The Enemy Whose Name We Dare Not Speak

When President Bush addressed the nation for the last time as President, he emphasized – as he often had during his 8 years in office – the threat posed by terrorism to American homeland security. "I have often spoken to you about good and evil, ” the President said. “This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise."

As before, the outgoing President declined to specify the “evil” we face. In fact, on the one famous occasion when Mr. Bush named an “axis of evil” he identified three rogue states: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Yet, North Korea has recently been deleted from the unofficial “axis of evil”--stricken from the U.S Government’s official list of state sponsors of terrorism despite neither abandoning its nuclear weapons program, nor accounting for the countless souls abducted and/or murdered by the North Korean regime over the past half century. Historians, policymakers, and pundits may debate the wisdom of striking North Korea from the list, but whatever the final judgment may be, it is also definitive proof that the Bush Administration was, in fact willing to compromise with at least some forms of evil.

Ultimately, the disappointment of the Bush years was not merely a result of the Administration’s inability to match rhetoric to realpolitik; that is a hallmark of nearly all Presidential Administrations. Rather, President Bush and his Administration, right down to its final days, demontrated a disappointing and astounding inability to articulate who the United States’ enemies are, what strategies the nation needs to use in order to meet the threat, and why the strategy was appropriate. Ultimately, the toxic blend of a particularly medieval observance of Islam with a crypto-fascist political ideology that we face across the Islamic world (and at times at home) has become, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “the Enemy Whose Name We Dare Not Speak.” This is by no means a novel observation – but a constant, recurring criticism of the Bush Administration–and one which President Bush never managed to fully address.

One of the important battlegrounds in what President Bush instead inartfully labeled the “War on Terror” has been the struggle to monitor, interdict and ultimately reduce terrorism financing. Nowhere has the failure to crystalize the nature of our enemies yielded more concrete examples of policy confusion and incoherence.

Here are several examples illustrating the point:

• Seven years after the September 11th attacks, only one (now largely inconsequential) Saudi charity has been designated a financier of terrorism despite the fact that the entire intelligence community has overwhelming proof that many Saudi (and other Gulf state) charities have been bankrolling Sunni extremist groups such as al Qaeda and Hamas for more than a decade. At first, the Bush Administration’s failure to take action was ascribed to diplomatic considerations – i.e. letting the Saudis enact meaningful reforms of their own, including the establishment of a financial intelligence unit and a commission to oversee the financial dealings of charities. But by 2004, U.S. counterterrorism officials were again beginning to worry that, although the Saudis were cracking down on domestic terrorism risks inside the Kingdom, the Saudis were failing to enforce any of the money laundering and terrorist financing regulations they nominally established in May of 2003 and the promised financial intelligence unit (FIU) that was to be established as a sister organization to the United State’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) existed only on paper.
  
  Four years later, Stuart A. Levey, U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for terror finance issues, testified before Congress that “Saudi Arabia today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism, to Sunni terror groups and to the Taliban than any other place in the world.” Levey also testified that although the Saudis had been aggressive in pursuing discrete terrorist cells, the Kingdom had failed to carry out its promise to establish an FIU. Nor had the Kingdom created the long-promised Saudi High Commission for Charities. Whereas the political environment of 2003 and 2004 required the Saudis to at least feign concern for U.S. security and profess the intention to combat terror financing, in 2008 Nail Jubeir, press attache for the Saudi embassy in Washington no longer felt compelled to offer even the customary fig leaf. According to a report published in the L.A. Times in April 2008, Mr. Jubeir flatly confirmed that neither the FIU nor the Charity Oversight Commission had been created.
• For more than a decade, the FBI and Department of Justice investigated Hamas fundraising activities in the United States, leading first to the designation of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) in Richardson, Texas as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) in 2001. HLF was later indicted in 2004 and tried twice (the first trial ended in a hung jury) in 2007 and 2008. Prosecutors ultimately proved that HLF was part of a larger conspiracy to fund Hamas that involved a large number of un-indicted co-conspirators. Evidence presented at the first HLF trial suggested that the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an Islamic group named as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the case had used its financial subsidiary, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), to divert funds to top Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzook, among others. Yet that fact apparently did not stop DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from purchasing a booth at the ISNA’s annual convention (along with the FBI) while DOJ prosecutors were simultaneously presenting evidence to a jury that ISNA was part of a massive conspiracy to finance Hamas. The good news: According to the Politico website, ISNA’s president is one of the religious leaders invited to address Barack Obama’s inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral.

