Slashdot Mirror
Why Terror Financing is So Tough to Track Down
An anonymous reader writes "After a recent Slashdot story detailing the errant investigation into a credit card holder's dept payment, comes this article from the Christian Science Monitor discussing the commoditization of terrorism, its relationship to crime, and the difficulties encountered when trying to track "bad" money."
Some people fight for freedom. Some people use terror as a political tactic. Some freedom fighters use terrorism. Not all freedom fighters are terrorists. Not all terrorists are freedom fighters. Claiming that the two terms simply carry different connotations for the same meaning is not insightful.
English is easier said than done.
There is something utterly wrong about the words Christian and Science being next to each other.
Why? Because you don't understand the distinction between literalists and real intellectuals who also happen to be Christians?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Laws and law-enforcement officers are always lagging behind and will continue to do so. The degree to which they lag behind is what matters. If a dog starts running after you, and gets nearer to your heels you tend to speed up and ultimately lose focus and fall into the open manhole.
This is what law-enforcement should focus on, instead of trying to leapfrog over the terrorists.
PATRIOT act can't help much because it ends up harassing the normal people more than it can catch the bad guys.
Singapore's example is a good one. The whole system is completely integrated. My library card becomes invalid the moment my employment pass is canceled. Similarly, the credit card company automatically sends me a closure statement and the IRAS gets the remaining funds from my bank account.
However this does not hassle the common man in any way from buying beer in THailand or cigars in malaysia using his card.
Prepaying the card with a huge amount also does not trigger a warning flag because the whole system hinges on a high degree of cooperative automation.
However with disparate state laws, etc., it is difficult to enforce it in US.
Strangely i felt more under microscope in US than i did in singapore. Every time i visited BankAm in US to deposit my paycheck ($4000-$6000) i needed to provide TWO photo IDs to deposit and withdraw. Additionally i needed to fill in a few nasty forms for an amount beyond $5,000/-
In singapore since the system already has my photo and EP number and details, they don;t even bother asking. They took one good look at my face, compared it with record (seeing it was not canceled) and that's it.
Moral: Laws cannot prevent or catch criminals. Only vigilance can. Law can be used to charge criminals.
And GWB is making it worse for US agencies to get cooperation from other countries by kicking at their guts and laughing.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
There are certainly people who profess to fight for freedom and do not, but there are also people who do not even profess to fight for freedom. People who want to re-establish the Caliphate, for example, certainly think it is a good idea, but that doesn't mean that they think it has anything to do with political freedom.
English is easier said than done.
Can any slashdotter tell me why despite the fact that Katrina was known to be coming, and that it would be huge, there was so much devastation amid confusion without clear leadership?
I think it comes down to a confusion of responsibility. Decades ago, people would have known that the hurricane was coming and that it would be big. They would have taken the personal responsibility to get the hell out of dodge. Boat, plane, train, hitchhike, hike, swim . . . ANYTHING, just to get the hell out. But it's the new millennium, and people are used to being coddled by their government, which has been arrogating more and more power to itself so that people think it's omnipotent. "This is America. This isn't a third-world country. Nothing bad can happen to me. Uncle Sam will figure it out so I won't get hurt" is a common thought that runs through people's heads. (I see this line of reasoning all the time, exempli gratia, at the pharmacy at which I work, when people don't understand why the federal government won't somehow make their drug copayments go away.)
The federal government does not do anything well that involves actual people except for killing them. The states have limited means, because what state senator wants to vote for a tax increase to fund emergency preparedness, especially when the federal government ostensibly has the will and the means to do it for them. So the people give up the buck, the states pass the buck, and the feds drop the buck. And so you have a mess like New Orleans after Katrina.
Less clear to me is why we don't hear too much about any recovery efforts in Mississippi, even though it was in the right front quadrant of Katrina, and therefore bore the real brunt of the storm. Was it simply less damaged, were people better prepared, or was the response better managed? We're learning a lot from what Louisiana did wrong. What can we learn from what Mississippi did right?
