According to Edouard Planche, an expert in the illicit trafficking of cultural property for Unesco, the main culprits are traditional organised crime groups, linked to drugs and weapons networks, although smaller players are now becoming involved in a desperate bid to make money.
The McKevitts and their three children have been living for years in Blackrock, a seaside village three miles outside of the border town of Dundalk, which once harbored so many I.R.A. safe houses, underground weapons networks and gunmen that the police called it El Paso.
Within an overall intelligence budget estimated at $40 billion a year, these critics argue that the more urgent need for the United States is to add resources for human spying efforts, seen as more useful than satellites in collecting information about terrorist groups and illicit weapons networks that have become the government's top intelligence targets.
Now, he suggests, such countries could readily spawn characters like Dr. Khan, who "did not create his nuclear-weapons network so much as discover it as a condition of the modern world".
Police believe the raids last Friday have closed down an ice and weapons trafficking network across the Gold Coast.
He cited the dismantling of a nuclear weapons proliferation network led by the Pakistani scientist A. Q . Khan and the capture of Qaeda leaders including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as examples of the intelligence agencies' recent successes, and he portrayed the failures involving Iraq as reflecting isolated rather than endemic problems.
Using the scenario of a US defence of Taiwan as an example, the report said that China could hit US systems with "electronic countermeasures weapons and network attack and exploitation tools".
They are reported to be using armored vehicles, including tanks, and heavy weapons," the Network reported.
Both illustrated the overwhelming conventional superiority of the United States and the efficiency of its revolution in military affairs (RMA) based on smart weapons and network centric warfare.
The Chinese military is deploying vast numbers of missiles (including carrier killers), hard-to-find submarines, long-range sensors to track and target U.S. forces, anti-satellite weapons, digital networks to coordinate attacks and cyberwar weapons to crash U.S. networks.
