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."
If news lately is to be believed then there are thousands of terrorists running around. Rarely are building blown up, or water supplies poisoned. This has led me to the conclusion that either the government is fear mongering or the terroists are really stupid. Really, how hard is it to blow up a building?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Check out the Wiki page on it too...
It turns out that "fear mongering" is what the neo-conservatives now in power in Washington DC need to do what they do. The most interesting conclusion of the film is that al Qaeda isn't this all global organization with thousands of sleeper cells ready to commit attrocities. That is what people like Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz want us to believe. To find out why, whatch the move...
Interestingly, some CS'ers claim that Einstein did some hanging around CS reading rooms later in his life. I have to think that if this is true, the inability to describe matter as anything other than energy-equivalent in increasingly shrinking component pieces played into an interest in the CS theory that matter is an illusion (hence the occasional wack job offing their kid with a bedroom seance instead of antibiotics). http://www.christianscience.org/Einstein.htm
As a side note, Jill Carroll, whose abduction in Iraq has caused a bit of a ruckus for a few weeks now, was a freelance write for the CS Monitor. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1666314&page=1
Well, you didn't have a whole city flooded after the storm. But as far as direct storm damage, I can tell you firsthand, it's hard to imagine anything "more damaged" than coastal Mississippi. And as for response afterwards: you have a much lower concentration of people who depend on government for everything.
"(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.)"
I think you misunderstand their complaint. Their complaint is basically "what the fuck happened to all those taxes I paid, how come people in Turkey and Greece get free drugs and I can't. Why doesn't a person in Australia or New Zealand have to worry about going bankrupt because they broke a hip and I do?".
They are right of course. Other much poorer countries manage to provide basic health care for their citizens (even if it's not ideal) and we still don't.
As for the hurricane NO was a special case. The levies broke (like they were predicted to). If Bush was awake during the meeting when he was told they could break better plans could have been made. Of course if he hadn't lied afterwards and told people "nobody could have predicted this" people wouldn't blame him so much.
evil is as evil does
I just don't see why they bother. If Saudi Arabia wanted to hurt the US all they would have to do is to only accept euros for their oil. The collapse of the dollar after that would hurt the US way more then Osama ever dreamed of.
evil is as evil does
The other reason is that our leaders who might themselves be inept, think that the way America works is the way other societies work and think. In areas where terror is cultivated, folks are willing to do stuff for free...all in the hope that some divine power will reward them sometime in future.
You just don't get it do you? Most of the time people don't do things for religion. Generally religion is used as a scapegoat, excuse, reason etc. The only people that can be controlled by religion are the same people that can be controlled by anyone with charisma.
Most acts of violence (terrorism is defined by those in power) are driven by fear, anger power and greed. The people at the top are generally driven by power and greed whereas the people at the bottom are generally driven by fear and anger. They are people just like you and me that have been driven into situations where they feel that their acts are their only way out.
I read an article from a Russian journalist that summed it really well:
Just after Russia conquered Afghanistan this journalist visited a major military base that they'd taken over by bombing it. The major military based ended up being a civilian village. As the journalist entered the village he saw a father holding his daughter that had been killed in the bombing. As they drove past the father looked up with hate in his eyes at the truck. At this moment he said he knew they wouldn't be able to hold Afghanistan. He said he realised that they people had nothing. This father who may have previously been a supported of the Russians was now there number one enemy and would do anything to get revenge. He had nothing and the only thing he had (family) was now taken away. Every time Russia had a victory they'd create more soldiers with nothing to live for. In the end Russia pulled out because they weren't able to hold it.
If Fiji (crazy example on purpose) bombed America and took it over in a couple of days and decimated America's defences so they'd never be able to regain control. How many people could honestly say they'd just sit around and be peaceful? How many people would rally around anyone and anything to try and get justice even if it involved violence?
People always try to demonise terrorist and distance themselves as much as possible even though we'd often act in a similar way if the roles were reverse.
It's always a choice and I hope that if I was put in that situation I'd act differently but to be honest I don't know what I'd do if family was killed infront of my eyes. I don't think I'd be as honourable as I like to imagine I would be.
