Witnesses: David Aufhauser, Dept of the Treasury; John Pistole, FBI; E. Anthony Wayne, Dept. of State; Richard Clarke, former Nat. Counterterrorism Coordinator, Nat. Security Council; Louise Richardson, Radcliffe Inst. for Advanced Study, Harvard Univ.; Jean-Charles Brisard, JCB Consulting Internat.; Matthew Levitt, The Wash. Inst. for Near East Policy; Samuel Bodman, Wm. Fox., R. Richard Newcomb, & Stuart Levey, Dept. of the Treasury; Nancy Jardini, IRS; Lee Hamilton, & Slade Gorton, The Nat. Comm. on Terrorists Attacks Upon the U.S.; Mallory Factor, Mallory Factor, Inc.; Lee Wolosky, Boies, Scholler & Flexner, LLP; Michael Garcia, U.S. Immig. & Customs Enforce., Dept. of Homeland Security; & John Lewis, FBI. Charts & tables.

Groups committing acts of terrorism have adapted their means of financing to elude detection since the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Surveying the global community’s multi-year effort to cut off terrorist funding, this volume offers a much-needed analysis of a complex, widely discussed, yet poorly understood subject. While books on terrorism have touched upon the topic, this is the first comprehensive, balanced, and scholarly overview of terrorist financing, its methods, and efforts to counter it. Bringing together leading analysts of terrorism, international relations, global finance, law, and criminology, Countering the Financing of Terrorism provides a critical assessment of the international effort to restrict terrorist financing. It evaluates the costs and benefits and offers recommendations for more effective policies for the future.

In the past eight years, there has been a massive increase in government spending on counterterrorism intervention development and implementation. Given this increase, there are two evidence-based policy questions that are important to address: Is there evidence that any of these programs are effective – in other words, can they be shown to be linked to reducing terrorism, terrorist recruiting, or to improving the response and management of terrorist events? Do these interventions have secondary or collateral effects that may be costly, harmful, illegal, beneficial, or otherwise? As Lum and Kennedy discovered in an evaluation research on counterterrorism interventions, only a minuscule number of empirical studies of terrorism exist and there is an almost complete absence of evaluation research on counter-terrorism strategies. This is startling given the enormous increases in the development and use of counter-terrorism programs, as well as spending on counter-terrorism activity. Even more disconcerting was the nature of the evaluations we did find; some programs were shown to either have no discernible effect on terrorism or lead to increases in terrorism. The emphasis of the need for empirical research in evaluating interventions and informing policy cannot be overstated, and is the primary goal of Evidence-Based Counterterrorism Policy.