Jim Kouri
Public Safety Examiner
7/26/2011
Steps to curb transnational organized crime, as addressed in a White House initiative announced yesterday, are important to severing funding to terrorists, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Monday.
Transnational crime was one of several questions Navy Admiral Mike Mullen answered as part of a news briefing with the Foreign Press Center in Washington, DC, according to Lisa Daniel of the American Forces Press Service.
The foreign journalists’ questions touched on U.S. military relationships around the world, NATO actions in Libya and missile defense, Daniel reported.
Asked by a Moroccan journalist about transnational crime in Africa, Mullen said, “If I was going to pick one area in Africa, it’s been the flow of drugs, literally across the Atlantic [Ocean] that lands in North Africa and flows into Europe. The envelope, if you will, around it is transnational crime, and it’s something I’ve been concerned about for years.”
Such organized crime, Mullen added, “is not just about drugs, … it’s immigration, it’s people, it’s weapons.”
Transnational organized crime has been a multi-trillion-dollar per year business “that ties in very nicely with the support of terrorists,” he said. “I’m extremely concerned about that. Taking steps to try to address that trend is an incredibly important step forward.”
White House officials today sent to Congress a report, “Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime: Addressing Converging Threats to National Security.”
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