According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, 19 of the 44 groups designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the United States Government participate in the illegal drug trade.

Source:  David T. Johnson, “The Escalating Ties Between Middle Eastern Terrorist Groups and Criminal Activity,” United States Department of State, Remarks at the Washington Institute for Peace, January 19, 2010.

According to security experts, an Algerian terror group affiliated with Al Qaeda called the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magahreb recieves up to 80 percent of their funding from kidnap and ransom activities.

Source:  John Thorne, “Kidnapping westerners is a lucrative business in the Sahel,” The National, December 20, 2009.

A new report by the International Crisis Group states that the Afghan Police Department must address systematic corruption within its ranks in order to achieve a stable security environment.

From Reuters (via the Washington Post):

Systemic corruption among the Afghan police force, too used to fighting the Taliban instead of fighting crime, is fuelling a perception of lawlessness and public discontent, a think-tank said Thursday.

In many isolated outposts, the police are the only face of the Afghan government and are vulnerable to insurgent attacks. But they are also renowned for milking the populace for bribes.

Endemic corruption in the interior ministry, which runs the police, means promotions are often bought, not earned on merit.

“Too much emphasis has continued to be placed on using the police to fight the insurgency rather than crime. Corruption and political appointments are derailing attempts to professionalize the force,” the International Crisis Group (ICG) said.

The FBI announced that most of the 108,000 tips its received from its terrorism tip line is baseless.

From Reuters:

The FBI tracked about 108,000 potential terrorism threats or suspicious incidents from mid-2004 to November 2007, but most were found groundless, a Justice Department review found on Friday.

The department’s office of inspector general gave the figure in an audit of the FBI’s terrorism case-tracking system, called Guardian, launched in 2002 after the September 11 attacks.

“The FBI determined that the overwhelming majority of the threat information documented in Guardian had no nexus to terrorism. However, as a result of information reported in Guardian the FBI initiated over 600 criminal and terrorism-related investigations from October 2006 to December 2007,” the inspector general’s report said.

The report did not discuss the result of the investigations.

FBI policy requires that each threat or suspicious incident reported by the public or other government agencies and law enforcement officers be reviewed to determine whether there is a link to terrorism.

The current economic crisis hitting the global economy probably won’t affect the operations of al-Qaida, according to security analysts.

From the AP (via Yahoo News):

Al-Qaida, which gets its money from the drug trade in Afghanistan and sympathizers in the oil-rich Gulf states, is likely to escape the effects of the global financial crisis.

One reason is that al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorists have been forced to avoid using banks, relying instead on less-efficient ways to move their cash around the world, analysts said.

Those methods include hand-carrying money and using informal transfer networks called hawalas.

While escaping official scrutiny, those networks also are slower and less efficient — and thus could hamper efforts to finance attacks.

“It would be inconceivable that large amounts of (terror-linked) money would transit through the formal financial system, because of all the controls,” said Ibrahim Warde, an expert on terrorist financing at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

More and more US Mayors and Police Chiefs are looking for help from the federal government in fighting crime, not terrorism prevention. 

From USA Today:

The government doles out too much anti-terrorism money to towns and cities for emergency equipment that rarely gets used while cash-strapped police struggle with crime, according to a growing number of mayors, police chiefs and security experts.

Seven years after 9/11, some are asking the government to re-examine spending hundreds of millions of dollars on bomb robots, chem-bio suits and equipment that often gathers dust in warehouses.

“The simple truth is that average Americans are much more likely to find themselves victims of crime than of terrorist attack,” the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) says in a new report that calls on the next president to shift money back to crime fighting.

Since 2003, when the Homeland Security Department was created, the government has given states and cities $22.7 billion for emergency preparedness. How that money is doled out has been controversial from the start. Big cities complained that too much was sent to remote towns; police complained that they couldn’t use it for overtime.

NATO announced that it will begin targeting drug trafficking in Afghanistan to limit the amount of revenue that the Taliban receives from the drug trade. 

From the NY Times:

 NATO forces in Afghanistan will step up attacks on drug lords and narcotics traffickers who are supporting an insurgency that has rebounded in the past year and is responsible for rising violence, the top American commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday.

The comments by the commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, made clear that international troops in Afghanistan were not going to eradicate opium poppy crops. Afghanistan is the world’s top supplier of opium poppies, which are processed into heroin.

But by drawing a clear link between the narcotics trade and its role in the insurgency, General McKiernan was outlining what could be an important and expanding role for American and NATO troops as they seek to eliminate a source of money and weapons for the insurgency.

India is facing a possible threat of home grown terrorists after a recent bombing.

From the CS Monitor:

The portrait of an Indian terrorist has long been a caricature: poor Indian Muslims indoctrinated in radical seminaries and funded by Pakistan, India’s neighbor and longtime enemy. But two of the suspects arrested Wednesday were software engineers, one ran a hotel.

It suggests that Indian terrorism is not motivated by dire poverty alone, but also by the perception of systemic prejudice against Muslims here. This is a bitterly controversial idea in the Hindu-majority nation sensitive to claims of intolerance, but the arrests are creating a small window for India to consider it more deeply.

“The role of Pakistan-based terrorist groups cannot be minimized, but the involvement of local elements in recent blasts adds a new dimension to the terrorist threat,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said this month after the New Delhi bombings.

North Korea has told the United States that it no longer wishes to be removed from its terrorism list.

From the New York Times:

North Korea said Friday that it no longer wished to be removed from the United States’ terrorism blacklist, signaling that it is hardening its stance amid reports that its leader, Kim Jong-il, may be seriously ill.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry also confirmed what the United States and South Korea have said already: it has begun to reassemble a nuclear complex that can produce weapons-grade plutonium.

“We neither wish nor expect to be delisted as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,’ ” the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA, quoted a ministry spokesman as saying. “We can go our own way.”

Bravado is North Korea’s common negotiating tactic. Still, the statement bodes ill for Washington’s efforts to keep the nuclear complex, Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, disabled.

The Taliban in Afghanistan is said to be using Internet phone company Skype to avoid detection. 

From The Daily Mail:

Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using the latest ‘internet phones’ to evade detection by MI6, security sources said last night.

Skype, a popular piece of consumer software that allows free calls to be made over the web, has been adopted by insurgents to communicate with cells strung out across the country.

Unlike traditional mobile calls, which can be monitored by RAF Nimrod spy planes, Skype calls – the commercial application of a technology called Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – are heavily encrypted.