WASHINGTON -- Senior Obama administration officials met this week to explore how the United States might expand efforts to thwart global financing for violent extremism, a key White House adviser said yesterday (see GSN, June 24).
(Aug. 7) -
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, left, sits with his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri during a 2001 interview. Al-Zawahiri appeared to seek increased funds for the terror organization in a recent audio message (Getty Images).
"We had discussions at the White House this week at the highest levels ... looking at where we have come over the past number of years, where we need to go, what are the challenges that we face," said John Brennan, U.S. President Barack Obama's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism. "We've made a lot of progress."
Washington is "actively working with and through the international banking community to deny resources and funding to the al-Qaeda network and the businesses that support them," he said.
However, he told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, terrorist financiers have "adapted" over the years to international measures aimed at isolating and freezing their assets.
They have aggregated terrorist funding with other money spent on more benign activities, said Brennan, who spent most of his career as a CIA official specializing in counterterrorism and the Middle East.
"It's now increasingly difficult ... to distinguish the monies that are going to legitimate social [and] educational programs from that which is being siphoned off for terrorist purposes, because it is very comingled and blended," he said. "The further downstream the money gets, it's harder then to determine exactly where it's going to."
Over the past several years, the U.S. government and its allies have prosecuted a number of Muslim charities that have quietly redirected a portion of donated funds toward violent purposes, often unbeknownst to contributors (see GSN, Jan. 16).
Even some moderate Muslim groups that seek to advance "the legitimate teachings of Islam" are "used by extremists [and] terrorists as the cover organizations," said Brennan, without naming particular entities. Though the U.S. government can try to "root out" individuals or groups involved in aiding terrorism, leaders in foreign countries in which the funds move might be best at thwarting such activities, Brennan said.
"We can help to a certain point, but then it gets down not just to those governments, but further down to the state and local [levels]," he said. "Just the way it is here in the United States -- all politics is local -- [it's] the same thing overseas."
Former CIA and State Department counterterrorism official Larry Johnson is skeptical that terror financing has become more complex.
"I don't know how he can say it's getting worse, because based on the intelligence I've seen, nobody's measuring it," Johnson, who consults with the U.S. government on counterterrorism and illicit financing, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They have not discovered anything new."
Moreover, he said, "we're not seeing a massive growth in terrorism." While there have been notable attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and elsewhere, violent extremism has generally been contained and does not appear to be expanding, he said.
Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, recently released an audio recording apparently aimed, in part, at boosting what seem to be declining coffers for the terrorist network, Johnson noted.
"It is the individual duty of every Muslim in Pakistan to join the mujahedeen, or at the very least, to support the jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan with money, advice, expertise, information, communications, shelter and anything else he can offer," al-Zawahiri said in the July 14 address.
Washington has long undertaken efforts aimed at cutting off these illicit funds, Johnson said, "but at the end of the day, the U.S. government has failed to put together a coordinated [approach] to terrorist financing."
Staff for the Sept. 11 commission, which concluded its work in 2004, issued a monograph noting the challenge of tracking down terrorism funding streams, but said the process sometimes has offered unexpected benefits.
"In reality, completely choking off the money to al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups has been essentially impossible," the commission aides wrote. "At the same time, tracking al-Qaeda financing has proven a very effective way to locate terrorist operatives and supporters and to disrupt terrorist plots."
Yesterday, Brennan said that Obama has approved several new initiatives to counter al-Qaeda and others.
"Over the past six months, we have presented President Obama with a number of actions and initiatives against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups," he said. "Not only has he approved these operations, he has encouraged us to be even more aggressive, even more proactive and even more innovative, to seek out new ways and new opportunities for taking down these terrorists before they can kill more innocent men, women and children.
"To this end," Brennan added, "the president is devoting new resources, investing in new capabilities, approving new actions and adapting our policies across the board." He did not offer details.
Johnson questioned Brennan's assertion here, as well.
"I am aware of nothing along the lines of what he's talking about," he told Global Security Newswire. "They have not dramatically changed anything the Bush administration was doing."
Johnson is particularly concerned that the Obama team has not moved expeditiously to establish an effective lead federal agency for counterterrorism and better integrate the actions of a variety of government offices with crucial roles to play. Those include the CIA, FBI, and the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments.
One illustration of the problem is that the U.S. government has not devised a single most-wanted list for terrorism suspects, integrated across federal departments. That failure has impeded investigations and enforcement, allowing individuals sought by one federal agency to escape notice by others, Johnson said.
"They've had more than enough time to address this and set in motion some [reforms]," Johnson said. "This is not complicated. They only want to make it complicated because it involves shaking up bureaucracies."
Speculation late last year that Obama would nominate Brennan to become the next CIA director was squelched when he withdrew his name from consideration. Critics charged that Brennan had not sufficiently repudiated Bush administration policies on harsh interrogation techniques, which might have impeded his Senate confirmation for the post (see GSN, Jan. 26).
The high-level White House position, by contrast, did not require a Senate vote.
During the Thursday event, Brennan said Obama is devoting new resources toward reducing the risk that terrorists might obtain and use a nuclear weapon. The president in April gave a major speech laying out an ambitious approach toward containing proliferation, including establishing new arms control agreements and securing nuclear materials around the globe.
"The risk of just one terrorist with just one nuclear weapon is a risk we simply cannot afford to take," Brennan said.