Taxing Terrorism
Jeffrey Breinholt, Deputy Chief of the Justice Department's Counterterrorism Section, discusses a largely overlooked aspect of U.S. federal criminal law enforcement--criminal tax law--and its implications for prosecuting terrorists and their supporters.
Douglas Farah
Senior Fellow, Financial Investigations and Transparency
Email this article
Print this article
Doug Farah is IASC’s Senior Fellow, Financial Investigations and Transparency. Farah specializes in research and writing on terror finance, armed groups and stateless regions. A veteran investigator with more than 20 years experience, Farah is a consultant on terror finance to various European and U.S. government departments and agencies as well as the United Nations Criminal Investigative Unit, Bosnia. He also applies his expertise on subjects ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to drug trafficking and Russian organized crime with leading NGO’s including the NEFA Foundation, the Coalition for International Justice, the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, and Global Witness. He has appeared as an expert witness before the U.S. Congressional Bipartisan Terror Finance Working Group, crimes against humanity trials in The Hague and in the civil trial of survivors of the USS Cole v. Government of Sudan.
In 1980 Farah enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he began working for United Press International. In 1985, after graduating with honors (B.A. in Latin American Studies and an B.S. in Journalism), he was named UPI bureau chief in El Salvador, covering the civil war there. In 1987 he left UPI to freelance for The Washington Post, the Boston Globe and US News & World Report. In 1988 he won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence for a Washington Post series on right-wing death squads in El Salvador.
In 1992, Farah joined the Washington Post as a staff correspondent and was promoted to bureau chief for Central American and the Caribbean where, until 1997, he covered the drug wars in Colombia, Haiti and Cuba, among other issues. From 1997 to 2000, Farah took on broader responsibilities at the Post as an international investigative reporter covering drug trafficking and organized crime, including the emergence of Russian organized crime groups in the western Hemisphere as well as the growth of Mexican drug cartels within the United States. In 2000, Farah again resumed the role of Post bureau chief, this time for West Africa, and was based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. After breaking the story of al Qaeda’s ties to "blood diamonds" and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, death threats compelled Farah to leave Africa in 2003. He remained with the Washington Post until early 2004 investigating radical Islamic groups and terror finance.
Farah is the author of Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror (2004) and the forthcoming (2007) Merchant of Death: Viktor Bout and the New World Order. In addition to the aforementioned newspapers, Farah’s work has also been published by The Financial Times, The New Republic, The Journal of International Security Affairs, the Royal United Services Institute and the Air Force Institute for National Security Studies, among others.
| Top Publications | |
|---|---|
 | |
 |
Nigeria and the Muslim Brotherhood |
| |
| |
Salafists, China and West Africa's Growing Anarchy |
| |
