A CIA report: The world situation to be increasingly determined by “terrorists, criminal groups, and transnational corporations

According to the CIA report “The Global Trends to 2015,” international relations are set to be increasingly determined by “large and strong organizations,” not by national governments. The trend is reportedly spurred by blurring of national borders and development of the Internet. “The governments will have to soften their grips of information flows, technologies, diseases, migration, arms, and financial transactions,” the US intelligence asserts. “Terrorists and criminals will enter temporary collaboration contracts in order to grab unstable and economically vulnerable countries. These bodies will also collaborate with guerrilla movements to gain control of the countries’ vast territories. Criminal and terrorist organizations’ revenues will mostly be coming from drug, arms, and humans trafficking, military technology thefts, illegal waste transport, extortion and forgery,” the report says. Terrorist acts will take on more sophisticated forms and will target the maximal number of civilians. Those aims may well be achieved using biological and chemical weapons, and also “nuclear handbags.” Iran is expected to conduct cruise missile tests by 2004, while Iraq will be able to threaten America with missiles carrying chemical, biological, and nuclear warheads by 2015. It is no surprise that transnationals are mentioned here on a par with criminal gangs. At the same time, the CIA tends to thinks that, to counter the threat, US should stay a kind of the only gangster at the world stage, our correspondent Irina Malenko argues.