Interdicting Terrorist Funding
Want to make the country safer from terrorism? Take the money now being wasted on national ID cards, massive data mining projects, fingerprinting foreigners, airline passenger profiling, etc., and use it to fund worldwide efforts to interdict terrorist funding:
The government’s efforts to help foreign nations cut off the supply of money to terrorists, a critical goal for the Bush administration, have been stymied by infighting among American agencies, leadership problems and insufficient financing, a new Congressional report says.
More than four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, “the U.S. government lacks an integrated strategy” to train foreign countries and provide them with technical assistance to shore up their financial and law enforcement systems against terrorist financing, according to the report prepared by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress.
More:
One unidentified Treasury official quoted anonymously in the report said that the intergovernmental process for deterring terrorist financing abroad is “broken” and that the State Department “creates obstacles rather than coordinates effort.” A State Department official countered that the real problem lies in the Treasury Department’s reluctance to accept the State Department’s leadership in the process.
In another problem area, private contractors used by the Treasury Department and other agencies have been allowed to draft proposed laws in foreign countries for curbing terrorist financing, even though Justice Department officials voiced strong concerns that contractors should not be allowed to play such an active role in the legislative process.
The contractors’ work at times produced legislative proposals that had “substantial deficiencies,” the report said.
The administration has made cutting off money to terrorists one of the main prongs in its attack against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. It has seized tens of millions of dollars in American accounts and assets linked to terrorist groups, prodded other countries to do the same, and is now developing a program to gain access to and track potentially hundreds of millions of international bank transfers into the United States.
But experts in the field say the results have been spotty, with few clear dents in Al Qaeda’s ability to move money and finance terrorist attacks. The Congressional report- a follow-up to a 2003 report that offered a similarly bleak assessment – buttresses those concerns.
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Adam S • November 28, 2005 10:03 PM
I think you should apply your 5 step process here. The goal is to shut down terrorist funding. How will that be done? What will the side-effects be?
I don’t think the idea survives that scrutiny.