If news lately is to be believed then there are thousands of terrorists running around. Rarely are building blown up, or water supplies poisoned.
Oh, so every terrorist is busy killing? No organizers? No fund raisers? No recruiters? No trainers? these people just pop up out of the ground strapped with semtex and go to work?
The insergency in Iraq is nothing but well meaning Iraqis either I take it?
This isn't a Hollywood film where a dozen guys get together and hatch a scheme. It's a bit more involved and it doesn't take much to see that for yourself, you've got the whole internet to understand how large this strcuture is, not much unlike a large corporation.
You're thinking these guys are random kooks, far from it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Remember that government funded superbowl ad about how buying marijuana was helping put box-cutters into the hands of hijackers? Of course at the time it probably made you angry enough to want to fly an airplane into the DEA headquarters, but there probably was some grain of truth, where if you follow n-many levels of redirection then yes some percentage of that money ended up in the hands of people so designated as terrorists. But then, you think about it more, and any money you give to anyone for anything could end up in the hands of terrorists after it has changed hands a few times. It's like 7 steps to Kevin Bacon, but with money instead of movies, and Osama or whoever instead of Kevin Bacon.
A lot of what they do is a "reach out and touch somebody" kind of terrorism.
They aren't blowing up shit willy nilly in 99% of countries, because it doesn't suite their purposes. Israel has been a relatively safer place since Hamas agreed to a cease fire about a year ago.
If you hit up the Wikipedia page on terrorism their first sentance is:Emphasis mine, because terrorism has rarely been about killing people, in the same way that war has rarely been about killing people.
War and terrorism have almost always been extensions of politics. Even Osama Bin Laden's original stated goals were (are?) that the US withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia and support from Israel.
To directly answer your question: We don't know how hard is it to blow up a building, because either we haven't tried or because we don't know the failure:success ratio. (If you have tried to blow up a building, I hope you work in demolitions and that you succeeded.)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Blowing up a building is relatively easy. Getting ahold of the required explosives is much more difficult in the USA. In a place like Iraq, it is much easier to scrounge old munitions and to extract the explosives for reuse.
The terrorists are not stupid. They select targets with a desired effect in mind, not to just blow shit up.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
We also, for the most part, didn't have the absolute poverty that we have today. That's the real reason people didn't leave.
:) ), have a Buick that's not running well, three kids, and $20 to last through the end of the week. How the hell are you supposed to pick up and go to Houston?
Imagine: it's 2 days before a big hurricane hits. You're a single mom (bear with me, I realize this is Slashdot
The ones that had the money and didn't go.... they were dumb, and deserved the later problems. But an awful, awful lot of those folks just didn't have many options.
Decades ago, Americans weren't this poor.
I think they are just stupid. YOu don't even have to blow stuff up.
How hard is it to call in a bomb threat to a skyscraper?
How hard is it to claim that you injected 500 random cows with mad cows disease (or whatever).
How hard is it to mail talcum powder to a hundred people.
All those acts would cause panic and fear. If you scare the public enough not to eat beef you will collapse the economy of the west.
What these dumb fucks don't realize is that you don't have to DO anything. You just have to talk a good game. This is a lesson our politicians know very well. They just need to pull a Rumsfeld once in a while that's all.
evil is as evil does
Terrorism financing is so hard to track down because terrorism doesn't exist until its labelled as such. The actual distinction between terrorism and war is nada (both require a lawmaker's stamp). Its obvious 9/11 was nasty, clearly characterizable as warfare. Think of the organized crime wars of past eras or the Janjaweed in Sudan now. What makes terrorism even more difficult to detect is that people who are not criminal, are sympathetic to the enemy. Bush says over and over that the US is not at war with Iraq, but that's just not true. The real Iraq is still there, and those people hate the US and want us out. Really, we're at war with all those people - right or wrong. I'm not very sympathetic to them, because I don't know many. I just don't think its a war worth winning. That's because I would do OK with expensive oil and a nervous Israel. I'd probably do better since there'd be less cars trying to run me over on my bike. And my Israeli friends would probably spend more time here in the US instead of Tel Aviv and I'd get to see them more.
