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THE OCTOPUS IN THE SHADOWS

Pundita is nothing if not persistent.

Not only has she been blogging about the implications of Transnational Organized Crime for some time now ( look here , here, here and here, here and here) but with increasing frequency in her emails, she has gently nudged me to look at that problem, in particular the International Crime Threat Assesssment that was released by the Clinton administration in December of 2000.

Admittedly, I initially viewed Pundita’s alarm over transnational crime with a degree of jaded cynicism. After all, I come from a State where the former Republican governor is under Federal indictment, the current Democratic governor and his powerful father-in-law are in hot water over a corruption scandal and the formerly omnipotent Mayor of Chicago is in the sights of the same Federal prosecutor who put Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in the slammer. Looking no further than today’s Chicago Tribune, we see that a Colombian Heroin ring was running dope out of the City of Chicago’s Water Department – whose de facto boss must have been too busy defending himself from charges in the Mob-related Hired Truck scandal to notice the Cali cartel setting up shop. The same Federal prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is also pursuing that matter as well as having rounded up most of the key members of the Chicago Outfit – minus Joey ” The Clown ” Lombardo who is now on the lam.

(For those out of the loop on on Chicago’s more colorful figures, if you have seen the movie Casino, Lombardo is wanted by the Feds for the death of Anthony ” The Ant” Spilotro who was murdered in 1986. Spilotro was the character played by Joe Pesci in the movie who gets mauled with baseball bats and buried alive in a cornfield)

With that in mind, to please Miss Pundita, I finally began reading the International Crime Threat Assessment, expecting nothing much to impress me. Well…it did. If you read nothing else, go to the assessment called ” Consequences for US Strategic Interests“. It’s an eye-opener and it got me to thinking that we Americans often laugh at the comical level of corruption that prevails in some South America countries or in Africa or various small nations where names seem incomprehensible and funny hats are worn. Then we assure ourselves that it can’t be like that here or in other advanced nations of the Core because we have the rule of law, a regulatory state of impressive size and power, transparency and democratic governance. Right ?

Well, in orderly Japan, the number two economic power in the world, the Yakuza have a respected place and a societal function going back to the days of the Tokugawa Shogunate. To keep the underworld and the legitimate world in complete harmony required powerful political fixers like the ex-fascist and war criminal Kodama Yoshio and the billionaire ultranationalist Sasakawa Ryoichi. These two men were the bridge between the gangsters, rightist thugs and LDP bosses in postwar Japan – they weren’t just bagmen either but advisers, organizers and string-pullers in both worlds.

Well..that’s the Japanese you say. They have a very different culture and legal rule-set for these matters. No one could get away with that in the United States. Right ?

I seem to dimly recall that there once was a scandal involving a corrupt bank with a global reach named BCCI whose depositors included dictators, terrorists, narcotics traffickers, arms merchants, Middle-Eastern radicals, mafia bosses and other unsavory types. BCCI’s shadowy owners liked to buy up local banks the world over and to smooth the path toward that end in America they bought themselves some of the best ” fixers” imaginable – Clark Clifford and Robert Altman.

Robert Altman is the fellow who had the good sense to marry Lynda Carter, whom Bob Dole and a number of senior Republicans found to be quite charming ( one might even say a wonder woman) and Altman’s role was to work the GOP angle but Clark Clifford was a person of an entirely different magnitude.

Mr. Clifford was a genuine ” wise man” who advised Democratic presidents – all of them – from Truman forward. President Truman held George Marshall in something akin to awe but a young Clark Clifford persuaded Truman to overrule his revered Secretary of State and recognize the State of Israel over Marshall’s vehement protests. As White House Counsel Clifford drafted the National Security Act of 1947 that created the Defense Department, the CIA and the National Security Council. He was ” present at the creation” and agreed to become Johnson’s Secretary of Defense when American fortunes in Vietnam were reaching their nadir and stabilized a deteriorating situation. Unfortunately, Clifford also became entangled, when not in government service, with shady characters like Bert Lance and the secretive and paranoid billionaire Howard Hughes.

In all seriousness, Clark Clifford had rendered signal services to this country of the highest order over a very long career – a career that was tarnished when he sold out to dangerous criminals for approximately $ 6 million and change. His age, ill-health, past contributions and powerful connections spared Clifford a prison term but not public embarrassment. Senator John Kerry tried to treat Clifford with kid gloves during the Senate investigation of BCCI but by that point it was merely damage control. Clark Clifford and Robert Altman paid a $ 5 million dollar fine and walked and what private financial information about prominent DC insiders and organizations fell into the wrong hands ( BCCI’s DC subsidiary was Washington’s largest bank) hands during Clifford’s chairmanship is unkown.