People accross the world need economic safety and social security in order to prevent terrorism I think some the Marshall Brain's ideas should be implemented world-wide. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Fantastic! I had no idea that New Orleans had the same population density, flood probability, and problem of a massive amount of people who didn't own a car. If you've ever lived on a coast, you know that half the time it never hits where they say it will, and some people even evacuate in the wrong direction, heading towards the storm (especially in Florida). The white elephant is, of course, that most of the deaths weren't people who drowned - they died of natural causes exacerbated by the fact that our Federal Government, with BILLIONS of dollars at their immediate and easily accessible disposal, completely failed them. There are still hundreds of empty beds at FEMA camps all across the region, due to poor management and poor planning. And there's no excuse for "confusion of responsibility:"
"DISASTER. It strikes anytime, anywhere. It takes many forms -- a hurricane, an earthquake, a tornado, a flood, a fire or a hazardous spill, an act of nature or an act of terrorism. It builds over days or weeks, or hits suddenly, without warning. Every year, millions of Americans face disaster, and its terrifying consequences.
On March 1, 2003, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). FEMA's continuing mission within the new department is to lead the effort to prepare the nation for all hazards and effectively manage federal response and recovery efforts following any national incident. FEMA also initiates proactive mitigation activities, trains first responders, and manages the National Flood Insurance Program and the U.S. Fire Administration."
Now the current (and previous) administration has missed the clues and failed to prepare for:
Terrorism and 9/11
The Iraq War
Katrina
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.
"While the identities of possible beneficiaries of advance knowledge of the attacks were not known publicly, experts were quick to point to possible candidates -- all presumed to be affluent residents of Arab nations."
There were Mossad agents caught filming the plane crashes into the twin towers as though Israel had prior knowledge:
http://ww1.sundayherald.com/37707
So it could have been Mossad raising money for its operations in the US. I don't see why the terrorists would do it, since it makes them easier to catch.
Sure, GM has a huge organization with a monumental bureucracy of uncountable levels and whole departments so far removed from the factory floor that they could be on a whole different planet.
But GM does actually produce a hell of a lot of cars, despite/because all this superstructure!
I can imagine that Al Queda has a fair amount of trainers etc. Or an enormous amount. It doesn't really matter. If you look at the end product, they produce very little actual terror. If it's because they ran out of killers and only have paper pushers left or whatever, is not really that interesting.
The original posts point remains. They're either incredibly inefficient at their core mission. Or they're not nearly as many and resourceful as we've been led to believe.
FTA: "A recent report from the Center for Security Policy shows that the ARMB currently has investments in 68 companies that do business with Iran and eight with business ties to North Korea. Several billion dollars can be traced to these and other Alaskan investments."
The state has a resolution pending to study the matter.
FUCK Singapor.
If you threaten the party line, they can cancel your existence? You can starve at the press of a button if you happen to hold views the reigning government dislikes? This is NOT a good system. Imagine what Bush would do if he had that power at his finger tips. --Not that he doesn't. He's already openly declared war on journalists and whistleblowers.
Give me a society which is based on paper money with NO electronic banking. And heck, remove the concept of lending for profit, for that matter. (Usury used to be considered a sin for a good reason.)
Terrorism is a lark. It is funded and quietly encouraged by Governments, and where there are no willing suicide bombers, good gosh, the secret services will damned well drug up children and send them into the line of fire with bombs around their necks; but not before calling the press first.
Here's one example of fake terrorism using rockets.
There is just so much to be gained by facists when the populace fear a made-up enemy of the state.
-FL
Decades ago, Americans weren't this poor.
You're joking right? People in America have never been richer. Even the poor are much much better off than they used to be. But maybe decades ago, people were cleverer with their money, and didn't blow it on giant TVs, air conditioning etc?
We also, for the most part, didn't have the absolute poverty that we have today.
What is your evidence for this?
We were never at war with Ireland. That's absurd; if that had been the case then Dublin could have been flattened within hours. The Irish government never had anything to do with the (current) IRA; in fact, London and Dublin collaborated on intelligence and enforcement for years.
I don't actually recall either government using the rhetoric of war about the whole business, either. That was always the IRA's line. Wherever possible, IRA men (and for that matter Unionist paramilitaries) were treated as common criminals - as the murderers they were, not as soldiers. This principle has since been abandoned - as part of the peace process, we've had something of an amnesty and let a lot of IRA prisoners go, but it's definitely worth it. We pretend Sinn Fein are a legitimate political party entirely not connected with the IRA (and Gerry Adams was never on the Army Council, oh no...) and we pretend the IRA prisoners are soldiers and therefore to be released once a peace deal is made.