The US tries to sell this as a war on terror when its really just a war on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon to be Iran. But by trying to not be at war when you are, you create this confusion. Why did I say Saudi Arabia? Because they're a monarchy chiefly supported by the US and Britain (a puppet dicatorship if you will - watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' that's the Sauds). That's why so many of the 9/11 hijackers were from there.
The same thing happened back in the 1980's with Northern Ireland. Plenty of donation money for poor Irish made its way to violent means back in the 80's. I lived in Boston back then and the level of conspiracy was intense. Donate to a good Irish cause - some of the money found its way to the IRA. I remember the winks and nods at Southie day in 1984. The British and Irish were at war, but the Irish couldn't fight against a nuclear power with conventional means. The Irish didn't want to take over Britain, they just wanted to kick them out of Northern Ireland (or least stop the paramilitary Protestant death squads). But in the end the British drew a truce reigned in the death squads and none of those terrorists is in a place like gitmo. That's because the British didn't have the heart for decimating the Northern Irish Catholics, which is what they would've had to do to win. I'll give the British props for not being as inhuman as the US is now.
Maybe eventually, Americans will realize you can't have a war on terror because terror is a form of war. In fact it was originally coined by the French as a form of warfare on their own population. They had to keep all those citizens in line after the revolution and so they did some pretty terrible (terrorizing) things.
To win this war, you need to rephrase the whole thing. Define your enemy. In this case it would be Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, maybe Syria soon too. But since the US population isn't ready to accept that this country is an imperialist on the scale of the Roman Empire, we have this stupid 'war on terror' confusion. If you want to win, you need to get everyone on board and lock up or kill every possible enemy and bomb them into oblivion. Think Dresden in WW2 or Nagasaki. That's how you break the enemy's morale. You have to decimate them. Think hundreds of Gitmo's. That's how you win a war. You kill them.
I personally don't have the stomach for it, and I think its a stupid gamble that only people who havn't read their history would make.
I know that this sounds like an off the wall conspiracy theory but when you think about it, it's true.
Methods that peek into people's credit card transactions won't find terrorists. Terrorists are, as much as people might not want to admit, intelligent people. They are not going to do anything that gets them noticed. This includes buying semtex with their credit cards.
I'm pretty sure that the Government knows this obvious truth. So if they are not using the PATRIOT Act to spy on terrorists (since things like the PATRIOT Act is useless in finding terrorists), then who are they spying on? You of course!
The whole idea of a 'war on terror' is not a new one. Various Governments have used the same scare mongering tactics to try and control their populations. I know I'm not saying anything here that people don't already know but I feel it has to be said until people actually listen.
Short of banning work, there's no way to stop that source of funding.
In my view, there is a huge amount of scaremongering going on. Terrorists use terrorism because its CHEAP. It doesn't need much funding. The 9/11 thing was an exception.
Laws preventing you from paying cash for cars (here in the UK) are not going to have any impact on terrorism. They probably do affect the disposal of stolen money, and they sure as hell inconvenience law abiding citizens, who then assume "its being done for a good reason" and that the government is "tough on terrorism".
Its in the same league as my proposed ban on short skirts to combat inflation - it works if you apply the rules strictly - not because there is a cause and effect relationship in the scientific sense, but because it gives the general public the impression the government is "taking stringent action".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I have to second this.
As much as people don't want to hear it terrorists, whether they
are IRA, UDA, Hammas, Shining Light etc. etc., tend to be the
brightest and best that there society can offer.
The maze prison in Nothern Ireland was full of bright young
men from good families with above average educational acheivement.
And to being the discussion a bit more on Topic most of these people
are either self funding or funded by handing round the collection plate.
Although the IRA got more into organised crime twoards the end of its
tenure the majority of funding still came from passing around buckets
in the Irish bars of Boston and NewYork.
