Focus to Remain on Terrorist Financing
By Matthew Levitt
Yesterday, the Obama administration officially nominated three new senior Treasury officials, including David S. Cohen to be assistant secretary in dealing with terrorist financing. Coming on the heals of the decision to keep Undersecretary Stuart Levey at the helm of the office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, all signs are that the new administration intends to keep a strong focus on protecting the U.S. financial system from abuse, taking offensive action to prevent illicit actors from enjoying easy access to the U.S. and international financial systems, and following the money as a means of identifying terrorist financiers and operators up and down the financial pipeline.
As I argue in a piece written for Oxford Analytica, with more activities out of the public eye than in it, counterterrorism efforts are, by their very nature, difficult to assess. However, financial measures in particular have proven quite successful, and those who follow the money are increasingly being called on to use their skills and tools against the hardest targets. The Obama administration is likely to continue leveraging these tools against a variety of transnational threats, using them in tandem with diplomatic, law enforcement, regulatory, intelligence, and other tools.
The full article is available here.
