| 1 | 1 | | Observers at the current Palermo mafia 'maxi-trial', in which 474 men are accused |
| 2 | | of murder, intimidation, drug trafficking and extortion have all been making the same |
| 3 | | point: that it is excellent that such a trial is taking place at all, but that the police and legal |
| 4 | | work that have gone into it are only a beginning. Now must come political agreement that |
| 5 | | it is time to break the mafia's power, and financial measures to dry up their sources of |
| 6 | | income. |
| 2 | 7 | | The mafia are, of course, not terrorists but gangsters. But the same point emerges |
| 8 | | from James Adams' extremely sane and lucid book, The Financing of Terror. Adams' |
| 9 | | theory is that it was still perfectly possible, ten years ago, to consider terrorists as a small |
| 10 | | body of men, manipulated by masterminds, but that it is absolutely impossible to think |
| 11 | | that way any longer. Over the last decade, he stresses, basing his case on a great deal of |
| 12 | | convincing and dispassionate research, terrorist groups have become autonomous, |
| 13 | | wealthy, and increasingly sophisticated, their leaders experts no longer in dynamite and |
| 14 | | kidnapping but in high finance and modern technology; while they have been learning by |
| 15 | | their mistakes, counter terrorist forces have not. |
| 3 | 16 | | The Financing of Terror goes a long way towards destroying the old chestnuts of |
| 17 | | terrorist rhetoric. Though willing to accept that the Soviet Union may indeed exploit |
| 18 | | terrorist groups as a means of destabilizing the West, Adams builds up a picture of an |
| 19 | | enormous, chaotic, fragmented and growing number of terrorist organizations, active |
| 20 | | throughout the world, the links between them haphazard rather than coolly planned or |
| 21 | | directed from a single source. Self-sufficiency seems to have become the order of the day |
| 22 | | among terrorists, while state sponsorship of terrorist groups plays an extremely small part |
| 23 | | in terrorist incidents. |
| 4 | 24 | | The solution, argues Adams, is not for democracies to resort to strong military |
| 25 | | measures, like Reagan's bombing of Libya which, by responding to terror with terror, can |
| 26 | | only be counter-productive, and in the process lead to the gradual destruction of frail |
| 27 | | civil liberties, but to rethink their counter terrorist strategies and improve their |
| 28 | | intelligence gathering and contacts. |
| 5 | 29 | | Terrorism, more than many contemporary subjects, has acted as a magnet for |
| 30 | | extreme positions. The more partisan books usually give warning of their opinions with |
| 31 | | bold titles and loud jackets. Desmond McForan has called his book The World Held |
| 32 | | Hostage and has for a cover a picture of a sickle, looking like an implement in a butcher's |
| 33 | | shop, poised menacingly over an innocent green and blue globe. To further help the |
| 34 | | slower readers, the publishers have picked out the more passionately held convictions in |
| 35 | | bold type throughout the text. McForan is a conspiracy theorist of the school that came to |
| 36 | | be fashionable after Claire Sterling's book The Terror Network - which argues that the |
| 37 | | KGB were the puppeteers of modern terrorism - won favour with President Reagan in |
| 38 | | the early Eighties. Anarchists, he announces in a rambling confusion of inference and |
| 39 | | insinuation, have joined forces to undermine the Western world; their expertise comes |
| 40 | | from the Soviet Union, Libya and Cuba, all training grounds for ' ruthless terrorists of all |
| 41 | | nationalities', and their money from the oil of the Arab states. Their goal? The third world |
| 42 | | war. McForan describes himself as a freelance consultant for a 'stateside university and |
| 43 | | many multinational companies'. One can only hope that neither his business seminars |
| 44 | | nor his students will be swayed by this simplistic rubbish. |
| | | |
| | | from: The Spectator, September 13, 1986 |
