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Politics : New FADG. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (782)	5/23/2007 10:32:01 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4152

Sure money gets to them but my point is that post-bin laden and al queda central, assuming we coulf pull that off, no billionaire could do the transfers necessary to do bin laden redux. Michael, ask yourself how the drug cartels manage to repatriate the Billions they make from selling narcotics in the US and Europe? They don't necessarily have to move money. They can purchase commodities and manufactured goods with their drug proceeds, and then reship those back to their "home base", reaping an even great profit. This is what the Nigerians were doing for a number of years. They would sell Heroin here in the states, then purchase used SUVs and other vehicles to be smuggled back to Nigeria, where they would be sold and the profits banked. The Columbians/Venezuelans were doing the same thing with appliances. So it's not much of a stretch to believe terrorist finance networks are using the same methods. Hawala is one method, but the amount of money that can be "transferred" is dependent upon the amount of money the Hawala operators have on either side of the transaction. Hawala networks, from my understanding, can only really work where there is a "balance of trade" (representing flows of money back and forth) between the Hawala operators. A Hawala operator asked to move a million dollars to Pakistan from the US has to find someone in that country willing to disperse that million dollars to the recipient holding the "chit". In return the Pakistani Hawala operator will need to find someone who wants to transfer 1 million dollars to the US (with that million being dispersed by the US operator). Either that, or the US operator has to figure out a means of transferring that million to his Pakistani based counter-party in order to balance out the books. Hawk

To: michael97123 who wrote (782)	5/23/2007 12:08:23 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4152

So what you get is your decentralized version with money, planning and coordination problems. I get your point. But disagree. As if that is not obvious. Let me attempt another explanation. I presume all of us gray beards (yes that includes you and me) grew up under the Peter Drucker school of management. His models were all about hierarchical and pyramidal organizational structures and centralized command and control. Drucker taught the devil was in the details not in the form. He wrote about decentralization but never advocated giving up one iota of control. BTW every Democrat I know believes all government should be organized within Drucker's models. They also believe (and current leading Republicans join them in this) that the solution to all significant governmental management problems is to overlay it with another layer of supervisory bureaucrats. When he began writing around 1940, Drucker could not envision a successful world-wide decentralized organization like AQ. Nor should he have been expected to do so. It was only in the last years of his life that world-wide communications systems became available to enable a decentralized cell-based structure. And AQ did not invent cell structure. I cannot name who did but I can tell you from 1963-66, I was the demolition and explosives member of a 4 man SF cell that regularly worked targets in eastern Europe. Our local operational communications were limited to dead letter drops and very intermittent meetings. For emergencies we had an RS-6 radio that we could use with morse code and one-time crypto pads to contact a base in England. But we could only do that on a preset time schedule and our available contact times were limited to one or two a week. AQ has taken that concept to a much higher and much more responsive level. They can do so because they distributed thousands of trained (in Afghanistan) terrorist operators throughout the world, and because of instantaneous and world-wide Internet communications. They do not even have to take the risk of loading and unloading a dead letter drop. These trained terrorists have been cloning themselves all over the world ever since their graduation. Each cell has one or more activists. They know how to obtain operational funds locally. They are skilled in obtaining supplies for and manufacturing homemade explosives and incendiaries, and in firearm use. And they are full of ideas on what are appropriate targets. The Imams set priorities and that is all they have to do. For a clear understanding of AQs target set and motivational factors, I recommend the book, The Quranic Concept of War. A War College student did a good book report on it that is on-line. Try googling the book title to find it. I have a copy of the book if you have questions about it. For a clearer understanding of AQs decentralized organizational mode and why it is successful, I think the book The Starfish and The Spider explains it as well as anyone.