 |
SwiftVets.com
Service to Country
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
kmudd
Master Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 825
|
 Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 3:39 am Post subject: Kerry and BCCI |
 |
|
The real scandal. (Bank of Credit and Commerce International S.A.)
National Review; 10/7/1991; England, Robert Stowe
Last edited by kmudd on Wed Sep 22, 2004 6:22 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Navy_Navy_Navy
Admin
Joined: 07 May 2004
Posts: 5777
|
| Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 3:57 am Post subject: |
|
|
Infreakin'credible. 
| Quote: | | Senator Kerry is an extremely luckly man. If he were a Republican, all this might amount to a scandal. |
MIGHT? He'd have been in jail, by now. 
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
kmudd
Master Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 825
|
| Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 4:05 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Navy_Navy_Navy wrote: | Infreakin'credible.
| Quote: | | Senator Kerry is an extremely luckly man. If he were a Republican, all this might amount to a scandal. |
MIGHT? He'd have been in jail, by now. |
And BCCI was involved with Bin Laden.
Collapse of BCCI shorts bin Laden.
United Press International; 3/1/2001
WASHINGTON, Mar 01, 2001
The 1991 collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International placed a great financial strain on Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden's terrorist network by depriving it of its main source of funding, U.S. government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed Thursday.
Huge construction projects to build up Sudan's terrorist and military infrastructure were also occurring about the same time, also helped to drain away bin Laden's financial resources, the sources said.
L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a prosecution witness in the trial of four men accused in the August, 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 1993 slaughter of 18 U.S. Army Rangers during a firefight in Somalia, testified last Thursday that bin Laden had told members of his group, "There is no money."
Kherchtou joined the group in 1991, but quit four years later because of the organization's money troubles, he said. He did not elaborate on the exact nature of those woes.
However, according to the U.S. officials, when the Bank of England closed BCCI in July of 1991, it not only triggered a worldwide financial scandal, but disrupted bin Laden terrorist operations that were being financed through the bank.
It was an irony of history that, during the 1980s, BCCI had been the primary conduit of CIA financial aid to the Afghan mujadhideen fighting the Soviets, they said.
But the bank was also used "by a variety of shady, if not criminal characters," in the words of one U.S. counter-terrorist official. These included arms dealers, various terrorists, Muslim intelligence services, and groups attempting to buy weapons of mass destruction. Capital cities such as Riyadh and Islamabad used the bank to finance and further their own covert activities, he said.
BCCI also laundered money from criminal enterprises of all kinds, ranging from funds embezzled by Third World heads of state to proceeds from organized crime, he said.
In bin Laden's case, the bank was the main financial engine powering the spread of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, he said, especially in Sudan where a network of terrorist training camps was paid for out of the national budget.
The bank, founded by rich Pakistanis and wealthy residents of the Persian Gulf states, did not keep careful records and when an audit was ordered, the bank was closed down in order to avoid spreading the financial failure among other user
banks.
The result was that the terrorists "at a stroke" lost all their money," said another U.S. official.
At the time of the collapse, bin Laden was living in Khartoum and had been approached by Hassan al-Turabi, Sudan's militant Islamic spiritual leader, who asked bin Laden to help set up a network to support Turabi's Popular International Organization and the terrorist Armed Resistance Movement.
By the time Gen. Omar Bashir came to power in a 1989 coup, Sudan was already a center for Islamic terrorist activity and had developed ties to such banks as the Jordan Islamic Bank, the Dubai Islamic Bank, Taqwa Bank of Algeria and the Faysal Islamic Bank in Khartoum, where bin Laden himself soon came to have an account.
Iran and Sudan had begun cooperating closely on joint terrorist activity, and Iran had pledged to transfer funds to Turabi. Turabi asked bin Laden to set up a new network that could launder and transfer money for a variety of Sudan and Iran-backed radical Islamic groups in Western Europe and North America.
Bin Laden owned a series of companies in Khartoum: the White Nile Tannery, Taba Investment, an export company, Qudaret transport, a fleet of fishing boats, al-Hijrah, a construction and development company among others.
He had also set up a series of accounts at banks like the al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum that were soon being used to move money for Islamic movements. Among his activities were the smuggling of cash from anti-West Gulf States to the radical Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) movement in Algeria and hiding $30 million that had been transferred to Sudan by Iran, according to U.S. officials.
Bin Laden began to launder proceeds from the drug trade as well at about this time to help take up the financial slack. He cooperated with Afghan leader Gulbaddin Hekmatiyar, who was diverting profits from the Afghan drug trade to help
finance Islamic terrorist movements, the sources said.
Soon, the centers for bin Laden's financing spread from Sudan to banks in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, He worked closely with Turabi and a group of Turabi's wealthy supporters to capitalize the Shamal North Islamic Bank in
Khartoum. In return, bin Laden received 1 million acres of land in Kordofan and western Sudan.
