The urgent need to protect the global supply chain
Every day, staggering numbers of air, land and sea passengers, as well as millions of tons of cargo, move between nations. International trade and commerce has long driven the development of nations and provided unprecedented economic growth. Indeed, our future prosperity depends upon it.
At the same time, threats to trade and travel — whether from explosives hidden in a passenger’s clothing or inside a ship’s cargo, or from a natural disaster — remind us of the need for security and resilience within the global supply chain. A vulnerability or gap in any part of the world has the ability to affect the flow of goods and people thousands of miles away. For instance, just three days after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear tragedies struck Japan last March, U.S. automakers began cutting shifts and idling some plants at home. In the days that followed, they did the same at their factories in more than 10 countries around the world.
Ten years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we also continue to see the determination of individuals and groups to disrupt economies by targeting our transit and cargo systems. Understanding the seriousness of these threats underscores the need for a continued focus on protecting the global supply chain.
Just as important, we must move away from the outdated dichotomy that we have to choose between trade and travel efficiency, and trade and travel security. Security and efficiency must no longer be seen as mutually exclusive. It is possible to enhance security without increasing wait times, creating more paperwork and driving costs higher – and we are doing so already.
As I announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the United States released a National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security, the product of more than two years of collaboration across the U.S. government, and with international and domestic public and private partners.
The National Strategy, created with the input of more than 60 subject matter experts and hundreds of supply chain stakeholders, takes a whole-of-nation approach to global supply chain systems, with two explicit goals: promoting the efficient and secure movement of goods; and fostering resiliency.
We will pursue this strategy in three main ways:
The danger of symbols
By Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft The opinions expressed are their own.
Ten years ago this Sunday, 19 madmen used commercial airliners as guided missiles to perpetrate what became the most influential act of terrorism in world history, generating mass fear, confusion, sorrow and rage on a scale that will not be forgotten. With the passing of a decade the reality of the attack—the smoke and the flames, the blood and the destruction—have receded into memory. Now the September 11th attack has become a concept, a symbol of the apex of terrorism in the new millennium.
Human beings evolved the capacity to generate symbolic thought over millions of years, a feat which allows us to predict and plan for potential threats and opportunities. For example, we put money in a 401k knowing that many years in the future we will have this money to live on. This aptitude is one ability that has made the human species uniquely successful among life on earth, as no other animal is capable of such complex future planning,
There is a downside, though, to this human capability: how we evaluate potential outcomes. If we are hunting for food and see a caribou, we get excited. Our emotional system signals us that an opportunity is present and it’s time to go after it. If, on the other hand, we see a bear, we become afraid, because our emotions are signaling it’s time to escape. This emotional evaluation system is probably similar in all animals, but the difference in humans is that we use this response pattern to judge imaginary scenarios as well.
We imagine various anticipated outcomes and choose the one that our emotions tell us is most desirable. The trouble is that some of these mental creations are completely fictitious. For example, have you ever laid awake at night worried sick about something that, later, never ended up happening? The emotions are just as real, the discomfort just as unpleasant, and yet the object of the emotions is only in our minds. Because complex planning works extremely well and has brought us tremendous success as a species, evolution moves us forward regardless of our biological weakness in responding emotionally to imaginary things. It’s an unfortunate side effect of natural selection—and yet it was a prime cause of the 9/11 attacks.
Like other human beings, the terrorists had a hard time distinguishing between real and imaginary threats when strong emotions were present. Bin Laden was greatly offended that the United States had troops stationed on Saudi soil. That some of those troops were Christian defiled the Holy Land of Islam and that some were women was an affront to Saudi manhood. The reality of American troops creating a physical barrier against the threat of an Iraqi invasion into Saudi homeland mattered far less than the imagined insult and desecration of cultural and religious icons.
Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers and the man who flew the first plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center that bright September morning, was an architect by trade. Atta had written his master’s thesis on how skyscrapers symbolize the oppression and dominance of the godless West over the virtues of Islam. Thus in his act of ultimate terrorism, he demolished a symbol in order to vanquish a threat that was entirely conceptual, killing thousands of real, flesh-and-blood humans in the process.
the writer exhibits stark misreading of reality and like many others, seems entrenched in this macho, cowboy, let’s kick their butt, mentality.
When are we going to read reality as reality, not as sound bites to makes us feel good (presumable)?
Those who attacked us did not do it just because they were evil, hate our democracy, or hate America. They are evil for the mere fact that killing thousands, indiscriminately, of innocent people. But let’s also look inward. We went to them, to their land, to their homes, we kicked their doors, killed their husbands, orphaned their kids and plundered their oil, and for whose benefits? Not for the American walking in the street, but for the likes of Halliburton, Northrp Grumman, Booz Allen, and GE. Yet again, they own all the newspapers, the broadcasting, and our Congress.
The case for torture warrants
Rational discussion of this and other questions relating to torture proved difficult, because the issues are so emotional. Indeed, to many absolutists, the very idea of a “rational” discussion of torture is an oxymoron. To them, the issue is simple and clear-cut: torture should never be employed or even considered, because it never works; it is incompatible with democratic values; it is barbaric; it will always lead to more barbaric practices; it is worse than any evils it may prevent; it will provoke even more terrorism; it strips any democracy employing it of the moral standing to object to human rights violations by other nations or groups; and it unleashes the “law of unintended consequences.”
Most of these arguments are empirical in nature and may be true or false as matters of fact. But there is one fact that is indisputably true, has always been true, and, in my view, will always be true. That fact is that every democracy confronted with a genuine choice of evils between allowing many of its citizens to be killed by terrorists, or employing some forms of torture to prevent such multiple deaths, will opt for the use of torture. This, too, is an empirical claim, and I am entirely confident that it is true as a matter of fact.
Although the current administration, unlike its predecessor, has announced that it would never torture suspected terrorists, it has also resisted any judicial review of its counterterrorism measures. “Trust us,” but don’t ask us to justify that trust! Such an approach might be acceptable if men were angels, but no administration is run by angels. That is why visibility and accountability are essential to democratic governance. Neither is this an issue that divides along party lines. President Clinton implicitly acknowledged on National Public Radio that he would have used torture in an extreme case:
We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don’t need blanket advance approval for blanket torture. They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the President to make a finding in a [ticking bomb] case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Clinton was then asked whether he was saying there “would be more responsibility afterward for what was done.” He replied: “Yeah, well, the President could take personal responsibility for it. But you do it on a case-by-case basis, and there’d be some review of it.” He summarized his views in the following terms:
If they really believe the time comes when the only way they can get a reliable piece of information is to beat it out of someone or put a drug in their body to talk it out of’em, then they can present it to the Foreign Intelligence Court, or some other court, just under the same circumstances we do with wiretaps. Post facto . . . But I think if you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, we’re gonna be in real trouble.
Although I do not know what President Obama would say, I do know what his administration would do if faced with a real ticking bomb situation. No President would want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent citizens if he could have prevented these deaths by authorizing the use of nonlethal torture against a guilty terrorist. If I am correct, then it is important to consider the following: if the use of torture is imminent, is it worse to close our eyes and tolerate it by low-level law enforcement officials without accountability, or instead bring it to the surface by requiring a warrant for it as a precondition to its infliction? The question is not whether some torture would or would not be used in the ticking bomb case—it surely would. The dilemma is whether it would be done openly, pursuant to a previously established legal procedure, or whether it would be done secretly, in violation of existing law. This is the important policy issue about which I have tried to begin a debate: how should a democracy make difficult choice-of-evil decisions in situations for which there is no good resolution?
“The tragic reality”, Dershowitz, is that you are unbalanced. Go back to Harvard Law School. Begin again – at the beginning.
