The US is sending bulletins to police and intelligence services around the world, trying to create a global network that could help round up 3,000 people in about 30 countries who are suspected of working with Osama bin Laden.
In theory that network already exists, in the form of Interpol, the police agency representing 178 nations. But a lack of money and of trust among law enforcement and intelligence agencies has kept Interpol from becoming what it was designed to be, officials say.
Interpol's General Assembly is set to convene today in Budapest. The terror attacks on the US are rewriting Interpol's agenda and, perhaps, its future. The organization's leaders will seek the full cooperation of member forces and the FBI to bring suspects in the case to justice.
"At what point do we begin to share information internationally about people we suspect of being engaged in planning to engage in terrorist activity?" Interpol's new secretary-general, Ronald K. Noble, said. Noble, formerly Treasury Department undersecretary and a Justice Department official, is the first American to head the group.
Interpol's annual budget is about US$25 million -- not even a tenth of bin Laden's reputed inheritance. More important, walls of secrecy and suspicion among national police and intelligence services mean that an alarm raised in Pakistan, for example, or Malaysia may not reach the US.
Senior FBI officials say they have been loath to share sensitive information with the organization, whose members include nations like Iran, usually hostile to the US, or whose police and intelligence services are considered unreliable.
Noble said there was a looming question for Interpol: "Is the world ready for an international criminal database accessible by the public sector and the private sector?"
Furthermore, he asked, "Is the world prepared to have an international database where people not convicted of crimes but under suspicion are listed? If there's a Delta flight going from Paris to New York, does the manifest get run through the database? The analysiswill have to begin there.
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