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Banned
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Originally Posted by Seaver
No but some of them border on aiding and embedding the enemy. Saying how we were monitoring international bank transactions, the method we used to stop cold the terrorist "charity" funds, potentially lost us a valuable tool.....
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Some of the opinions expressed on this thread make my case for dividing the politics forum into a "feelings" based section, and a "facts" based section.
The "attack the NY Times" "Op", catches our leaders and those who control the congress, red handed, because their accusations againt the NY Times are exposed for what they are; bullshit propaganda aimed at distracting from the truth and it's messenger. The reason we know this is because the NY Times revealed a "secret"...the monitoring or SWIFT financial transactions, that al Qaeda in Baltimore, knew about for the last five years...if they read the Baltimore Sun......
Seaver, the "outrage" is feigned....the administration knows this. It's a shame that the "chorus" doesn't. The method of surveillance, using "SWIFT" to track "al Qaida" finances, was published nearly five years ago. If "al Qaeda" exists in the form of the dangerous and formidable opponent that the Bush admin. tells us that it is, beyond the fact that "it" is gradually bankrupting the U.S. Treasury, due to the fact that the appropriations to fight "it" are a million times greater than what it "spends" to terrorize America......al Qaeda would be smart enough to have noted the news reports in the fall of 2001, and stopped making any financial transfers that would be monitored.
The NY Times disclosure was about the fact that the monitoring continued anyway, without specifically targeted warrants....and the question still is...against who? That is what this propaganda "Op" is about. It is designed to make the questioning seem treasonous, and it is bullshit. The "target" that justified the CIA/FBI monitoring, via SWIFT, knew for five years, not to do financial transactions that would show up in the SWIFT data monitoring, yet
the program continued, anyway.
Read the Sac Bee editorial, and the inaccurate "chorus" from the conservative web page:
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http://www.willisms.com/archives/200...ew_york_1.html
Is The New York Times A Pack Of Treason Weasels?
New York Times editor Bill Keller is puzzled as to why the article revealing the existence of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT program, is creating such a firestorm. Yes, checking banking records to track terrorists is an obvious strategy, and yes the administration even announced its intention to do so after 9/11 (a program that the Times editorial board even advocated immediately after the WTC attacks). <b>But the operational details have been unknown until now, and even the name of the program had been kept under wraps.</b> The CIA has proven yet again that is is a keeper of secrets that can keep no secrets: Coalition of the Willing members and other international partners in the War on Terror must be wondering what details of cooperation with the United States won't likewise end up on the front page of the New York Times.....
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If the statement in bold in the quote box above was true, what did the Baltimore Sun report about (below) way back on September 21, 2001. when their article stated,
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......Funding on that scale would not necessarily have required large international bank transfers of the kind often seen in cases involving drug cartels or corrupt regimes. That could limit the ability of the National Security Agency to follow the money through its electronic intercepts of such transactions, which are carried out by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), headquartered in Belgium.........
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So....after that article was published, if you were an al Qaeda money launderer or a distributor of funds to al Qaeda "cells" around the world, would you have initiated any financial transactions that SWIFT could potentially monitor for the US CIA/FBI? I'm just a guy named "host" on a message board.
If I know that al Qaeda was warned, by September 21, 2001, not to use SWIFT, didn't Cheney and Bush also know it, before their posturing and outrage directed last week at the NY Times. They have reasons and an agenda to drive their speech and their false posturing. Those who defend and repeat their claims on this subject seem only to be following flawed leaders...
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Who's overreaching?
GOP blows political smoke over leaks
Sacramento Bee, The (CA)
June 29, 2006
Estimated printed pages: 2
President Bush has condemned as "disgraceful" several newspapers' reports about a government program that monitors international financial transactions. Some congressional Republicans go further: Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky accused the New York Times of "treason" and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas wants intelligence agencies to assess the extent of damage to national security.
What's ironic about this is, first, that the news reports, while they added much detail, merely described a program that's been no secret to anyone who has followed the administration's anti-terrorist efforts. And if there's any investigative tool that most Americans would probably agree is a proper one, it's tracking suspected terrorist finances.
A major component of that tool has been a Belgium-based database called SWIFT -- Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication -- that tracks millions of financial transfers, many of them between this country and others. SWIFT serves as a clearinghouse for financial institutions worldwide. The president was infuriated because, he said, disclosure of the program to tap into SWIFT's database "does great harm to ... America" by tipping off suspects.
That's debatable.