America, Iran and a terrorist label
Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Who says that the United States and Iran can’t agree on anything? The Great Satan, as Iran’s theocratic rulers call the United States, and the Islamic Republic see eye-to-eye on at least one thing, that the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) are terrorists.
America and Iran arrived at the terrorist designation for the MEK at different times and from different angles but the convergence is bizarre, even by the complicated standards of Middle Eastern politics. The United States designated the MEK a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997, when the Clinton administration hoped the move would help open a dialogue with Iran. Thirteen years later, there is still no dialogue.
But the group is still on the list, despite years of legal wrangling over the designation through the U.S. legal system. Britain and the European Union took the group off their terrorist lists in 2008 and 2009 respectively after court rulings that found no evidence of terrorist actions after the MEK renounced violence in 2001.
On July 16, a federal appeals court in Washington instructed the Department of State to review the terrorist designation, in language that suggested that it should be revoked. But Hillary Clinton’s review mills appear to be grinding very slowly.
A group of lawmakers from both parties reminded Clinton of the court ruling this week and drew attention to a House resolution in June — it has more than 100 co-sponsors and the list is growing — that called for the MEK to be taken off the terrorist list. Doing so would not only be the right thing, the six leading sponsors said in a letter, it would also send the right message to Tehran. Translation: using the terrorist label as a carrot does not work, so it’s time to be tough.
Come January, when a new, Republican-dominated House of Representatives begins its term, Clinton and President Barack Obama are likely to come under pressure from hawkish members of congress to act tough towards Iran, further tighten economic sanctions and ensure that those already existing don’t erode.
Hilarious!
Spend half a century fighting communism, then move onto the Islamists, and then in the midst of all this Americans cry the merits of an ISLAMO-MARXIST TERRORIST GROUP. Yes you complete bunch of idiots, they are Islamists, Marxist and Terrorists… Remember the evil reds? Remember the evil mullahs? Remember the planes in New York? Combine the three and you have your average MEK nutbag… Nevermind the personality sect aspect.
Even funnier, you guys do realise they tried to assasinate Nixon in Tehran? Like i said, HILARIOUS!
Friggin tools the lot of you…
9/11 and the nine year war
The following is a condensed version of George Friedman’s geopolitical column for STRATFOR, a global intelligence company where Friedman is chief executive officer.
It has now been nine years since al Qaeda attacked the United States. And it has been nine years of America primarily focusing on the Islamic world. Over this period of time, the United States has engaged in two multi-year, multi-divisional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, inserted forces in other countries in smaller operations and conducted a global covert campaign against al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups.
In order to understand the last nine years, we must understand the first 24 hours of the war — and recall our own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the audacious nature of the attack was both shocking and frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next.
At the root of our panic was a profound lack of understanding of al Qaeda, particularly its capabilities and intentions. Since we did not know what was possible, our only prudent course was to prepare for the worst. Nothing symbolized this more than the fear that al Qaeda had acquired nuclear weapons and that they would use them against the United States. The evidence was minimal, but the consequences would be overwhelming.
What happened was that an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy. The United States operates with a grand strategy derived from the British — maintaining the balance of power. For the United Kingdom, maintaining that balance in Europe protects any one power from emerging that could unite the continent and build a fleet to invade Britain or block its access to the mainland.
The Americans elevated that grand strategy to a global level. Having blocked the Soviet Union from hegemony over Europe and Asia, the United States proceeded with a goal, like that of the United Kingdom, to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud.
America’s trouble with Islam
Of the many posters held aloft in angry demonstrations about plans for an Islamic cultural centre and mosque in New York, one in particular is worth noting: “All I ever need to know about Islam, I learned on 9/11.”
As an example of wilful ignorance, it’s in a class by itself. It passes judgment, in just 12 words, about a sprawling universe of 1.3 billion adherents of Islam (in 57 countries around the world) who come from different cultures, speak a wide variety of languages, follow different customs, hold different nationalities and believe in different interpretations of their faith, just like Christians or Jews. Suicidal murderers are a destructive but tiny minority.
