International Terrorism and Transnational Crime: Security Threats, U.S. Policy, and Considerations for Congress
A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report about international terrorism and transnational crime is available. You can find a copy of the 50+ page report at the Open CRS website.
From the summary of the report:
This report provides a primer on the confluence of transnational terrorist and criminal groups and related activities abroad. It evaluates possible motivations and disincentives for cooperation between terrorist and criminal organizations, variations in the scope of crime-terrorism links, and the types of criminal activities—fundraising, material and logistics support, and exploitation of corruption and gaps in the rule of law—used by terrorist organizations to sustain operations. This report also discusses several international case studies to illustrate the range of crime-terrorism convergence and non-convergence, including Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company; the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); the 2004 Madrid bombers; the Taliban; Hezbollah; Al Qaeda; the 2005 London bombers; Al-Shabaab; as well as known or alleged crime-terrorism facilitators such as Viktor Bout, Monzer Al Kasser, and Abu Ghadiyah. Policy considerations discussed in this report include possible tensions between counterterrorism and anti-crime policy objectives, implications for U.S. foreign aid, gaps in human intelligence and analysis, the value of financial intelligence in combating the crime-terrorism nexus, impact of digital and physical safe havens and ungoverned spaces, implications for nuclear proliferation, and effects of crime-terrorism links in conflict and post-conflict zones. Unless otherwise noted, this report does not address potential crime-terrorism links in the domestic or border environment.
If you’re not familiar with the sometimes difficult to obtain CRS reports, they are worth checking out. The research is conducted primarily for members of congress, so the analysis tends to be balanced.
The OpenCRS web site: “Congressional Research Reports for the People” (http://www.opencrs.com/) is one of just a few places to find CRS reports.
Unless you know someone in congress, of course.