• The HLF trial also revealed that USAID, the administrative arm of U.S. foreign aid, had managed to provide notorious Hamas fronts with a number of grants in 2002, immediately following Israel’s military operations against Hamas in May of that year. The payments were vetted through the U.S. Embassy in Israel which miraculously failed to inquire of either the Israeli government (who had previously designated these Hamas fronts as illegal organizations affiliated with Hamas) or the FBI which had produced its own detailed report on Hamas front organizations in the West Bank.

Tempting as it is to portray these blunders as the forseeable consequences of a sterotypically inept Washington bureaucracy, that is neither correct nor fair. There have been setbacks and mistakes, but there have also been significant, material achivements. Al Qaeda and Hamas no longer move money through the U.S. financial system with the same ease as before. International banks, often at the behest of the U.S. have isolated Iran and its banks, imposing obstacles in Iran’s dogged efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Financial transparency has improved, and many nations, at the behest of Washington, have passed anti-money laundering and counter-terror finance laws with teeth.

Yet the problems remain, and many still stem from the profound failure to reconcile the Administration’s undeniable zeal to defeat al Qaeda with its unmistakable ambivalence as to how or even if, to confront the various strains of Islamist extremism that have not only fueled al Qaeda but also fueled Hamas and other terrorist groups. As we sit here today, the lack of a clear strategy, and the absence of a willingness to clearly and candidly label our enemies continues to empower Islamist extremism around the globe, not only to the considerable peril of U.S. citizens, but also to the peril of millions of faithful, law-abiding Muslims who are the extremists’ primary victims.

If the Obama Administration is to improve upon the Bush record at interdicting, reducing, and eliminating terrorism financing, it must begin by identifying the problem squarely and honestly. That does not necessarily mean taking more drastic public actions against the Saudis or prosecuting every un-indicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land Foundation, but it does require the next President to clearly oppose Islamicism in all its forms. It is, in many ways, a rhetorical challenge – and one that President Obama appears more capable of meeting, but it is also a challenge requiring a “practical imagination” --a way of looking at the current terrorism designation process, the reporting provisions of the Patriot Act and other tools used to date with an eye towards a coherent gameplan.

A comprehensive approach is beyond the scope of this single blogpost but here is a sample of some tangible steps the next Administration can at least consider:

1. prohibiting U.S. financial institutions, on a prospective basis, from processing future transfers for entitites that have received or sent funds to previously designated SDGTs;
2. on a prospective basis, revoking the tax exempt status of any U.S. charity that has received more than $100,000 from any previously designated SDGT;
3. formally designating all major Hamas front organizations (to date only a handful have been);
4. requiring foreign financial institutions to certify that they do not currently maintain any accounts for any SDGTs as a condition of maintaining a corresponding banking account in the United States;
5. empowering FinCEN to impose a 10-year ban from the United States on any financial institution determined to have knowingly provided financial services to a designated SDGT or country on the U.S. state-sponsor of terrorism list.

These proposals are merely a starting point for a wider and deeper discussion of exactly who is fighting us and how best to starve our enemies of the vital financial sustenance that is crtical to the war they continue to wage. Candidate Obama previously stated: “If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost.” President Obama and his counter-terrorism team must now keep that maxim in mind as they confront the complexities and challenges of combating the Enemy Whose Name We Dare Not Speak.

Gary Osen contributed to this post.