The benefits of JTTFs? They provide one-stop shopping for information regarding terrorist activities. They enable a shared intelligence base across many agencies. They create familiarity among investigators and managers before a crisis. And perhaps most importantly, they pool talents, skills, and knowledge from across the law enforcement and intelligence communities into a single team that responds together.
#4
Mexico is STILL a foreign country. If United States Intelligence is making contacts or recruiting sources in a foreign country certain, well established, long standing coordinating rules and directives apply. The unltimate coordinating and approving authority for these activities rests with the Director, CIA. The authority for these activities also holds responsibility and oversight for these contacts.
They can remain silent and deny all they want, but NO ONE in the US Gov't would ship that volume of small arms, clandestinely or otherwise, into a foreign country without the expressed knowledge and approval of the Country Team (US Ambassador, Chief of Station, Regional Security Officer, and LEGAT). It just ain't happening.
#9
If something makes no sense, you don't know the whole story. F&F makes no sense (and I don't buy the conspiracy to gin up gun control emotions, though at least it makes some sense.) We are missing some critical data, I think.
Secretary Clinton got some unpleasant news as she was working to round up support for US regional diplomacy in the United Arab Emirates this week: the UAE announced that it was closing down the offices of a prominent American quango linked to the Democratic Party. Though the incident lacked the drama of the arrests of quango employees in Egypt earlier this year, it was a slap in the face and a sign of just how tired many world governments are growing of this new cross between government and the private philanthropic sector.
A quango is a quasi NGO and in the United States many of them are focused on promoting democracy overseas. Although organizations like the National Democratic Institute and its counterpart the International Republican Institute are largely funded by the federal government, they operate under more or less independent boards of directors. They are modeled in some ways on the German political party foundations, again funded largely by taxpayers but operated under the authority of political parties rather than the government itself. The democracy quangos are set up to interfere with the politics of other countries. They dont necessarily take partisan positions in their elections, but they train democracy activists, provide them with support, and generally work to open up political space in target countries as a way of promoting the kind of political change Americans like to see.
The US and some other countries have enjoyed a free ride for a while. These organizations have been able to operate pretty freely in a large number of countries; we have in effect found a way of getting government-funded activities and organizations on foreign soil without having to observe all the tiresome, tedious formalities of diplomatic custom and usage.
When countries like the UAE start slamming the doors (and on the German foundations as well as the American ones) this is a sign that the free ride may be coming to an end. In the future, foreign countries may well demand that entities directly or indirectly funded by foreign governments operate only on the basis of a negotiated and mutually acceptable agreement. To many in the west, this will feel like a crackdown on free speech; to many in other countries it will feel like an anti-colonial assertion of national sovereignty.
Unfortunately, genuine NGOs are getting smeared with the quango label. It is easy for demagogic or anti-democratic politicians to attack authentic civil society movements and institutions by fuzzing the line between quangos and the rest. The west has colluded in fuzzing the difference as well, and that may have been a mistake. Quasi-NGOs have had a good run, but the combination of budgetary stringency at home and resistance abroad puts a question mark over their future.
#2
Bright Pebbles, I think your comment would be more true if it was phrased something like, "number of genuine NGOs after their tenth birthday".
I think a number start off with noble purpose and get quickly corrupted. I'm not sure how many new NGOs we have though, so this might be the way it was, and not the way it is.
#10
I was a believer in Amnesty until I saw one of their reports (back during the cold war) that had 80 something pages about the US being bad and five or six about the Soviets. Bias couldn't have been more obvious.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.