Strengthening our nation's front line of defense

By Dennis C. Blair (Director of National Intelligence)

Source: www.washingtonpost.com - Friday, December 18, 2009

Visita il sito o scarica il bando della edizione 2009/2010. I termini di presentazione delle domande scadono il 15 settembre 2009.

The conjecture of this paper is that the use of “mafia protection” is normally emplaced in areas with low institutional pressure, where the governmental framework is weak, perceived as exogenous, or for some other reason not able to have an effective control on the territory. The theory is that this “non orthodox / non State protection” has a common nature and can be driven by informal pressures groups in several and different geopolitical scenarios. So, in the Arab etymological sense, “mafia” operates a sort of reductio ad unum and unifying theory of many informal political vectors. Empirically, we will briefly consider the galaxy of different Italian “mafias”¹ ( Mafia, Stidda, Camorra, Ndrangheta and Sacra Corona Unita), some Middle-East non governmental political experiences ( Lebanese Hezbollah paramilitary level ) and Japanese Yakuza. The paper will try to find out similarities and parallels among them at two levels: Framework and praxis.

Keywords: Organized Crime, Social Protection, Terrorism, Affectivity, Mafia, Anthropology

What reaction can be envisaged to counter, or at least to confront, nuclear Iran? Let’s see. But, before all, we must ask ourselves why the Islamic Republic of Iran is looking for nuclear weapons, or even for a nuclear energy facility for domestic and civil purposes. 

First of all, Teheran is looking to stabilize and secure, by means of its nuclear structure, his status of a regional power in the whole area of the Persian Gulf. Iraq is now downtrodden in a long period of internal stabilization, and cannot have any possibility to think about his new foreign policy.

After this, reasonably long, time of internal stabilization, Baghdad shall emerge as the geopolitical pivot for the United States in that area, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, controlling even the border areas to the north, in the line of the Russian sphere of influence.

Our resumé, translated by the paper on “Costs and opportunities of the Islamic Finance in Italy” in the GNOSIS review, the official periodical from AISI (former SISDE) the Internal Secret and Security Service of the Ministry of Interior in Italy, has been printed with the permission of the Author. Full version of the article is available at www.sisde.it.

Marco Giaconi

Abstract

The Arab world has always considered investment opportunities in Italy. Such interest is confirmed by a number of relevant investments already made in the country. The perception of attractiveness by Arabic investors, however, has not been stable, because of Italy’s economy’s well known structural rigidity (i.e. excessive bureaucracy, low quality infrastructures, ineffective distribution network, different dimensions of corporate ownership, intrusive tax system, powerful trade unions, low productivity of factors involved). Strong limitations to Italian attractiveness are also related to the financial-credit support, due to the scarce international dimension of the Italian system. In the future, Italian attractiveness to Arab capital might worsen, following the increasing request by Arab investors for technical peculiarities complying with Islamic religion.

by Giovanni Nacci

Until recently, the leitmotif of the political debates about "security" seemed to be focused on the theory - bipartisan - that for a more effective contrast to crime and terrorism troubling the today society would have been necessary "to do more intelligence". Roughly speaking, this thesis seems to be really difficult to refute, but just because it is presented in a so general way, becomes a useless theorization. Hardly ever in fact, after the proclamation, the issue was seriously studied in depth with an organized method and no clear, precise and flexible proposals were put forward. Doing so, there's the danger that we give too much importance to images - not too much truthful - that the current perception of intelligence tends to evoke among people. 

 (this article was published by "Intelligence e Storia Top Secret " n° 8/2008)

by Marco Giaconi, Intuslegere President and co-founder

ESRIF must become the leading instrument for the implementation of european security for strategic infrastructure and for civilian purposes. We think, at www.intuslegere.eu, that ESRIF could develop new and effective technologies for Communication-Control and Information in the whole European space, mostly by focusing its energy on data storage, data mining, and new techniques of dissemination of these data for Police and Security services; while defining a new set of infrastructures for satellite control and internet securization.

We also think, at Intuslegere, that ESRIF could develop an air and maritime network for the security of commercial lines, while elaborating new mathematical models to integrate these data in a large European predictive scenario. And we also think that ESRIF could develop new interactive models to deal with civilian security that could be of some use for the political authorities both at EU level and at the national level.

And finally we hope that ESRIF shall be able to effectively integrate NATO, EUROCORPS, and the other politico-military institution covering the European space in a new network of civilian-military cooperation, while maintaining the basic ESRIF nature of a public-private partnership.