BCCI is as dead as Julius Caesar but the foreign actors who put that octopus in the shadows together are still out there, scuttling about the deeps of the world financial markets. When you read of $ 220 billion being looted in Russia and sent abroad or the fantastic profits reaped in the Andes nations or the Golden Triangle by narco-terrorists you have to realize that the money has to go someplace and it isn’t just to Switzerland or tiny Gap countries with iron-clad bank secrecy laws. Really, would you stash your cool billion in some crappy little fly-by-night bank in the Caymans ?

Or would you try to put it somewhere safe and take measures to make sure it stayed that way ? That’s the crux of the problem that TOC poses to American national security and the health of the Core.

ADDENDUM: From the Winds of Change Archive – War and Crime.

RECOMMENDED ECONOMIC READING

Ka-chiiing ! I’m in the process of trying to clear the decks with previously promised blogging posts this week, since work responsibilities have lightened, which I will get to this evening. However a few of superbly informative posts on emerging markets issues demand your attention, both of which connect to the role of the World Bank:

For the Arabists among ye, Collounsbury has a two part series analyzing MENA market problems and structure. He’s really sharing on the ground insights here.

Part I. Practical Comments on World Bank MENA Development.

and

Part II. Practical Comments on World Bank MENA Development

The esteemed Pundita has developed and tied together themes from her previous postings on organized crime, international aid and debt issues and democratic reform to discuss plans the West has for Africa.

“Crooked Governments Beware and the US lowers the boom on UN “

Pundita has been hitting the Transnational Organized Crime issue hard lately, so much so that I feel compelled to bone up on the subject which I’ve regarded as marginal in the past. In fact, she’s forcing me to stop and re-think some of my premises in terms of current national security threat estimation. I’ll have some thoughts about her post later tonight.

More later.

RECOMMENDED MILITARY READING

Hooooo-HAH ! A meaty selection to sink your mind into:

“ The Journalism of Warfare” by Keith Windshuttle in The New Criterion. Windshuttle opens with an absolutely devastating attack on Robert Fisk’s laudatory descriptions of Osama bin Laden:

“In Fisk’s description, bin Laden was attended by “bearded, taciturn figures” who never strayed more than a few yards from him. In Lawrence’s account, Feisal was accompanied by a retinue of slaves who guarded his person and lit his path with lamps. Students of British imperial adventure novels will recognize the genre. The world the writers conjure up is pre-modern, where natural aristocrats, tall and slender, lord over male servants and slaves who are handsome, silent, and strong. The aristocrats are famous for their warrior skills. Their long robes are trimmed with gold and scarlet. They carry daggers in their belts. It is a world without women and it reeks of homoeroticism. …

…This same hankering after the trappings of aristocracy, or anything that smacks of aristocracy, is behind much of the anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment that now emanates from the European news media, especially in the writings of European leftists such as Fisk. “

” Crack in the Foundation: Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge in Future War” by Colonel H.R. McMaster.

This one was brought to my attention by reader Jacob H. , for which I am most grateful. It is the longest by far, a 102 page PDF document in which McMaster takes a critical look at the assumptions of Network-Centric Warfare and Joint Operations Concept based transformation at the DoD. McMaster, who has a PhD in history and is currently commanding the Army’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq is a rising star who nonetheless jumped right into a hotly contested Pentagon policy debate. It must not have hurt him because McMaster was eventually picked to be an adviser to Lt. General John Abizaid and then tapped for a coveted field command.

” Feel that Draft ?” by Charles Moskos in The Chicago Tribune. One of America’s foremost experts on the U.S. military, Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos has come out with an op-ed piece arguing for a return to conscription ( an eventuality I foresaw more than a year ago and Moskos makes some of the same points ):

“In brief, draftees could readily fill the multitude of jobs that require only a short formal training period or even just on-the-job training. It is well documented that higher-quality recruits have the skills and motivation to learn quickly a wide variety of military jobs. Draftees would be ideally suited for duties on peacekeeping missions such as in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Sinai. Better educated and more mature draftees would also be ideal for guard duty in military prisons.”

That’s it.