Bin Laden also worked with Ayman al-Zawahiri to set up a network of banks in Europe under the name of the Brotherhood Group, whose core consisted of 150 rich Arabs from the Persian Gulf states.
According to one U.S. official, the Brotherhood Group also had a presence in the United States consisting of 65 members who had major companies. These were used as fronts and communications centers, and to move and launder money, he said.
In 1991, bin Laden was also asked by Turabi to understake a wholesale reconstruction of Sudan's infrastructure to support the new influx of Islamic terrorists. Using his construction, labor and financial assets, bin Laden began to build airports, military facilities, roads, and bridges.
A major project was a road linking Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Bin Laden then built a modern airport near Port Sudan to accomodate military and reconnaissance aircraft. Some of the pressure for the build-up came from Iran, U.S. government officials said.
Other major projects included the Ruysaris Dam, the largest in Sudan, and the lengthening of the 310-mile al-Tahaddi military artery that links Khartoum with Juba to the far south, and Shendi and Atbarah to the north. According to one US terrorism analyst, this road would prove to be key to the government's ability to fight rebels in the south of the country.
In May of 1993, bin Laden brought a group of as many as 300 well-trained followers from Pakistan to help administer the project, which continued into 1995, according to U.S. officials who estimated the cost of the undertakings to be in the billions of dollars.
In 1994, bin Laden built three major terrorist training centers in northern Sudan, with this number later expanded to a total of 23, they said.
But by 1993 Egyptian intelligence had sniffed out some of bin Laden's illegal financial networks and had begun to make arrests, track checks and harass distribution channels. They launched a major raid in 1995 that captured a large amount of data on the Brotherhood Group, according to a congressional aide.
Bin Laden set up another financial network in the Balkans in 1993, hiding within the activities of "humanitarian charities" that provided comprehensive social and welfare services. Not only did these charities raise money, they were also effective in building popular support for militant Islam, U.S. officials said.
The bin Laden-Zawhiri groups, however, later were penetrated by U.S., Croatian and other intelligence services, plus he never received any real compensation from the government of Sudan, a U.S. official said.
By the time bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, he had lost up to $150 million, the source said, and another U.S. counter terrorism official speculated that it was then that bin Laden turned to drug money as a way to refurbish his finances.
By RICHARD SALE, Terrorism Correspondent
Copyright 2001 by United Press International. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
azpatriot
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 20 Aug 2004
Posts: 593
Location: Arizona
|
| Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 4:30 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Navy_Navy_Navy wrote: | Infreakin'credible.
| Quote: | | Senator Kerry is an extremely luckly man. If he were a Republican, all this might amount to a scandal. |
MIGHT? He'd have been in jail, by now. |
Are you kidding one of those anti-gun liberals would have shot him already 
_________________
Proud to be an American! and member of the PAJAMAHADEEN 
FedEx Kinko's: When it absolutely, positively has to be forged overnight  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
kmudd
Master Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 825
|
| Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 3:07 pm Post subject: |
|
|
BCCI and Senator Kerry revisited. (National Review update of Oct 7 1991 investigative article on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal and John Kerry's handling of the congressional investigation into the money laundering scheme) (Column)
National Review; 3/30/1992; O'Sullivan, John
BCCI AND SENATOR KERRY REVISITED
IN OUR October 7, 1991, issue, NATIONAL REVIEW published an article by Robert Stowe England, entitled "The Real Scandal," which harshly criticized certain aspects of the investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) by Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations. Senator Kerry telephoned to protest our article, and he followed up with a 14-page single-spaced letter which listed 28 separate errors of fact or analysis. Mr. England, DaVid Kendall NATIONAL REVIEW'S lawyer), and I met with the senator and his staff for nearly two hours, and we promised to investigate his criticisms.
Having conducted that investigation, we are now in a dilemma. In law, we could stand behind every comma and preposition of our original article. Mr. England, a distinguished journalist, our frequent contributor, and a man unknown to libel suits, had no animus against Senator Kerry, investigated carefully, uncovered knowledgeable sources, and firmly believed, as we did, that the article was entirely accurate as written. He had sought information from the senator's office and had been greeted with hostile suspicion. In the quaint legal formulation, we published without 'actual malice," because we neither knew of any untruths nor doubted what we printed. We would be fully entitled in law to reject the senator's protest entirely. But having carefully analyzed the senator's letter, rechecked our sources, and reviewed the new information and documents that the senator and his staff provided us, we have arrived at a conclusion we didn't anticipate. We still think our article contained valid and serious criticisms, and we reiterate some of them later in this note. In all honesty, however, we think we owe the senator an apology for some errors that would have been flagged in football as "unnecessary roughness."
