International Aid Groups Balk at Latest Federal Antiterror Screening Plan

After loud protests by charities, the U.S. Agency for International Development said this week that it has not started a controversial plan to screen nonprofit organizations for ties to terrorists and is meeting with critics to ameliorate their concerns.

Under the proposal, the agency would require international nonprofit groups and companies that apply for federal aid to provide personal information for all employees, executives, trustees, and people whom a charity hires as subcontractors. Organizations would not be told whether any of the searches raise red flags that might jeopardize their ability to win a grant or contract.

With the vetting on hold for now, charity leaders said they will continue to push government officials to scrap the program altogether.

“What we would like them to do now is to drop the rule, and then we’re entertaining all options if they don’t,” including enlisting members of Congress to fight the program, said Samuel A. Worthington, the president of InterAction, a Washington coalition of about 160 charities. He said some of InterAction’s members would refuse money from the agency if the screening were to begin.

The proposed antiterrorism effort, known as the Partner Vetting System, will begin after the aid agency has reviewed comments from charities and others affected by it, David Snider, a spokesman for the agency, told The Chronicle. “This program is not up and running,” he said.

While Mr. Snider said that the agency had not postponed the program, a July 17 notice published in the Federal Register said it was to have “become effective on August 27.”

Under the proposal, the aid agency would require groups that apply for grants, contracts, or other financial partnerships with it to provide Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, nationalities, e-mail addresses, and birth dates for the people they work with. The government would then vet names for possible connections to individuals or groups designated as terrorists by law-enforcement authorities.

In a notice in the Federal Register, the agency said, “The information collected from these individuals is specifically used to conduct screening to ensure that U.S. AID funds and U.S. AID-funded activities are not purposefully or inadvertently used to provide support to entities or individuals deemed to be a risk to national security.”

The notice said that an estimated 2,000 people could be checked.

Under current regulations, the agency requires that recipients of federal funds check staff members on their own and certify to the government that no one associated with the organizations appears on terrorist watch lists. In addition, the U.S. Treasury Department has issued voluntary guidelines for nonprofit groups to help prevent charitable dollars from unwittingly supporting terrorists or militants posing as humanitarian groups.

This week, the aid agency met with nonprofit groups to better explain the proposal. According to a PowerPoint presentation at the meeting, a copy of which was given to The Chronicle by one of the participants, the agency said it needs a more robust vetting process because “existing systems do not provide an appropriate level of due diligence” and its staff members remain “potentially liable,” and because the organization operates in 90 percent of the countries where terrorists are active.

But critics of the system said that while safeguards are needed to keep aid money in the proper hands, in this case the government has gone overboard.

“The administration sees a terrorist under every bedcover,” said Philip D. Harvey, president of DKT International, an aid organization in Washington that operates in 11 countries. “The paranoia is getting awfully distressing.”

DKT currently has a $500,000 grant from the agency for a family-planning program in India, and Mr. Harvey said he is unsure whether he would comply with the Partner Vetting Service if it were to start.

Mr. Harvey said the Agency for International Development’s proposal is sending a bad message to charities. “It doesn’t want partners,” he said, “it wants lackeys.”

Charities argue that the Partner Vetting System would be an administrative burden on them and possibly would place aid workers’ lives in jeopardy by creating the perception that they are associated with national-security agencies.

Many of them said the most disturbing aspect of the proposed program is that it would be exempt from the Privacy Act, a 1974 law that prevents law-enforcement authorities from maintaining files on Americans not suspected of a crime, and since the screenings may be based on classified information, grant recipients and others would not know whether they raise suspicions.

“U.S. AID cannot confirm or deny whether an individual ‘passed’ or ‘failed’ screening,” the agency said in a Federal Register notice.

Mr. Worthington of InterAction said that, because humanitarian groups and their employees would be ignorant of their status in the system, it robs them of their legal right to challenge any accusations of wrongdoing.

If the agency starts the vetting program, it would at first operate in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The two Middle Eastern areas have long been a concern for the government. Since 1993 America has pumped in more than $2-billion in economic assistance and other aid, but Islamic militants like Hamas are involved in every aspect of Palestinian society, including providing social services and running schools.

In 2004, lawmakers ordered the agency to do more to prevent federal money from possibly supporting nefarious purposes, and a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, criticized the Agency for International Development’s evaluation of its grant recipients in the territories.

But it is unclear exactly how much, if any, federal money has inadvertently lined the pockets of Palestinian terrorists.

The accountability office’s report says government officials in 2005 identified six organizations that possibly had ties to Hamas and other radical groups. Upon further investigation, the report says, two of the suspect groups were deemed innocent, and two were considered to be affiliated with terrorists. The report did not say what happened to the remaining groups, except to say that the awards they had received had ended by the time the red flags were raised.

In addition, in semiannual reports to Congress, the development agency’s inspector general has said its audits in the West Bank and Gaza have not uncovered evidence of money going to support violent acts.

According to the most recent report, which covers October 2006 to the end of March 2007, “oversight activities during this period did not identify any instances where terrorist organizations received U.S. AID funds.”

In its meeting with charities, the aid agency cited assertions from terrorism experts, Rep. Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, and news reports that American money has indeed gone to questionable Palestinian entities, such as $140,000 to the Islamic University, in Gaza.

Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, a right-leaning think tank in New York, and the author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, told The Chronicle that a broader screening system is long overdue and is desperately needed in the Palestinian territories and other war-torn areas where Islamic radicals are active.

What’s more, she said, InterAction and the other groups opposing the Partner Vetting System are playing down a massive threat.

“They shouldn’t get money without better monitoring,” she said. “Americans need to understand that this is serious and this is war.”

But other charity leaders have framed the controversy differently. They said that ultimately the system would hurt American foreign policy if activated.

Douglas Rutzen, president of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, in Washington, said the screening plan would embolden authoritarian governments, like Russia, that have cracked down on nonprofit organizations to squelch political dissent.

Indeed, an August 27 article in Russia Today, an English-language news service in Moscow, carried the headline, “U.S. follows Russia’s lead on NGOs issue.”

What’s more, Mr. Worthington of InterAction said that if the Bush administration continues to view partners in humanitarian work with suspicion, it will foster anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world.

“We have a choice as a people,” he said. “Do we reach out with some degree of trust or is every relationship that involves U.S. government money one where we have to ask first, before we shake your hand, Are you or are you not a terrorist?”

The notices proposing the new program are available on the Federal Register’s Web site by searching under “Partner Vetting System.”

Copies of letters from InterAction and other charities opposing the proposal are available on InterAction’s Web site.