Yes private US citizens were the major source of funds for a
terrorist organisation. So why is it so hard to believe that private
citizens are the major source of funding for Islamic terrorists?
The main problems here is that if you are in a government department
responsable for say seat belt standards in automobiles and you want a
bigger budget, you can get your hands on some "Homeland Security" dollars
by pointing out that most of the 9/11 terroists were known seat belt
wearers and reasearch into seat belts could help identify future terrorists.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
What if things are going just peachy?
What if the main objective is not to win the war, but to maintain a state of constant war? If this were the case, then it would achieve several things. . .
1. It would keep the American Public in a state of perpetual fear. When people are scared, they don't think rationally. They don't mind having their freedoms revoked, they are much easier to herd like cattle. They do as they are told. The upshot being that the dictator gets to bend rules and stay in power for as long as he can maintain the state of 'war'.
2. It keeps money flowing in huge amounts from the public coffers to the pockets of oil men and weapons salesmen, (both of which Bush is). His fellow staff share this trait. Peace is not profitable.
Oil was selling at around $13 per barrel before the first Gulf War. When bombs started dropping in the desert, oil jumped to $40 per barrel. --A few people made a lot of money overnight. The brokers were wetting themselves. And they couldn't wait for it to happen again, which it has.
I think the 'war on terror' confusion has more to do with deliberate marketing than with error.
-FL
As Senator Kucinich said, I think we see a pattern here. But the problem is not Republican or Democrat - it's that our government is fundamentally broken. I'm voting straight down the line this year - voting out every single incumbant, regardless of how much I hate the alternative.
The alternative? You're smart enough to recognize the incumbants suck. Why do you fail to recognize that the guy on the other side of the aisle is just the same guy wearing a different suit? You're right: The problem is not Republican or Democrat - it's Republican and Democrat.
Vote for a third party, even if its not mine, please.
one mans terrorist is anothers freedom fighter
Except they aren't fighting for freedom, they are fighting for oppression.
Freedom of religion? As long as it's Muslim.
Freedom of speech? Sure, as long as it doesn't go against anything in the Koran.
Right to live? Sure, as long as you are Muslim (and once you're in, you can never leave or it means death)
Sometime people kill to gain their freedom and to fight against oppression, other times they just kill you because you don't subscribe to their beliefs. I mean look what happened over a few cartoons... still think they are fighting for freedom?
You are quite right about the fear.
The rest of the world doesn't understand why American conservatives aren't frightened about what's happening.
We're in the middle of two endless wars which have killed tens of thousands and crippled hundreds of thousands. Americans are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn't that frighten you?
We've blown one trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. One trillion dollars -- do you have any idea how much that is? Think how much you could do with a million dollars. Now imagine getting a thousand times as much. You could give a million dollars to everyone you knew and still be staggeringly rich. Now imagine a thousand times more than that.
How are we going to *pay* for this trillion dollars? Most of these expenses haven't even hit us yet and come from decades of caring for the tens of thousands of young men and women that have been crippled by this pointless war. We've written a trillion dollars in bad checks -- doesn't that frighten you?
We have a President that has failed at every single thing he's done. We've gone from disaster to disaster, we lost the World Trade Center, we lost New Orleans, we lost Bin Laden, we are losing every day in Iraq. We watched over days while Katrina slowly destroyed New Orleans and, just like on 9/11, he did nothing, nothing at all -- but this time we could see him caught like a deer in the headlights. Perhaps New Orleans was beyond saving, but we'll never know because Bush didn't even try -- he didn't even pretend to try.
So we have a President who gathers disaster around him like flies to honey and then is incapable of acting competently.
And there are three more years of this to go.
To the "rest of the world" -- "liberals", "socialists", and pretty well every single non-American -- conservative America is like a bus driven at high speed by a madman, and we are terrified that it will take a lot of us out with it when it finally crashes and burns.
And we think the reason that the few of you aren't frightened is that you're also mad, and blind to boot.