But for the people waving all-I-ever-need-to-know posters in front of national television cameras two blocks from “ground zero,” site of the biggest mass murder in American history, Islam equals terrorism. No need for nuance, no need for learning, no need for building bridges between the faiths. The mindset epitomized by the slogan mirrors the radical fringe of Islamic thought, equally doubt-free and self-righteous.
Both sides have data to back up their assertions. The Islam-equals-terrorism school of thought can point to 3,000 victims of the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those who preach that the U.S. is waging war on Islam itself, and terror acts are therefore a form of self-defence, can argue that Christian soldiers have been killing Muslims through history, from the Crusades to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The “ground zero mosque” affair began with a dispute over the center’s proximity to the hole where the Twin Towers once stood. Too close to hallowed ground, argue opponents, including family members of people who died in the attack. The question of location morphed into a national debate on religious tolerance and prompted demonstrations against planned mosques more than a thousand miles from New York.
Does all this add up to a rising wave of anti-Muslim bigotry? Or is it more of the same, with the volume turned higher in advance of mid-term elections? There are no hard data to answer that question and it is worth looking back a few years at polls on American attitudes towards Muslims. In 2006, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent favoured rules requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification to better spot potential terrorists.
Callers to a Washington radio show host who followed up on the ID issue suggested identifying Muslims with a crescent-shaped tattoo on their foreheads, stamps on their driving licenses, passports and birth certificates, or special armbands.
I wonder why it is that as soon as the threat of the cold war ended Islam steped up to fill the vaccum of peace?
Drugs, terrorism and shadow banking
The trouble with moving big amounts of cash, from a criminal’s point of view, is threefold. It’s bulky, it’s heavy and it smells.
A stash of $1 million in mixed bills weighs around 100 pounds (50 kilos). Specially-trained dogs can sniff out bulk cash in a heartbeat.
All of which helps to explain why drug cartels and financiers of terrorism appear to have been making increasing use of what FBI chief Robert Mueller calls a shadow banking system.
Its features include a legal loophole that allows money launderers to get around the requirement that cash or “monetary instruments” (share certificates, travellers’ cheques, money orders etc.) in excess of $10,000 must be declared on entering or leaving the United States.
It is, however, perfectly legal to carry, say, $50,000 embedded in the magnetic stripes of so-called pre-paid stored-value cards.
They look like a credit or debit card but are not linked to a bank account, can in many cases be loaded anonymously, are not “monetary instruments” under U.S. law, and were labelled “the ideal instrument for large-scale drug trafficking and money-laundering operations” in a 2006 analysis by the National Drug Intelligence Center.
It predicted that drug traffickers, narco-terrorists and other criminals would increasingly rely on stored-value cards — “superior to established methods of money laundering” — because they could be used without fear of documentation, identification, law enforcement suspicion or seizure.
Hello,
I see this type of transaction from time to time back when I work in the hotel indsutry. A person would come in trying to use a prepaid credit card. They wouild give me this hole story about how they travel on business and how theuir boss pass them in these cards. Sound fishy. Once I would say We dont accept them he would come back and ask to pay straight cash. once I say I need an ID they would disaspear.
American nightmare: Al Qaeda at home
- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
It has been a recurring nightmare of American counter-terrorist officials for years — growing numbers of home-grown al Qaeda recruits drawn from the Muslim-American community, plus blue-eyed, blond-haired would-be suicide bombers travelling on American passports.
That notion clashes with the widely-held belief that Muslims in the United States are not nearly as prone to being seduced by Al Qaeda propaganda as their co-religionists in Europe. But a series of recent terrorism cases involving American citizens have challenged old assumptions and thrown question marks over a host of surveys meant to show the American Muslim communities’ resistance to radicalization.
