Well, we're almost done fixing the toilet tank after it sprung a leak and life here started resembling the Donner Party and all...
Anyway, back to the essay. The threat is real, the mullahs are coming. Joking aside, here is something which does bother me: terror financing.
I'll try to keep things succinct because it can get boring, but in the first three years following 9/11, the government's approach, while somewhat difficult to grasp because of its scope, was actually encouraging in many respects.
There was a serious and concerted effort to go after terrorist financial networks led by a guy most probably never heard of, David Aufhauser. Aufhauser took this on after being promoted to general counsel of the US treasury and had some success. As of about mid-2003, $136 million had been either seized or frozen (assets).
But then, Aufhauser quit in '03 to take a job with the Swiss bank UBS.
Now it might seem strange at first:
http://www.law.com/jsp/tx/PubArticleFri ... 5651908034
In May 2004 regulators with the Federal Reserve slapped the financial giant with a $100 million fine for hiding money transfers to countries under U.S. sanctions, including Iran, Libya and Cuba.
UBS didn't stay on the defensive for long. A little more than a month after the fine was disclosed, the bank announced that it had hired David Aufhauser, one of the country's top experts on international money laundering, to run the legal department of its investment bank.
But then...
The Swiss bank's decision to bring in a top government regulator as general counsel is part of an increasingly popular strategy in corporate America. At a time when business lobbyists in Washington have engineered remarkable victories with policy-makers in Congress — such as this year's class action reform and bankruptcy legislation — corporate interests also are lining up regulatory expertise with D.C. lawyers who know the agencies, the rules, and the players.
"They recognize that the government is more and more involved in what companies are doing," says David Leitch, a former deputy White House counsel who joined Ford Motor Co. in April as general counsel. "So a working knowledge of Washington and government are all things that are becoming increasingly more valuable in corporate America."
There's precious recent information about what efforts are taking place in the fight against terror financing, understandably, but with Iraq taking center stage, this is one view of the effort in general, and please take it with salt:
http://www.douglasfarah.com/
Wednesday January 11, 2006
A Waning Interest in Terror Finance
It seems, from my recent conversations with some senior folks in government, that there is a growing sense of dismay-across party lines-at the waning interest in serously combatting terror finance, a coherent public diplomacy strategy, cohesive intelligence reform and many other vital issues.
My friends say there is no follow-up on terror finance issues and no comprehensive strategy because the NSC coordinating group on the issue is now a shadow of what it was when it was so actively led by David Aufhauser. Entrenched cultural and analytical habits have made thinking or acting in new ways difficult. What was once a serious attack mode on the issue now appears to be largely paper-shuffling and a holding pattern, and there is no one at the the top driving against the bureaucratic inertia.
Another common theme is that communication across departmental lines is reportedly at least as bad as it was before 9-11, which each agency clinging to scraps of information and engaging in bloody turf wars rather than facing a common enemy. People with expertise in specific matters are routinely pulled off their primary job and thrown into others for weeks or months at a time, cutting down on sustained focus on important issues. In a crisis mode this is necessary, but this seems to be part of a larger pattern of personnel management and priority setting.
At this point it's necessary to state who made those comments, Doug Farah:
Since June 2005, Douglas Farah has been an investigative consultant with the NEFA Foundation, as well as a consultant and freelance writer on terror finance and national security issues. In 2004 he worked for nine months with the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, studying armed groups and intelligence reform. For the two decades before that, he was a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the Washington Post and other publications, covering Latin America and West Africa.
Born to missionary parents on July 22, 1957, he moved to the Amazon basin in Bolivia when he was 18 months old. When he was 7 years old his family moved to the capital of La Paz. Following his graduation from the American Cooperative School in December 1974, he spent several years working in rural development and traveling around Latin America and Europe.
In 1980 he enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he began working for United Press International. In 1985, after graduating with honors (B.A. in Latin American Studies and an B.S. in Journalism), he was named UPI bureau chief in El Salvador, covering the civil war there and the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Honduras. In 1987 he left UPI to freelance for The Washington Post, the Boston Globe and US News & World Report. He 1988 he won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence for a Washington Post series on right-wing death squads in El Salvador.
In 1990, on contract with The Washington Post, he moved to Bogota, Colombia, to cover the exploding drug war in the Andean region. Working in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia he chronicled the rise and fall of the Medellin cartel and its leader, Pablo Escobar. He also wrote extensively about the rise of Cali cartel, the move by Colombian drug traffickers into heroin and the growing alliance between Colombian and Mexican drug mafias.
In 1992 The Washington Post hired him as staff correspondent for Central America and the Caribbean. In that job he continued to cover the drug wars in Colombia, but also the 1994 U.S. occupation of Haiti, post-war Central America and the rise of drug trafficking and HIV/AIDS across the region. He also traveled more than a dozen times to Cuba to write about the changing revolution on that island. In 1995 he was awarded the Maria Moor Cabot Prize by Columbia University for outstanding coverage of Latin America.
