that this sort of prosecution violates the First Amendment. But it’s also true that sweeping powers of this sort are nothing new in the field of international trade.