Incidents spiked in 2009 and included the arrest of five U.S. citizens in Pakistan, where they allegedly tried to link up with extremists, and the arrest of Daniel Boyd, a white convert to Islam who was accused of plotting to attack soldiers at the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Early in the year, Bryant Vinas, a Hispanic American convert, pleaded guilty to having trained with al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Now, the lure of al Qaeda’s murderous ideas is seen as a real threat. “The group seeks to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States,” according to John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “These Americans are not necessarily of Arab and South Asian descent,” he wrote in the preface of a Jan. 20 report from his committee on al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia. “They include individuals who converted to Islam in (an American) prison or elsewhere and were radicalized.”
“The prospect that U.S. citizens are being trained at al Qaeda camps in both countries deepens our concern…” not least, apparently, because an American official in Yemen told committee investigators that American converts living in Yemen included “blond-haired blue-eyed types.” That echoes then CIA chief Michael Hayden’s 2008 warning that al Qaeda was training “operatives that wouldn’t attract attention if they were going through the customs line at (Washington) Dulles airport.”
How many have done so is anyone’s guess. A January study by researchers from Duke University found that in the eight years following the September attacks, 139 Muslim-Americans had committed acts of terrorism-related violence or were prosecuted for terrorism-related offenses involving violence.
Political correctness has nothing to do with why the US is losing “the propaganda war.” They are able to recruit people as is without “take ‘em dead or alive” rhetoric fuming from the executive…they had for years before hand. It’s not a question of morality / the strength of ideas for those who find this message appealing, but as an answer to the concept of globalization. Rather than have a sanitized version of growth with consumerist overtones, a retreat to an idealized past is much more comforting.
I do enjoy that Bernd had an article a few weeks ago about the over-exaggeration of the terrorist “threat”, only to come full circle by joining the cocophony. Attempting to win the hearts and minds isn’t that horrible of a goal, but it has to be kept tempered by logic and the realization that there limits to any message. Additionally, keeping the military out of said message is important, for these are the same geniuses who burned a village to save a village many a time in the past.
America, terrorists and Nelson Mandela
- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
Woe betide the organization or individual who lands on America’s terrorist list. The consequences are dire and it’s easier to get on the list than off it even if you turn to peaceful politics. Just ask Nelson Mandela.
One of the great statesmen of our time, Mandela stayed on the American terrorist blacklist for 15 years after winning the Nobel Prize prior to becoming South Africa’s first post-Apartheid president. He was removed from the list after then president George W. Bush signed into law a bill that took the label “terrorist” off members of the African National Congress (ANC), the group that used sabotage, bombings and armed attacks against the white minority regime.
The ANC became South Africa’s governing party after the fall of apartheid but the U.S. restrictions imposed on ANC militants stayed in place. Why? Bureaucratic inertia is as good an explanation as any and a look at the current list of what is officially labelled Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTOs) suggests that once a group earns the designation, it is difficult to shake.
The consequences of a U.S. terrorist designation include freezing an organisation’s funds, banning its members from travelling to the U.S. and imposing harsh penalties (up to 15 years in prison) on people who provide “material support or resources” to an FTO.
At present, there are 44 groups on the list, ranged in alphabetical order from the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organisation to the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia. The Abu Nidal group, according to the government’s own country reports on terrorism, “is largely considered inactive.” The Congressional Research Service, a bipartisan agency which provides research and analysis for Congress, has wondered why it is still on the list.
One can ask the same about the Colombian group, added to the list in 2001. The bulk of the paramilitary organisation demobilized years ago and the latest U.S. government report says its “organizational structure no longer exists.”
during the court proceeding,some of the information about MEKm`s activities declassified by state department.
according to these information the group has not ended its military operation,still intenends to use violence to achieve its political goals and trained females to be suicide bombers.in also said that much of the information the group has provided on iran`s nuclear program has been wrong.
