The Adventures of Chester: Could Al Qaeda team with the mob?

There is a scene near the end of the film The Rocketeer in which a deal of some kind goes south and all of a sudden three parties find themselves in a Mexican standoff: cops, the mob, and a bunch of Nazi sympathizers intent of helping Hitler invade America. When the shooting starts, the mob quickly starts fighting the Nazis. At one point a cop and a mobster are crouching next to each other, firing away with submachine guns, when they pause, look at each other, shrug, and then keep firing.

But today, this sentiment -- "hey, mobsters are awful, but at least they love America," -- must be realized as so much wishful thinking. An AP story released over the weekend [via Instapundit] reported that the FBI is keeping close tabs on the possibility of collusion between organized crime and terror-related groups.

Though there is no direct evidence yet of organized crime collaborating with terrorists, the first hints of a connection surfaced in a recent undercover FBI operation. Agents stopped a man with alleged mob ties from selling missiles to an informant posing as a terrorist middleman.

[ . . . ]

"We are continuing to look for a nexus," said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI's top counterterrorism official. "We are looking at this very aggressively."

The new strategy involves an analysis of nationwide criminal investigations, particularly white collar crime, side by side with intelligence and terrorist activity.

"We have developed an ability to look harder and broader in a greatly enhanced way to see if there is any crossover," Billy said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Organized crime syndicates could facilitate money transfers or laundering, human smuggling, identification fraud or explosives and weapons acquisitions, officials said.

[ . . . ]

"Although terrorism and organized crime are different phenomena, the important fact is that terrorist and criminal networks overlap and cooperate in some enterprises," the study said. "The phenomenon of the synergy of terrorism and organized crime is growing because similar conditions give rise to both and because terrorists and organized criminals use similar approaches to promote their operations."

This episode highlights several issues that are extremely germane to the war, but which usually become overlooked in public discourse about it:

First, Al Qaeda and other groups are fluid whereas our own bureaucracies designed to catch, kill, or stop them are rigid by comparison. Al Qaeda actively works to circumvent our policies, bureaucracies, and self-created seams. While the military, FBI, CIA, etc, frequently succeed in pushing authority down the chain of command, increasing our flexibility and adaptability, we are simply not as flexible as our enemies.

Second, this story highlights the difficulty of clearly naming and defining the problems that we face. If a mobster sells missiles to a terrorist, is it a crime, or an act of war? Is Iraq convulsed in an insurgency, a civil war, sectarian violence, or none of those? Or all three? Much debate seems to focus on pinning this down semantically or rhetorically, because it is believed that if we can just define the problem, the solution will become clear, whether it's "staying the course" or "redeploying" to use the soundbite terms of the principal schools of thought. But no such guarantee -- that we'll know what to do with existing tools if we just define the problem correctly -- is possible. The same is true in this instance. Is mob-terror cooperation a foreign policy problem or a law enforcement issue?

Finally, as has actually been in the public debate a good bit, our legal system is in need of an upgrade of some kind to deal with issues like this -- though it is unclear just what the finished product will look like. In a summer article for PajamasMedia's PoliticsCentral, I argued that warfare is being privatized in some key ways, and that the Hamdan decision was a landmark case in this respect. The article focused on "friendly" and "enemy" private actors, asking these questions:

At the same time there doesn’t seem to have been a conscious decision at any level of government to allow so many functions of warfare to be privatized. Instead, private organizations have become active participants in the war due to market forces, government need, and the explosion of information technology. Indeed many of the clients of these private firms are other private firms themselves, though governments are often the ultimate paymasters.

How does the Hamdan decision affect the perception of these firms, and their legal standing in international law?

Suppose a self-organized group of citizens took it upon themselves to interdict Al Qaeda communications of some kind, and managed to stop an attack (See here)?

If the citizens’ actions included breaking US laws and they were caught, could they then seek a military commission rather than a criminal trial, claiming to be combatants in a larger conflict? Hamden might allow this.

What if a private group of citizens in Europe created an underground railroad to spirit away to the US Europeans threatened by the growth of militant Islam, and in the process broke several European laws? (See here.)

Are they combatants, criminals, or heroes? How will the government decide?

Finally, if Al Qaeda members can be subject to the Geneva Convention, why not members of other non-state groups that threaten the US, and whose members languish in the US court-system? What of members of the violent Central American gang MS13? If the US figures out a way to try Al Qaeda members under military commissions, why not declare the same rules to apply to international organizations that straddle the line between crime and terrorism?

Such scenarios seem far-fetched, but they may be upon us sooner than we might suspect.

If one of the Five Families considers assisting a terror plot, is regular jail time after a regular trial enough of a deterrent to have prevent such activity? Is it enough punishment? Can they be tried under the military tribunals that the House and Senate approved last week?

In their extremely prescient 2002 book Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, Jon Arquilla and David Ronfeldt defined and elaborated on the concept of netwar, which is exactly what the AP article seems to describe:

To be precise, the term netwar refers to an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age.

The AP describes two different sets of organizations, which are variously networked internally, attempting to cooperate based on monetary interest, rather than ideological similarity. Look for more and more of this in the future. Arquilla and Ronfeldt warned, "Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages."

We had best get to work.

Posted by Chester on October 2, 2006 11:55 AM to The Adventures of Chester