Counterterrorism Blog

Almost as soon as my last post on the transnational threat of cigarette smuggling was posted, several alert friends sent me the recent speech by Attorney General Michael Mukasey at CSIS, where he announced a new effort to understand and combat transnational criminal organizations.

The initiative is long overdue. As Mukasey noted, the Organized Crime Council had not met for 15 years. Quite a feat, given the numerous and wide-ranging indications that organized criminal groups have steadily gained influence, power and control or near-control over areas that are vital national security. As Mukasey noted:

International organized crime is a hybrid criminal problem that implicates three of the department’s national priorities: national security, violent crime, and public corruption. It needs a coordinated response and an openness to new ways of doing business. It also demands that we work closely with our foreign colleagues in order to dismantle global criminal syndicates. In short, this is about more than the Department of Justice. It involves our law enforcement and non-law enforcement colleagues at the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Treasury, and Labor, the U.S. Postal Service, as well as the intelligence community. And I’d like to thank these other agencies for their help and for their efforts.

The attorney general’s Organized Crime Council will have a leading role in coordinating that effort.

But one thing was curiously missing from Mukasey's comments, and that is the growing link, as I and others have outlined numerous times, between these organized criminal networks and terrorism, including but not limited to terrorism driven by radical Islamist theology.

Mukasey did mention the case of Viktor Bout and the FARC, which I have written about extensively. But it is here that Mukasey's silence is most interesting. My full blog is here.