EVEN ON THE LEFT, HOWARD ZINN IS WEARING THIN [UPDATED]

The cultural moment in the sun for Howard Zinn’s cartoonishly shallow, rad-crit, interpretation of American history may be waning. Dissent, a publication not exactly noted for right-wing sympathies, just blasted Zinn in an online article by Michael Kazin:

“But Zinn’s big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence. A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?

His failure is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s Web site than to a work of scholarship. According to Zinn, “99 percent” of Americans share a “commonality” that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers. And knowledge of that awesome fact is “exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to now-have tried their best to prevent.”History for Zinn is thus a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.

He describes the American Revolution as a clever device to defeat “potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.” His Civil War was another elaborate confidence game. Soldiers who fought to preserve the Union got duped by “an aura of moral crusade” against slavery that “worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, and turn much of the anger against ‘the enemy.'”

Nothing of consequence, in his view, changed during the industrial era, notwithstanding the growth of cities, railroads, and mass communications. Zinn views the tens of millions of Europeans and Asians who crossed oceans at the turn of the past century as little more than a mass of surplus labor. He details their miserable jobs in factories and mines and their desperate, often violent strikes at the end of the nineteenth century-most of which failed. The doleful narrative makes one wonder why anyone but the wealthy came to the United States at all and, after working for a spell, why anyone wished to stay. “

Zinn, it must be said, is no Ward Churchill or Joseph Massad. No one that I am aware of has ever accused him of fraudulent acholarship and it is hard to imagine the genial and mild-mannered Zinn bullying his students. It’s simply that his arguments are rather weak and Zinn owes his popularity mostly to writing history that caters to the preexisting sophmoric prejudices of young leftists who arrive on campus ” knowing” the truth.

Hat tip to Richard Jensen of CNET.

UPDATE: Callimachus of Done With Mirrors skewers Zinn’s latest attempt at spreading the anti-American disease.

NID AND DCI – NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET ?

The ubiquitous praktike wonders if Porter Goss has been rolled:

“It’s the latest evidence that Negroponte is consolidating his power as the nation’s intelligence czar. The May 2 memo, obtained by TIME and also reported late last week by GovWatch.com, states that “effective immediately,” Negroponte will participate in meetings of the NSC and its domestic counterpart, the Homeland Security Council (HSC). Meanwhile, CIA Director Porter Goss “will attend NSC and HSC meetings at the direction of the President.”

That’s the polite Beltway equivalent of saying, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

And here I was thinking that Negroponte would have very little clout given the constraits of his position. But I suppose political power is something you create for yourself rather than simply a function of your job description. I wonder what kind of relationship Negroponte will have with Rumsfeld, who gets the bulk of the US intelligence budget. Will the CIA’s diminished clout allow the OSD to grab some more DO turf?”

Historically, the DCI position held by Porter Goss was designed to have two hats – the administrative chief of the CIA itself and the Head of the entire Intelligence Community. The first role is strictly operational and the second is policy.

Very few DCIs have managed to wear the second hat authoritatively outside of Allen Dulles and William Casey, both of whom had special circumstances in their favor. Dulles benefitted from his de facto partnership with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a legendary reputation as a spymaster and Eisenhower’s deep personal interest in intelligence. William Casey remained an adviser on domestic political and personnel matters to Ronald Reagan as well as formally being a policy principal co-equal with Weinberger and Shultz. Casey’s working relationship with Reagan was simply too tight to be challenged lightly, even by other heavyweights in the administration.

Lacking this kind of clout, most DCI’s either retreat to their own bailwick and remain outsiders to top-level policy formation or attempt to become courtiers in the mold of George Tenet, who was pretty darn good at wheedling his way into a place at the table in two very different administrations. Hence Tenet and Goss ” briefing” the president every morning. This really is just trying to accumulate precious face time with the POTUS. Goss is better qualified than Tenet was to do the daily brief by virtue of his prior experience as a case officer but in either case the president is better served hearing from the senior analysts who prepared the brief. Same thing for John Negroponte – he’s the NID because he’s a discreet but very, very, tough troubleshooter, not because he’s a professional intelligence analyst. He’s highly competent, very smooth and Bush trusts him.

The NID represents an attempt to legislate that critical second hat of the DCI that only works when the president has a great deal of trust in a someone’s judgment, enough to delegate broad authority so that when the NID speaks to DoD or State, the bureaucrats hear the president’s voice. Without that kind of juice, the next NID after Negroponte will be just another Drug Czar.

The problem is, in any given administration, the people who can fill that kind of role can usually be counted on one hand.