Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies

6. Money and Modern Exile

155 In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men. —Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer I am not existing. Only a person, as in a . . . as a creature, to eat and to sleep and to read. —Youssef Nada, 2007 Blacklisting the Hofstadgroep In December 2006, members of the alleged Dutch terrorist group the Hofstadgroep were put on the European Union’s terrorism sanction list (or EU blacklist). The Hofstadgroep is the name given by the Dutch secret services to a group of individuals—mostly young Muslim men who are second-generation migrants but also a few women and one Dutch convert—loosely affiliated with Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. This group met at different times and in different constellations, sometimes at the house of Bouyeri in Amsterdam, allegedly to exchange radical ideas and to discuss or plan violent acts. The group had already been under surveillance for over a year when a number of the individuals associated with the group were arrested in November 2004, a few weeks after the murder of van Gogh. Their trial and appeal, which lasted from 2005 until 2010, became a test case of the breadth and applicability of new counterterrorism legislation in the Netherlands. The Dutch legislation was enacted in 2004 and designed to enable prosecution of potential terrorists in the earliest stages of contemplating and planning attacks. This legislation 6 MONEY AND MODERN EXILE 156 money and modern exile is exemplary of a wider post-9/11 turn toward anticipatory prosecution in which the link between prosecution and the perpetration of a violent act becomes increasingly tenuous. Without going here into the details of the Hofstadgroep trial, it is important to know that key juridical debates played out in this case concerning the questions of what defines belonging to a criminal “group” and what constitutes terrorist planning and intent.1 After the initial sentencing of the Hofstadgroep members in 2006, but before their appeal hearing in 2008, then finance minister Gerrit Zalm put Hofstadgroep members on the Dutch national blacklist and subsequently on the European list. The EU list had been created with the adoption in December 2001 of the EU Council Common Position 2001/930/CFSP, which implemented UN Resolution 1373 in European law. Apart from transposing the UN blacklist into the European acquis , this common position founds an independent EU blacklist on which member states can include European individuals and organizations . Although seemingly a nonviolent measure, placement on these blacklists is intended to have substantial paralysing effects on suspects ’ daily lives: not only are their assets frozen but engagement with affected persons in any sort of financial transaction, including, for example , salary payments and insurance contracts (with possible exceptions for basic needs provisions), becomes interdicted. As legal scholar Iain Cameron puts it, “The effects of a freezing order, if it is effectively implemented, are devastating for the target, as he or she cannot use any of his or her assets, or receive pay, or even, legally speaking, social security.”2 Blacklisting has run as a red thread throughout the previous chapters, being one of the most important and contested financial sanctions to which charities and terrorism suspects have been subjected. Blacklisting has become increasingly important in the pursuit of terrorist monies, as it is supposedly the more “targeted” way of fighting financial crime than the development of suspect banking profiles. The listing of the Hofstadgroep members was not nearly as controversial as some other post-9/11 blacklisting cases—at the time of their listing these individuals had been found guilty in a criminal trial of belonging to a terrorist organization. One of the most important elements of juridical and political controversy in other cases has been that persons have been listed in advance of and indeed in lieu of criminal trial. As Senator Paul O’Neill, U.S. Treasury secretary at the time of 9/11, recounts the logic of post-9/11 blacklisting: money and modern exile 157 [We] moved on . . . setting up a new legal structure to freeze assets on the basis of evidence that might not stand up in court. . . . Because the funds would be frozen, not seized, the threshold of evidence could be lower and the net wider.3 This controversy over thresholds of evidence was not entirely absent from the Hofstadgroep listing: one of the affected persons contested his...