A new investigation by the Canadian Center for Investigative Reporting uncovers a "wave" of heroin flowing from Afghanistan to Russian, where the U.N. estimates there are 80 heroin-related deaths every day.
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The State Department released their annual report, "To Walk the Earth in Safety," about its worldwide weapons eradication program in mine clearance and destruction assistance. Th U.S. works in 32 countries to destroy weapons, as well as implement programs to assist conflict survivors and inform area residents of potential risks from unexploded munitions.
Read the report here.
Use The Crime Report for more information on international criminal justice.
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Legal experts at a New York conference devise a strategy to combat terrorism in the courts
Can law be used as a weapon of war? Legal experts argued at a recent conference in New York City terrorists are using “Lawfare” to build humanitarian cases and international support for their tactics. Groups such as Hamas and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have filed lawsuits for “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” against their political enemies in the West, tying up senior Israeli officials and others in expensive, and often damaging cases.
These misuses of law by terrorist organizations subvert a country’s foreign policy and interfere with diplomatic actions, panelists said.
Using the legal system for strategic political or military end is not a new idea: in fact, Americans have a legal and political tradition in using the law to pursue justice. But Brooke Goldstein, director of the LawFare Project, which works to raise awareness of the issue and the conference organizer, said terrorists twist international legal code for their own means.
Humanitarian Cause or Terrorism Tactic?
For example, terrorist groups bring lawsuits in countries that have nothing to do with the parties involved. One such case involved Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel’s Kadima party, who canceled a trip to England after a pro-Palestinian group was able to get a warrant issued for her arrest for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
In a written introduction to the conference Goldstein, listed some of the lawfare tactics used by terrorist groups: from “hate speech” lawsuits filed against those who speak publicly about terrorism, Al Qaeda operatives who position themselves as victims in the eyes of the law and media by filing torture claims.
British libel law is one of the most popular examples of how lawfare is used. Saudi royalty routinely used these laws to sue American journalists who uncovered or exposed ties to terrorism groups. In British libel laws because the burden of proof routinely falls upon the author, not only were US journalists loosing large settlements in court they were responsible for fees and damages incurred during the lawsuit.
Lawfare can also inhibit democracies from the right and ability to defend against terrorism when fundamentalists file lawsuits against Western countries using the principles of international criminal law. Panelists argued that the U.S. risked allowing terrorism organizations to have the upper hand without protecting their own citizens.
In events where the public safety is deemed at risk, speakers argued that the United States does not have to hew to international law or code. Many panelists also shunned the role of the United Nations Security Council in regulating international military force and security. Democracies should not have to get approval from the UN before deciding to use military force.
America's Role
The conference was a first attempt to formalize a strategy to combat these tactics by terrorism groups. Speakers, which included former New York City District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gabriela Shalev, spent the day condemning lawfare.
“This is not a ‘mother may I?’ situation,” said former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. The packed and heavily secured room exploded with applause when Bolton declared, “We should say unequivocally that we recognize no higher authority in this world than the U.S. Constitution.”
David Harris, former chief of strategic planning for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, asked the audience to imagine current scenarios in which the United States was strictly following international criminal law taking place in the time of World War II.
“Would Hitler’s assassination have been an international crime?” he wondered. “Would each of America’s three million German (POWs) have been subject to individual law suits?” Harris explained that if America had taken this path during World War II, the war may have not come to the same conclusion and millions of lives could have been lost.
None of the discussion focused on America’s own legal quandary: the federal government’s decision to move the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other top Al Qaeda operatives away from New York City or if his day in court could be switched to a military commission.
Cara Tabachnick is news editor of The Crime Report
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Respect for civil liberties and stepped up cybersecurity are key elements of the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy, released Tuesday by Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence. The new NIS, the first since 2005, maintains previous goals such as countering WMD proliferation and violent extremism, but focuses new energy on information sharing and accountability within the intelligence community.
Click here to read the NIS announcement.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Homeland Security Issues and Cyber Crime.
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In the summer of 1993, ten Chinese would-be immigrants drowned when the Golden Venture, the rickety vessel smuggling them and 276 others to America, ran aground on a New York City beach. After more than a decade of police work, authorities tracked down and convicted Sister Ping, the mastermind of the transnational human trafficking ring, who turned out to be an elderly grandmother living in New York’s Chinatown. The Crime Report’s Cara Tabachnick spoke to investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who documents the case in his recent book , “The Snakehead.”
THE CRIME REPORT: Exactly how did these snakehead organizations work?
KEEFE: The snakehead organizations were (and are) loosely dispersed transnational networks -- non-hierarchical international collaborations in which groups of independent contractors might come together to move a load of people and then separate and go their separate ways. They're built on connections and driven by opportunism, so a snakehead based in New York might have associates working in Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
The routes shifted in order to avoid any obstacle erected by law enforcement, as did the modes of transport: during the 1980s snakeheads flew their passengers by plane, using phony documents, during the 1990s, they used ships, in the years after 2000, they brought people in ships to the coast of Central America, then up overland in cars and trucks through Mexico, and in recent years they have shifted back to planes and forged or doctored documents. Nobody knows how many people Sister Ping brought in over the years, though I would estimate it was in the thousands if not quite possibly the tens of thousands. As I think I explained when we spoke on the phone, the snakehead used Chinatown gangs to hold passengers hostage once they arrived in the United States. The gangs were by their nature violent, dabbling in extortion, kidnapping, and the like, and held the passengers at gunpoint until they paid.
TCR: What is the origin of the name 'snakehead'?
KEEFE: No one knows the origins of the term, but some suggest it is related to the circuitous routes that the smugglers use to bring their passengers from one country into another. The shape of the route looks like a snake, and the lead smuggler is the head of the snake.
TCR: Why did you decide to profile Sister Ping?
KEEFE: I wanted to write about the globalization of crime. Sister Ping seemed like a fascinating character, and smart. She seemed to be a good entry point for (understanding how) the world had become flat for crime, much like (New York Times columnist) Thomas Friedman wrote about this phenomenon economically. Her complex transnational operation generated millions of dollars, and she managed her business in a cruel and efficient manner. Yet, in Chinatown she is revered as a real kind of hero, almost like (Civil War-era “underground railroad” figure) Harriet Tubman, while the Department of Justice paints her as a terrible kingpin of smuggling.
TCR: Sister Ping believed that she was performing a service for her compatriots by delivering them to a brighter future in America? Was she right?
KEEFE: I always wondered to what extent she believed that, and what piece of this was an act. Frankly I don’t buy it. She charged huge rates to these families that wanted to smuggle their loved ones to the United States. She wasn’t charging only what she needed to cover costs. The FBI estimated she made $40 million over her 20 year career. At first, she sent people by plane to the United States, charging $18,000 per person. But when she switched to ships—which was a much cheaper route—she charged $35,000 per person. I think ultimately Sister Ping was involved in human smuggling for the money. She may have done some good by bringing over people from a struggling country, but if the profit motive wasn’t there I don’t think she would have been in business.
THE CRIME REPORT: Since 9/11, the focus of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE), which replaced the former INS, has shifted from immigration to national security and terrorism. Does human smuggling still need to be a high concern? Are Snakeheads a threat to national security?
KEEFE: I think it would be real mistake not to pay attention to Snakeheads. They are so sophisticated in how they enter the United States. If I wanted to get into the U.S. in a clandestine manner I would hire a Snakehead. They are starting to smuggle people in from Canada, and immigration officers are starting to see mixed loads come in from different (border) points.
TCR: In order to get your story, you actually infiltrated the gang. How difficult was that?
KEEFE: It wasn’t easy. I don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese much less Fukienese. (Ed. Note: Most immigrants who were smuggled to the US by Sister Ping were from Fukien province in China, where they speak a regional dialect) It was something I wrestled with: would the undocumented community just see me as white guy with a notebook? I got around that by hiring great interpreters whom I relied on heavily. I also had some people in the Fukienese community (in the U.S.) who blessed the project. It made all the difference. I had the New Yorker article in hand (Ed. Note: Keefe had written about Sister Ping for the New Yorker magazine in the Apr 24, 2006 issue) when I went to meet people so I could show them (my interest) was real. So a couple of important people said (I) was all right. Someone would make a call and say “I will send this non-Chinese over to talk to you.” If it weren’t for these individuals I wouldn’t have been able to do the book.
TCR: The mainstream media have not taken the same interest in Chinese gangs that has been devoted to other notorious groups, like the Crips or MS-13, even though they are just as violent. Why?
KEEFE: For some extent there are fewer gangs now. It isn’t as bad as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. I also think it was a real learning curve for law enforcement. They didn’t know the culture or the people. The NYPD and FBI had hardly any Fukienese speakers. It was harder to go after these gangs and their crimes; so as a result there was not much media attention.
TCR: Has (and how) transnational smuggling organizations learned from Ping's mistakes and have gotten more sophisticated?
KEEFE: I don't know about transnational smuggling organizations learning specific lessons from Sister Ping, but one thing that can be said for transnational networks of this sort is that they were constantly evolving and adapting, and I think it's fair to say that they get more sophisticated every day.
TCR: China today is extremely different from the country many immigrants fled in the 1990s. How has that affected the present smuggling situation? Are there still “snakeheads” as feared and well-respected as AH-Kay and Sister Ping out there?
KEEFE: Things have changed. But people still want to come to the United States. Most are going by plane with phony documents, not by ships anymore. The fee now is $75,000 per person, and it must be paid up front. Certainly when I was in China, I heard the question: Why would we take these risks when things are going so well in China? However (my last interviews) were over a year ago. In the past 6-8 months we have seen a global economic crisis, and manufacturing jobs have been hit hard. Jobs in China have been disappearing, so we may soon see again a huge migration to the United States. There are still Snakeheads out there, but no one is the same as Sister Ping was---none as famous. No one dominates the industry way she did.
Gretchen Peters, investigative journalist and author of “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” proposes a radical solution to the turmoil in Afghanistan: Send in the cops.
President Obama doesn’t need to send any more American soldiers to Afghanistan. There’s no doubt country needs to be stabilized – and fast. But it would be more effective to send thousands of police officers: beat cops who would know how to walk the streets and round up the criminals who are terrorizing and destabilizing that country.
And I’m not just talking the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
As thousands of U.S. Marines and British troops push into the Helmand River Valley, part of the new counterinsurgency strategy, they are discovering the uncomfortable reality that the Afghan National Police (ANP) in that region are more feared than the Taliban themselves.
Appalling stories of ANP corruption and brutality are emerging from Helmand. They range from stories of police abusing drugs and extorting shopkeepers and truck drivers, to tales of cops threatening villagers, and even abducting and raping their children.
In this atmosphere, it’s easy to understand why the Taliban were welcomed back as liberators, despite the horrifying reign of terror they too have imposed. Insurgents now control five of Helmand’s 13 districts.
It is critical that international forces bring stability to Helmand, since the fertile province produces more than half of Afghanistan’s $4 billion poppy crop. That drug money has not only corrupted state actors, including the ANP and top officials in the provincial and federal governments. It also provides the Afghan Taliban most, if not all, of their operational budget, and helps fund Al Qaeda as well.
Fighting a rich, ruthless and re-invigorated insurgency is a big enough challenge for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But the even tougher job will be rooting out state corruption – replacing dirty cops with reliable local security providers. This has to happen relatively quickly, because the Afghan people, after years of intense violence in the south, are losing patience with Western forces there.
Helmand province is like any bad neighborhood – similar to an inner city slum or a tough rural suburb where gangs roam the streets and crooked cops are on the take.
It’s doesn’t necessarily need a long-term military intervention. It needs law and order and good governance.
I’m not knocking America’s troops, who I think are doing a tremendous job in an unbelievably hot, harsh and complex environment. But within that environment, I believe the military would be wise to recognize that there can be wartime value to good old-fashioned police work.
POLICE EMBEDS
Some infantry units in Afghanistan have begun embedding retired police officers. They are helping American foot patrols to adopt law enforcement techniques that will support the “bottom-up” counterinsurgency strategy.
There are currently about 150 retired police working as advisors to infantry troops in Afghanistan, and the Drug Enforcement Administration is expanding its agents in Afghanistan from about 12 to nearly 80.
That’s a good start. But I believe President Obama would be wise to augment the military forces he is deploying to Afghanistan with thousands more police and law enforcement advisors, both to help our own soldiers on the ground, and also to speed up the training of local security forces.
What we really need to stabilize Afghanistan is a super-sized counter-insurgency trained force that can implement law enforcement tactics to root out corrupt state actors and also target anti-state actors like the Taliban. At a time when Washington is facing an enormous budget crunch, I believe trained law enforcement officers would do a more effective job, thus saving this country money in the war effort.
I have great admiration for our military leaders, and their willingness to dramatically shift strategy in Afghanistan. Some of our military leaders embrace the combat policing model that I am advocating; however other U.S. commanders appear to shun it completely. And unfortunately, our current military training program still does little to prepare American soldiers and Marines to do street-level police work.
It’s partly a question of expectations. President Obama himself has narrowed the goal in Afghanistan to rooting out Al Qaeda and Taliban hideouts, rather than trying to achieve lasting democracy and a thriving Afghan economy.
I think this narrowing of focus is a mistake, and is founded on misguided attitudes here in the West about the Afghan people.
I have worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a decade and I dispute analysts who argue that the people of the border regions are savage and ungovernable. Wherever I have gone and wherever my local assistants have conducted research, we have heard over and over that people there want security, rule of law and more stable communities.
That is not only the correct moral approach to the war in Afghanistan; it is the best exit strategy we have. We will never defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda by trying to kill them all. We will win when they become irrelevant.
Gretchen Peters is the author of "Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda"
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Tom Diaz, author of a new book, “No Borders: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement,” looks at the potentially ominous future of criminal street gangs in the U.S.
In the 1980s, few law enforcement officials had heard of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or the 18 th Street gang. Yet within two decades, these gangs metastasized from local urban-based organizations in Los Angeles and other California cities into transnational criminal enterprises operating throughout the Western Hemisphere, including El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
As Mexico’s violent drug-fueled turf wars threaten to spread north of the border, many wonder whether the gangs have become integrated with Mexican drug cartels.
One way to answer this question is to ask a better one: what will these gangs look like in ten or twenty years?
Street gangs are important to the Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). Their profits depend on the activities of such gangs as primary retail distributors of illicit drugs in the United States. Latinos are not the only groups who serve DTOs’ interests: African-American, outlaw motorcycle, prison, Asian, and other street gangs have also been identified as significant players in the trade in cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and other illegal drugs in the U.S.
Estimates of the annual value of the illicit drug trade vary widely. The Congressional Research Service estimates a range of $13.6 billion to $48.4 billion. The private intelligence service Stratfor puts the upper limit as high as $100 billion. Whatever the actual value, there is no doubt that Latino gangs are in the thick of the business, and are involved in a range of drug-related crimes associated with organized criminality, such as extortion and murder. To that extent, they are certainly an integral part of the DTO’s operations.
Data on gang membership and gang crime are notoriously subjective. They are based largely on estimates collected by federal agencies from local law enforcement agencies. Given that caution, the National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) reported in its National Gang Threat Assessment 2009 that in September 2008, “approximately” 1 million gang members belong to “more than” 20,000 gangs that were criminally active within all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report states that criminal gangs “commit as much as 80 percent of the crime in many communities.” NGIC has identified 11 gangs that operate nationally, among them four Latino gangs. Of the latter, the 18th Street gang and MS-13 also operate trans-nationally.
But the current relationship between transnational gangs and drug cartels cannot be neatly described. A major problem is that abstract terms like “affiliation” and “integration” are often used in government and media reporting alike in this context without concrete definition or specific example. My own view has been refined the more I look into the specifics. In looking at gangs and DTOs, I now take “affiliation” to mean a criminal business relationship, in which occasional or ongoing contacts between the organizations are primarily for the purpose of buying, selling, or trading goods and services, but the two do not share a command structure or employer-employee relationship.
On the other hand, I take “integration” to mean a relationship in which the gang is a functional part of a larger enterprise, subject to the latter’s command structure. The difference might be thought of as that between a local independent drug store and the local outlet of a chain drug store. They might each buy similar products from the same source, but the chain store is directed by, and answers to, corporate headquarters.
Law enforcement opinion is divided on the extent to which gangs like MS-13 are actually integrated into DTO structures. Based on what I have learned from my continuing discussions with U.S. and Mexican sources, I believe that the better view today is that gangs are “affiliated” with, but not yet “integrated” into the Mexican DTOs. Depending on circumstances and opportunity, the gangs operate principally as “contractors.” Have gangsters been used as “muscle” to protect cartel interests and “hit men” in cartel battles? No doubt. Have some opportunistic gang leaders made deals with DTOs for profit or power? Yes. But, are the gangs integrated as DTO “soldiers”? Almost certainly not.
Observers and students of transnational criminal enterprises largely see them as flexible cellular networks that change in response to opportunity, need and law enforcement pressure. Little is to be gained by such a fluid network from integrating street gangs who are often resistant to outside management directly into DTO structures. More specifically, many DTO leaders see the gangs as too volatile to embrace organizationally. DTOs certainly do not shy away from extreme violence, but many of their leaders regard street gang violence as reckless, often pointless, and therefore hard to control.
The next two decades however could see some significant changes in the structure and operation of Latino gangs.
Predicting the behavior of these dynamic human structures is difficult. But three factors – and one wild card – suggest more growth, violence and challenge to U.S. law enforcement and society from transnational Latino gangs.
First, the proportion of second-generation Latino youth (those 18 and under born of immigrant parents) grew from 30 percent of the U.S. Latino youth population in 1980 to 52 percent in 2007. This proportion will not shrink for another decade. Second generation youth are precisely the population from which ethnic street gang members are drawn. Caught between old and new cultures, these youngsters often face “multiple marginalities” that make their socialization – education, employment, and cultural integration – difficult. Although most of these young people will socialize and raise stable third-generation families, a small but significant portion – perhaps ten percent – will fail to adapt, fall between cultures and seek the gang as alternative to school, family and nation. Gangs are therefore likely to grow from this pool, no matter what happens to border control.
Second, the National Gang Threat Assessment 2009 states that some Latino street gangs are moving into the wholesale drug trade, “increasingly distributing wholesale-level quantities of marijuana and cocaine” in urban and suburban communities. Some of these gangs are assessed as “capable of competing with U.S.-based Mexican DTOs.” Other government reports echo these assessments. These developments mean market change, which in the drug trade means violent conflict: drug markets are rationalized by guns, not negotiations.
Finally, there are reports that Mexican cartels are shifting operations into Central America in response to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement pressure. Central America is the queen’s nest of the two most dangerous transnational Latino gangs, MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs. A variety of scenarios – none of them good – could develop from this mix.
There is, however, a wild card: so far, no one has succeeded in forging MS-13, the 18th Street gang or any other transnational Latino gang into a unified, well-coordinated enterprise. One ambitious gangster, Nelson Varela Comandari, wanted to hammer MS-13 into an integrated empire. Born in El Salvador and raised in the United States, Comandari was charismatic and feared enough to have succeeded—had his career not been cut short by a federal drug trafficking indictment and other charges.
Comandari has been in federal custody without hearing or trial for four years. As I explain in detail in No Boundaries, he has almost certainly been negotiating an omnibus plea agreement to resolve multiple, serious felony charges from different jurisdictions, including the federal government and the city of Los Angeles at a minimum. Such a deal would certainly require him to “flip,” or cooperate. One law enforcement agent told me Comandari could be the equivalent of the notorious informant Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.
There is no reason to think that other ambitious gangsters of similar mold won’t try to turn their gangs into powerful, mafia-like organizations. The natural next step would be to challenge existing organizations, especially the Mexican DTOs, for control of lucrative transnational operations.
If that happens, all bets about the future are off. A well-integrated, consolidated transnational Latino gang would naturally connect every form of transnational crime imaginable from whatever its global source to communities throughout the United States. In the classic style of the Mafia, a true Latino mafia would turn its attention to existing smaller local gangs and criminal operations of whatever ethnicity. (Some of that “muscling in” is going on now between national gangs and local gangs.) A war between U.S.-based Latino gangs and Mexican DTOs would be extremely violent, witness current events in Mexico.
All of this would put enormous stress on all levels of law enforcement, and most particularly local agencies. For all of its façade of being in control everywhere, the federal law enforcement community is stretched thin. This is why a principal objective of the U.S. Department of Justice is precisely to prevent the emergence of a genuine Latino mafia in the form of a consolidated and empowered transnational gang.
How I Got the Story
I utilized four types of sources: (1) in-depth interviews with law enforcement agents and prosecutors; (2) deep research into the records of selected criminal trials (and appeals) I used for case studies; (3) media reports; and (4) academic books and articles.
I also attended two law enforcement gang seminars. One of them was a highly restricted week–long event in El Salvador, sponsored by the FBI and Salvadoran National Civil Police. I got there because two key people trusted me. My experience has been that the best contacts open up only if the researcher is vouched for by someone in the law enforcement community.
The FBI was by far the most helpful federal law enforcement agency. The Department of Justice was also helpful in making available to me knowledgeable senior lawyers and prosecutors. On the other hand, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security (ICE and CPB) were useless. Their public affairs officials promised that they were seeking interviews for me, but none materialized despite repeated efforts on my part.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was of marginal use. After a good start, ATF’s management seemed to be “spooked” by their perception of where I wanted to go with my research. I thought ATF had a story to tell, so I found a good case involving the Latin Kings in Chicago, dug the records out of the Federal Records Center, and pestered ATF into letting me sit down with some of the agents involved.
In contrast, local law enforcement and prosecutors in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Texas, and Virginia were cooperative and interested in telling their stories.
Generally speaking, the lawyers – prosecutors and their supervisors – were much more comfortable about sharing details and documents than the cops and agents. This is probably because their organization is less “militaristic” than the typical law enforcement agency, and lawyers know better the bounds of what they can and ought to make public.
I love court records. They are a seriously underutilized source for crime writers. Transcripts, affidavits, and motions often contain rich detail.
Tom Diaz is a lawyer, author, and former journalist. He is senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center a national nonpartisan educational organization working to stop gun death and injury in America. He wrote Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, and co-authored Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil. Diaz was counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice from 1993 to 1997. He was an assistant managing editor at The Washington Times for six years and covered the Supreme Court and national security affairs for three years before that. He is currently researching a book on “sophisticated techniques” of investigation. Email him at tdiaz@vpc.org
Terrorists and other organized crime outfits around the world are increasingly turning to film piracy to finance their operations, says a new report by the RAND organization. Rarely prosecuted with weak criminal statues, researchers found that film piracy turns a greater profit than narcotic dealing with little risk of governmental sanction.
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Read full entry »NBC News, which teamed with local police officers to trap sex offenders for its "To Catch a Predator" series, is using similar tactics to hunt war criminals, the New York Times reports. One of the first efforts, an investigation of a Maryland college professor on genocide charges, is attracting criticism from federal officials months before the program would be broadcast.
For more than a year, NBC has been investigating the possible perpetrators of human rights abuses in several countries. The case of Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor of French at Goucher College in Towson, Md., is the only one that has become public. In December, an NBC crew and a Rwandan prosecutor confronted Munyakazi with charges that he had participated in that country’s genocide in 1994. He denied it. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it had significant concerns "that a program of this kind could negatively impact law enforcement’s ability to investigate and bring cases against the perpetrators of these horrible crimes."
Read full entry »As a topic of research and training expertise, terrorism has boomed since Sept. 11, 2001. Not coincidentally, the spigot of both government and private funding has been flowing wide open into the field. Thousands of potential sources now claim expertise in terrorism, from academics to think tanks to expert witnesses to for-profit firms that hawk anti-terrorism law enforcement or consumer products. (A Stanford University sociologist put together a research paper on the burgeoning subject—not terrorism, but terrorism experts: “The Rise of the Terrorism Expert: The Emergence of a New Field of Expertise.”) As always, journalists should be aware of the motivations of potential sources. This source list includes the RAND Corporation, the vast California-based nonprofit has one of the world’s largest and most venerable terrorism research divisions, with dozens of experts on staff who can speak to a number of terrorism-related topics. It might be a good place to start in the non-government sector.
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