The peace deal seems to have worked by buying off key figures with promises of power, and sidelining hardliners. We've corrupted the IRA leadership. They're too comfortable now, in their influential political positions. Too respectable. Can't be associated with semi-literate hardmen any more, oh no...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
No. That's how you lose. That's how you lose everything. Your pride, your integrity, your freedoms. Everything.
Don't believe me. Try and remember that the other side in WWII engaged in "morale defeating excercises" even worse than those mentioned above. Their societies are still living in shame. Forever burdened with the crimes their countries have committed.
Do you want that to happen to the United States?
May the Maths Be with you!
Furthermore, the most recent london attacks just costed a few hunderd pound. With such low amounts of money needed, tracking is completely impossible. This BBC article is an interesting read in the current discussion btw, worth your time.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Since you have no idea where your oil comes from, the only way to stop funding terrorists is to drive smaller more fuel efficient vehicles. Ironically the US is the terrorist's biggest ally since so many people see nothing wrong with driving a hulking SUV to work for the daily commute.
Decades ago, Americans weren't this poor.
Go read The Grapes of Wrath. Or at least try to learn more about your country's history than Brady Bunch reruns. You're likely to find that the major change in poverty between 1956 and 2006 is that we talk about it now.
This seems to make the best distinction between the two groups.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
And we're sorry you don't understand the statistics to which you allude.
The average person in the United States earns more and has greater purchasing power than he or she did fifty years ago. That doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of incomes across the population, nor does it address specifically the people of New Orleans.
In the 2000 census, Louisiana ranked 47th of 50 states in per capita income (2000 census). New Orleans has the lowest median household income of any metropolitan area with a population greater than 1,000,000 (1999 figures).
Looking at trends in the Gini coefficient for the United States shows a steady increase over the last thirty years, indicating a continuing drift of the Lorenz curve away from a uniform distribution of income. In other words, the rich--and even the upper middle class--have gotten richer, but the poor have gotten relatively poorer by a fair margin.
The fact that standards of living are quite high and poverty quite low in San Franciso, or Boston, or Hartford doesn't address the situation in New Orleans.
~Idarubicin
Sorry I don't believe you. Living standards in western countries are now much higher than they were (say) 50 years ago.
I think you did not understand parent. Although the "living standard" in western countries are higher the gap between the rich and poor is growing bigger and bigger.
It is like my statistics professor told me, the mean (average) is the least informative of all the statistical equations, you can have two sets {$10,$10,$0,$0} and ($5,$5,$5,$5} and they will give you the same average. Guess which one of those groups of people are better.
As I saw it from outside (I am from Mexico but was in UK when it happened) it seemed that Katrina came to show the extreme poverty that exists in the USA (the $0 in the sets). Those are the people that won't move from their homes, as it is the only thing they have. I know that because I lived in Campeche, which is a city that is struck by hurricanes quite often (Gilbert, Isadore, etc) and there are plenty of very poor people over there. People that has only their houses and what is inside them. When a hurrican comes they fear that, if they leave they will lose everything they have.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
>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.
The question is what conclusion you draw from this:
1. That these people are actually good, superior folk, who's ideas have merit
-or-
2. That higher education teaches some pretty wacked out crap these days.
It was an eye opener to many people. The great USA not being able to deal with an expected catastrophy. You people looked very backwards and primitive. Neither was your nation able to prevent most of the damage, nor was it able to provide adequate assistance. That is the non-performance people here in Europe associate with 3rd world countries. The countries affected by the last big Tsunami looked better organised and they realized they needed help urgently. European help was rejected with phony arguments, despite being urgently, and obviously so, needed.
Death toll from Katrina: 1420
Death toll from the European 2003 heat wave: 35000
Which is not to say that the U.S. didn't seriously screw up the whole Katrina effort, but it's awfully convenient for Europe, once again, to sit back with their smug sense of superiority when they can't even deal with a weather event this country faces every summer. As I recall, the French government wasn't able to help their most vulnerable citizens (sick and elderly) because the entire country was on vacation. 3rd world indeed....
That's more a sign of the times really. A doctor now has to think twice about helping after an accident: the victim might one day sue. Another example of this sort of thing is lost children; if I see a lost child I am staying the hell away and not helping them. Previously, I'd speak to them and try to find a cop or store clerk that could help. Now I'm just frightened of being accused of being a pervert or child abductor. Your lost children are on their own, it's just not worth the risk to help them anymore.
