Back when it was announced that President Bush was sending reinforcements to Iraq, I wrote that we still had no answer to how we would halt terrorism financing. The Counterterrorism Blog points out that three members of the House Financial Services Committee have introduced a bill to improve coordination between the major players in counterterrorism financing, specifically Treasury and State. Here's a section from the bill (PDF alert) explaining its purpose:
The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury shall negotiate and enter into a Memorandum of Agreement (hereafter in this section referred to as the ‘‘Agreement’’) specifying the role of each of the Secretary’s respective Department in the delivery of counterterrorism financing training and technical assistance provided to countries abroad (without regard to whether any country is designated as a priority country or a nonpriority country by the Terrorist Financing Working Group). [From Sec. 3 (a), p. 6]
The bill was inspired by an October 2005 GAO report entitled "Terrorist Financing: Better Strategic Planning Needed to Coordinate U.S. Efforts to Deliver Counter-Terrorism Financing and Technical Assistance Abroad" (PDF alert). The report concluded that agencies relevant to terrorist financing have failed to communicate well together on a very essential issue, so the Congress is working to order the Secretaries of State and Treasury to coordinate. In today's world inter-agency communication is essential, so this seems like a good development to me.
Recent Comments