(www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/a rticle/2010/07/16/AR2010071605881_pf.htm l)
therefor MEK exatly is a terrorist group.
The Underwear Bomber and the war of ideas
- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
Who is winning the war of ideas between the West and al Qaeda’s hate-driven version of Islam?
It is a question that merits asking again after a 23-year-old Western-educated Nigerian of privileged background, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to murder almost 300 people by bringing down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into the crotch of his underpants.
The administration of President Barack Obama, averse to the bellicose language of George W. Bush, has virtually dropped the phrase “war of ideas.” But that doesn’t mean it has ended. Or that Obama’s plea, in his Cairo speech this summer, for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world has swayed the disciples of Osama bin Laden, whose 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) against “Jews and Crusaders” remains the extremists’ guiding principle.
“To…kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” the fatwa said. “This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah (to) fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.”
That this exhortation is as appealing today, to a fanatical minority, as it was 11 years ago underlines that the United States has had scant success in meeting the objective the Bush administration set out in its 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. “Together with the international community, we will wage a war of ideas to make clear that all acts of terrorism are illegitimate, to ensure that the conditions and ideologies that promote terrorism do not find fertile ground in any nation…”
That aim was spelt out just weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, an event that provided ample ammunition for the extremists’ assertion that the West was stepping up an unrelenting war it has waged against the Muslim world for centuries. Such claims, and al Qaeda itself, should be easy to discredit, write two political scientists, Peter Krause and Stephen Van Evera in the fall issue of the Middle East Policy Council Journal.
The Islamic jihad was not the brainchild of Osama but that of the American Imperialism [with the aid and assistance of the most right-reactionary forces in every country of their occupation] whose only concern is to assist the MNCs and the TNCs in their exploitation of the abundant natural resources the world over.All talk of upholding the values- that too American ones[?]- of freedom, democracy, free choice,etc. is nothing more than a cliche to hoodwink those gullible guys in their own as well as other countries!
After all what business do the Americans have in those countries no matter what their social-economic-political systems are? If the former USSR was wrong in ‘exporting’ revolution to the third world countries how can the USA directly wage wars in the name of their brand of democracy? If America’s political evangelism is right then Osama’s and his ilk’s retaliation is also right! If America has every right NOT ONLY TO DEFEND BUT ALSO SPREAD ITS STYLE OF LIFE AND BELIEFS then how can one find fault with others who also feel that their values are being threatened?.After all it was this very same America which originally recruited and trained them in their ‘jihad’ against the truly humanizing socialist ideology that was sought to be practiced in such countries. IF communism was a taboo for them can the American way of life be sold to them in the name of pseudo-democracy?
AND lastly,no American other than the ones who are genuinely-not for tactical or personal/practical reasons-opposed to the neocolonialist wars of his country has any right to grouse against the backlash of his country’s atrocities elsewhere.Let them not gloat over their system which has driven thousands on to the streets in their own country and is ruining the lives of the millions in other countries.Because that system and its government in their country are not theirs but those of the warlords in the service of the MNCs and the TNCs.
A V Samikkannu, Pappireddippatti, Tamilnadu, India
Global Supply Chain Security sounds very promising but it takes time to develop and implement. I think there should be something private sector can do to help government now. Security is traditionally the integral part of supply chain risk management. In order to enhance the level of security of global supply chain, private sector should know how to identify each type of risk.
According to this paper http://www.scm-operations.com/2011/08/pr actical-supply-chain-risk-management.htm l there are some types of risks that have direct impact on global security. Human Resource risk is the first example. We should conduct HR audit at overseas facilities to ensure that suppliers and their employees don’t have any link with terrorist groups. Distribution risk should be monitored to ensure that cargoes will be transported through proper route with sound security measure. Most manufacturing companies transmit a lot of data to trading partners overseas so IT risk should be monitored to make sure that terrorist groups can’t intercept valuable data.