Let me classify the various charges. Some of the senator's points strike us as tendentious and/or silly, and we think he can't really urge them with a straight face. For example, he attacks us for writing that Clark Clifford convinced Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell to extend a subpoena deadline (when it was a Foreign Relations Committee aide reporting to Pell who actually granted the extension); that investigator Jack Blum left the Kerry subcommittee to go on to help Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau break the BCCI case (Blum did, and Morgenthau did); that the subcommittee spent a lot of time investigating the far-Left theories of the Christic Institute (it did); and that the intrinsic problem of conspiracy theories is that the overwhelming majority of them aren't true (they aren't).
Several other points raised by the senator seem to us fairly debatable as matters of opinion or evaluation, We remain unrepentantly convinced that the senator often treated the subcommittee's investigation as a political football; that a key breakthrough on BCCI (in the person of Jose Blandon) was supplied to the subcommittee courtesy of the Left's least favorite senator, Jesse Helms; that Senator Kerry could have been more aggressive in trying to wrest documents from First American; and that the senator should have challenged Clark Clifford's claim, made in a meeting with the senator on September 14, 1988, that BCCI "was squeaky clean and happy to cooperate."
But we would correct certain other points. We accept that the senator's subcommittee did not bring Communists to Washington to testify, and we think we were mistaken to assert that the subcommittee's funds were running out when it scheduled hearings with Jose Blandon in the spring of 1988 (although we don't back down from our assertion that the subcommittee's credibility was running on empty at that time). We don't think our thrust that "the fall of BCCI would have hurt Kerry's career directly" is entirely a fair one. Yes, he was raising funds from fatcat lawyers beholden to BCCI, and yes, we still think that's wrong, but other fatcats would probably have bellied up to the senator's campaign bar in their stead.
More serious is an error of fact which we now believe we made about the scheduling of hearings on BCCI in September 1988. We were originally told on excellent authority that hearings were set for that time, that the staff was working full tilt to get ready for them, and that they were called off after Clark Clifford visited Senator Kerry. We believed that, and our piece referred more than once to the senator's "cancellation" of "planned hearings" in September 1988. Some of the evidence the senator adduces to refute our account isn't very persuasive. He provides us with a June 12, 1988, press clipping which repeatedly quotes him as saying he's going to "suspend" his subcommittee hearings until after the November general elections. We continue to believe that far from simply being "suspended" for a brief period, the BCCI hearings went into virtual catatonia for two years, whatever behind-the-scenes work the subcommittee was doing. But we are now persuaded that we were wrong to state or imply that subcommittee hearings were specifically scheduled-and then suddenly canceled-in September 1988. After publication our sources backtracked on this narrow point. But this wasn't simply a trivial factual detail; it was a key charge in the context of our criticisms of the senator and the way he conducted his investigation. We apologize to the senator for this error.
While the BCCI mess was indeed a scandal, Senator Kerry's performance in bringing it to light was not, pace our hyperbolic headline, the "real scandal." The flaws in his investigation, described in our article, were minor compared to the criminality of BCCI. And if the senator could have pursued Jose Blandon's evidence of this criminality more aggressively, he did pursue it. He was neither a prosecutor nor a regulator, and his investigative powers were specifically limited. When all is said and done, he was at least trying to do a job that others better situated weren't. And he deserves credit for that-even if the credit he deserves is considerably less than the credit he has claimed.
That said, we decline the senator's request to retract the article. We still think BCCI was left alone for too long by too many powerful people. We still believe that the senator's subcommittee dithered for two years and then was beaten to the punch by the Bank of England. In the light of this, we continue to feel that the senator was at least negligent in accepting campaign contributions from Clark Clifford and Robert Altman after he had met with them to discuss BCCI. And we think our description of the relationship between Senator Kerry and savings-and-loan magnifico David Paul was right on the money (as it were). We'll consider issuing the senator a halo on that one when he issues a subpoena to Mr. Paul. There were unholy links between David Paul's CenTrust and BCCI that should have been pretty evident early on.
The senator can still sue us for libel if he likes. We have no deal with him, and we doubt that he will much like this attempt to set the record straight. But we and Mr. England recall with distaste the libel cases involving Ariel Sharon and William Westmoreland in which Time and CBS were able to conceal serious journalistic errors behind the broad dike of the Sullivan liel rule of actual malice." We do not think the media mantra We stand by our story" is a sufficient retort to specific criticisms backed up by good evidence. We believe that the press (that's us, but also any of our readers who writes a pamphlet) ought to enjoy generous constitutional protections. But if the press doesn't acknowledge error when it gets it wrong, that is a real scandal.
JOHN O'SULLIVAN |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
