CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Dirty Money at Work 119
groups, each performing some part of the task from production to transportation
to sale to laundering. Each element in the chain is linked by a
common motivation—profit.
Terrorist groups exhibit somewhat less cooperation because they are not
necessarily driven by a common motivation, instead each usually pursuing a
rather narrow agenda. Financing may be shared among terrorist groups, and
training may be offered to sympathizers. Communication and laundering
networks link some organizations, but specialization among many groups,
each contributing to a single attack, is infrequent. The need for secrecy in
planning, mobilizing, and executing terrorist operations precludes such extensive
cooperation as characterizes global criminal activities.
If there is any commonality in the agendas of various terrorist groups it
generally flows from a strong antagonism toward or a sense of disaffection
from the broader society. This can be rooted in political, religious, ethnic,
cultural, or economic conditions, each grounded in a sense of separation so
strong as to justify killing or being killed in pursuit of group objectives.
How does capitalism fit into this picture? In two ways. First, enormous
disparity, both economic and political, characterizes our shared
world, and disparity, however caused or perceived, promotes among some
powerful feelings of alienation and fatality. Capitalism can do a much better
job of giving everyone a stake in prosperity, ameliorating part of the
tendencies toward dissociation. Second, capitalism maintains the structure
of tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions, dummy corporations, mispricings,
fake transactions, and more, which terrorists utilize in the same way as
criminal syndicates. As the U.S. State Department reported, “The methods
used to move money to support terrorist activities are nearly identical
to those used for moving and laundering money for general criminal purposes.”
137 In other words, the structure that facilitates crime, corruption,
and tax evasion equally facilitates terrorism.
Just as we have state supporters of crime, as discussed earlier, we have
state sponsors of terrorism. In 2004 the United States had six countries on
its sponsors list: Libya, Sudan, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba. Iraq, included
the previous year, got a temporary pass because the United States
ousted Saddam and took over the country’s administration. An aging
Muammar Qaddafi is trying to rehabilitate Libya’s reputation by giving up
weapons of mass destruction, curtailing terrorists inside the country’s borders,
and providing major financial support to the continent’s African