Product Description
"Napoleoni has accomplished an extraordinary task of research in tracking, finding and graphically describing the financiers and the institutions supporting global terrorism, including al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."-John K. Cooley, author of Unholy Wars
"A masterpiece . . . This book should be required reading for everyone in the White House, State Department and Pentagon."-Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and The Joker's Wild: Dubya's Trick Deck
In Terror Incorporated, Loretta Napoleoni maps out the arteries of an international economic system that feeds armed groups the world over. Chasing terror money, she takes the reader from CIA headquarters to the smuggling routes of the far East, from the back rooms of Wall Street to hawala exchanges in the Middle East.
Napoleoni describes the "New Economy of Terror," "a fast-growing international economic system with a turnover of about $1.5 trillion [that] is challenging Western hegemony." It is made up of illegal businesses such as arms and narcotics trading and oil and diamond smuggling, as well as charitable donations and legal profits. Napoleoni reveals the interdependency between economies run by armed groups and Western economies. "As in the Crusades, religion is simply a recruitment tool; the real driving force is economics."
A pioneering examination of the system and methods by which international terrorism is financed, Terror Incorporated is "penetrating, lucid and essential" (Harry Porter, author of Empire State).
Loretta Napoleoni, a former Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and Rotary scholar at the London School of Economics, is an expert on international terrorism who has worked as an economist and foreign correspondent for Italy's financial papers. She has translated and edited books on terrorism and was among the few people to interview the Red Brigades in Italy after three decades of silence.