Posted on 03/28/2010 10:25:01 PM PDT by Cindy
SNIPPET: "BRUSSELS, March 24 (Reuters) -
SNIPPET: "There is a Venn diagram that you could draw with overlap between al Qaeda and organised crime," said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and a former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence at the U.S. Treasury.
"But in the real world, as opposed to the Jack Bauer world, you don't have the Sicilian mafia and Osama bin Laden's guys meeting at the hip," he told Reuters in an interview, referring to the fictional counter-terrorism agent in the TV series 24.
Levitt, a former terrorism analyst with the FBI and a senior adviser to the U.S. government on terrorism financing, said both al Qaeda and crime groups were likely to share methods and techniques, but it didn't constitute tight collaboration.
"You have people using the same facilitation, logistical, human-smuggling and cash-courier networks to do things," he said on Tuesday.
"But by and large, they also tend to use their own networks. There is overlap but it's a lot less than people make it out to be on the organised-crime level.""
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
Hat Tip: INTERNET HAGANAH
http://osint.internet-haganah.com/archives/001709.html
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