Banks and credit-card organisations define "unusual" transactions as transactions who'se size make them stand out from the usual transactions on an account. Those transactions are then checked in detail.
From this perspective it would seem that an account that has a long history of sudden fair-sized transactions (say 10,000$ or more) would be a much better (in the sense of less conspicuous) vehicle for a terrorist organisation to move money about. After all ... the size of the transactions wouldn't be unusual at all, and (operationally meaningful amounts of money could just be made to disappear in the petty cash accounts. In addition, the holders of such accounts would have some expertise in moving money around, and would be quite aware of what sort of transactions would seem suspicious and which ones wouldn't.
Considering that by all accounts Al Quaeda doesn't seem to be cash-strapped, and its leader has moved in (very) wealthy circles, wouldn't it make more sense to scrutinise transactions of larger accounts than those of small ones? Wouldn't it make sense for terrorist organisations to try and recruit a few wealthy individuals or simply acquire a few businesses that can hide such money flows?
After all, we hear that illegal drug trafficking is the largest industry in the US (dollarwise), and in my view (but I'm not an expert) that amount of money simply cannot be moved in any other way than through the banking system. There's far too much of it for one thing. And all this despite the conspicuous success of our much-vaunted "War on Drugs".
Given then, that we seem to have have good reason to suppose that there are huge streams of money flowing through the banking system that are derived from illegal activities, why not focus on those? Why not scrutinise the activities of the larger accounts (this may already be happening, but I don't know).
Now I understand that flagging unusual transactions on millions of small private accounts may be much easier to automate than checking transactions of larger accounts (just flag any transaction larger than the 95% confidence interval of all transactions or 5000$, whichever is smaller). And I also understand that in this way the police can detect petty crooks, but the focus of attention does seem to be a bit skewed.
What do you think?
Air conditioning was only invented in the last century. Surely it was inhabited for thousands of years before?
Actually, it wasn't. At least, not year-round south of Orlando. OK, there were a few hardy/masochistic individuals who lived in south Florida all year... but anyone else with the slightest opportunity to do so fled north at the first hint of June, and didn't come back until November or December.
Air conditioning is what makes it possible for normal, middle-class people to willingly live in Florida all year. If A/C vanished from the earth tomorrow, Miami would be largely abandoned by its populace within a year. People in highrises near the coast (with slightly better breezes) might stick around a tiny bit longer, but for the most part, the metro area would be depopulated.
The article says that "Hundreds of millions of dollars of assets have been frozen." Does anybody believe that terrorists are funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars? What that tells me is that a significant number of the funds being frozen are don't have anything to do with "terrorists". And later "Some estimates put the number of filings in the US alone at 13 million a day." That's almost 5 billion filings a year. Roughly 15 for every man, woman and child in the US every year. At that point, you're not watching for terrorists, you're watching basically everything. So what's the point? Is it really to watch for "teh terrorists"?
You keep saying that word[illegal]
I only said the word once. You asked for evidence that the 9/11 commission's report was a white wash. I provided some pointers. Hopefully, you'll take the time to read them and maybe do some research on the subject yourself.
Illegal election.
Illegal war.
Illegal wiretapping.
When did I mention an illegal election or illegal war? Please don't put words in my mouth. I can speak for myself.
Chances are all these things you call illegal were carried out to the letter of the law, but I doubt that would make any difference to you.
The gov't doesn't deserve my blind allegience. The gov't is meant to be my servant, not my master. A citizen(regardless of country) should always be questioning the actions of their government, it is the first defense against tyranny.
So yes, it would make a difference to me. Which part of warrantless(illegal) wiretaps am I misunderstanding?
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) lays down the law under which the President may do warrantless wiretaps. The first case is if the subject or location of the wiretap is solely foreign, i.e. no americans or american soil involved. The second case does allow Americans to be an involved subject. BUT these warrantless wiretaps can only last for 15 days after the declaration of War. Sadly we have been at war for much longer than 15 days.
The law here is actually pretty clear because the Fourth Amendment demands it.
Instead of trying to assinate my character, please provide me with some pointers & reference material so that I may educate myself. If you are just going to talk past those you disagree with, neither party will learn anything.
And since you mentioned an illegal war maybe you would be interested to know that United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan did tell the BBC the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy