A Winning Strategy for Terror Finance Prosecutions?
By Douglas Farah
As numerous colleagues have mentioned here, the recent guilty verdicts in the CARE International charity case is an important one for the government.
It is important to highlight the the strategy successfully used by the government in this case-forcing transparency on groups that claim to be charitable.
One of the architects of the government's national strategy in this regard is our colleague Jeffrey Breinholt, on leave from the Department of Justice's terror finance division. He highlighted the tactic in his book Taxing Terrorism From Al Capone to al Qaeda: Fighting Violence Through Financial Regulation.
Islamist groups (and others operating under false pretenses) cannot operate with the required transparency because they are operating in an opaque manner to hide what they do.
Operating in the U.S. system, which has mechanisms for enforcing the transparency requirements, is more difficult to do that it is elsewhere. Hiding the money or its destinations can lead to seemingly mundane charges of readily-recognized crimes.
Just last month at a public event on Capitol Hill, moderated by CTB's Andy Cochran, Breinholt spoke about the strategic opportunities that arise from legal regimes that seek to force transparency on those prone to tradecraft. Tradecraft can be difficult to prove, but white collar crime is less so. My full blog is here.
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