In 1997, Farah returned to Washington as the international investigative reporter covering drug trafficking and organized crime. He covered the emergence of Russian organized crime groups in Latin America and the Caribbean, the growth of Mexican drug cartels within the United States and drug-related banks in the Caribbean. In 1997 he was honored by Johns Hopkins University for a Washington Post Magazine article on how the Cali cocaine cartel bought the 1994 presidential elections in Colombia.
In March 2000, Farah was named West Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he traveled and wrote extensively about the brutal civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He also wrote about the interlocking networks of agents, under the protection of governments across the region, which profited from those conflicts and the diamonds-for-weapons trade. In November 2001 Farah broke the story of al Qaeda's ties to those diamond and weapons networks. Later that month Farah and his family were evacuated from West Africa because of threats against his life, resulting from the diamond stories. He continued to travel there and elsewhere around the world to report on the financial network of bin Laden. In June he joined the investigative staff in Washington.
Now what Farah "postulates" in the statement pasted above does not in essence counter the essay's assertions in terms of credibility. But then again, as someone said, the only History and the History we don't know.
So we sometimes have to 'rely' on such essays to gain insight and form decisions, hence the salt-taking. For me, Farah's statement has a ring of truth to it. Maybe not in the specifics but in substance.
Talking of war, enemy, integration of immigrants and voluntarily forfeiting 'rights', I find it interesting to quote passages of Farah's tetimony to the US House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Comm-ittee On Financial Services last year:
http://www.douglasfarah.com/articles/testimony3.%!@$
[...] Groups like al Qaeda and Hezbollah chose West Africa as a base because in states such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and most others in the region, governments are weak, corrupt and exercise little control over much of the national territory. Some states, like Liberia under Charles Taylor, were in essence functioning criminal enterprises. For the right price, Taylor let al Qaeda, Russian organized crime, Ukrainian organized crime, Balkan organized crime, Israeli diamond dealers and Hezbollah, operate under his protection. Yet Taylor's regime could still issue diplomatic passports, register aircraft, issue visas and enjoy the benefits accorded to a sovereign government.3
Because of this, Taylor issued airplane registrations to Victor Bout, one of the world's largest illegal weapons dealers. Bout was later discovered not only to be selling weapons to most sides of most civil wars in Africa, but also to the Taliban AND the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. He often took his payment in diamonds. Until very recently he was also flying for the U.S. military in Iraq.4
[...] What is particularly interesting during this phase was the collaboration between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. While al Qaeda operatives on the ground supervised the trade, the middlemen handling the diamonds were Shi'ite. Further muddying the waters as the collaboration between Islamists in the West African diamond trade, with Israeli diamond merchants. Despite the war in their homelands, both Israeli and Lebanese diamond merchants continue to do business with each other. There are numerous other documented cases of al Qaeda-Hezbollah cooperation, but the tie in the financial field is relatively unexplored.
[...] What is really needed is the most difficult and time consuming to carry out: building up intelligence-gathering capabilities on the ground in the "grey areas" or "stateless areas" of the world where the illicit commodity trades flourish and where terrorists have made significant inroads. These areas include parts of West Africa, much of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, parts of East Africa and swaths of Southeast Asia. Only specific information gathered at the points of origin in the commodities trade can really help monitor and decipher how the businesses operate.
For example, in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the DRC, a network of Lebanese diamond traders, related by family and political ties, have traditionally moved the bulk of the "blood diamonds." These kinship networks that are central to this commodity trade need to be mapped and understood as a first step toward defining what action can be taken. It is also essential to understand these groups, operating in areas of the world where computers and telephone communication is haphazard at best, rely on personal contacts, family ties and couriers for much of their operating structure. High-tech monitoring of their communications, successful against other types of groups, is much less useful in these circumstances.
The intelligence deficiencies are not surprising. At the end of the Cold War, no region of the world suffered more dramatic intelligence cuts than sub-Saharan Africa. More than one-third of the CIA stations were eliminated entirely and those that remained were left with only minimal staffing. Even as the Clinton administration began increasing funding for intelligence in the late 1990s, the region's capabilities and budget remained static.15
The whole piece is interesting to read. Hopefully the links posted work, otherwise I'll post alternates.
The point is that I take the original essay posted by Doc to be limited in scope and more, attempting to stifle dissent, i.e. questioning what is actually being done.
If the Lebanese, Palestinian, Israeli and Muslim traders involved in terror financing can effectively cooperate out of economic motives, how well are we in the West doing at engaging and retaining cooperation of allies in Asia, Europe and the Middle-East among others?
Incidentally, the answer is out there. Googling the name Karen Hughes offers a picture.
We are looking through the wrong end of the microscope, I fear. Ah well... SO MUCH FOR BEING SUCCINCT....