Amid the hue and cry from the White House and Capitol Hill, less fevered voices tried to put things in perspective. <h3>Roger Cressey, a former U.S. counterterrorism official, said the White House is "overreaching," that the SWIFT program "has been in the public domain before." And a former U.S. diplomat, Victor Comras, who was involved at the United Nations in efforts to combat terrorist financing, told the Boston Globe: "A lot of people were aware that this was going on," and that "unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume" their transactions were being monitored.</h3>
That makes sense. And so do the frenzied calls to crack down on the news media, at least in a politically partisan sense.
Never mind that some members of Congress had been briefed on the program and that all Americans have known for years about the government's efforts to uncover terrorist financial movements and seize assets.
This issue provides a convenient campaign weapon for supporters of the Bush administration to use against "soft-on-terrorism" officeholders, especially Democrats, and against critics in the news media. All of the frothing in Washington raises the possibility that some in Congress will seek to muzzle the press with legislation, subpoenas or other means of intimidation. The long-term effects of such actions might stifle the free flow of information in a society that treasures it, but whose current administration not only has an overdeveloped passion for secrecy but has used that secrecy to cover an array of abuses, including the abuse of people in U.S. custody, some of whom turned out to be innocent.
Such actions have tarnished America's reputation and subverted its values. They deserve to be held up to the light of day, no matter how unflattering the result may be to those now in power.
The line between what's fair to publish and what might hurt national security is a blurry one. The First Amendment's durability rests not only on its text, but on a long-standing unwritten bargain between government and the press that both will do their best to avoid straying over that line. The burden is on an administration that has gone much too far in the name of national security to show that news organizations have done the same in the name of press freedom. That's not evident.
Memo: EDITORIALS
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Quote:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/cus...,1,71575.story
Authorities trying to track money back to bin Laden But crucial financial trail could lead to dead end, anti-terror experts say TERRORISM STRIKES AMERICA THE RESPONSE
Sun, The (Baltimore, MD)
<h2>September 21, 2001</h2>
Author: SUN STAFF
Scott Shane
Estimated printed pages: 5
The money trail from last week's terrorist attacks may eventually lead back to Osama bin Laden. But experts say it could just as easily reach a dead end at an offshore bank account, an automated teller machine or even a shoe box.
"Don't rule out a shoe box full of cash," says John Fernandez, editor of the monthly newsletter Money Laundering Alert, based in Miami. "Bin Laden's organization has used both modern and ancient ways of moving money."
The hunt for the financiers behind the attacks in New York and Washington is a crucial part of the investigation, promising the possibility of a direct link to bin Laden, whom President Bush has called the prime suspect. The investigation could reveal whether bin Laden played the role of chief plotter and paymaster or whether he merely supplied the rhetoric of a holy war on America to inspire those who carried out the slaughter.
"I'm not sure we'll find that the money came out of his pocket, but I think we'll find ties to him," says Ed Bridgeman, who studies terrorism at the University of Cincinnati. "It's important, because it gives us legitimacy and credence in targeting him before the rest of the world."
<h3>That appears to be the goal of a web of U.S. agencies as they launch the most intensive money-tracking effort in U.S. history.
A new task force at the Treasury Department "has begun to create financial profiles" of the suicide hijackers, Treasury Undersecretary Jimmy Gurule said at a news conference Wednesday. He said the new sub-agency, called the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, "will be an important tool in our quest to dismantle the terrorists' financial bases and shut down their funding capabilities and operations. ... We seek to create a big-picture profile, if you will, of the financial infrastructure of terrorist organizations."
But Fernandez says the new tracking center should have been in operation months ago. "This center was proposed more than a year ago and funded last October, and just in the last few days they've activated it," he says. "It's just government bureaucracy."</h3>
FBI agents are poring over the 19 suspected hijackers' known transactions, however trivial, from video rentals to ATM withdrawals and rent payments. Other investigators, focusing on the sources of their funds, are inspecting bank records in the Cayman Islands and Panama, Fernandez says, and Barclays bank in London has frozen a suspicious account.
With an inheritance from his family's construction empire in Saudi Arabia and a network of legitimate businesses and bank accounts, bin Laden certainly is capable of providing the money for patient, meticulous, large-scale terror operations. But tracking the funds will not be easy, experts say.
The first and most important problem is that the total cost of planning and mounting the attacks that have transformed geopolitics overnight was relatively modest, probably several hundred thousand dollars spent over the past few years. The only relatively large expenditure was flight training tuition for several terrorists at prices ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 apiece.
"We've had a saying for a long time - that terrorism is warfare on the cheap," says Yonah Alexander, a terrorism specialist at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va., who recently co-wrote a study of bin Laden. "You had pilot training, air tickets, car rentals, apartments and food for a number of years. But for the whole operation, what are you talking about? Maybe a million dollars? They invest very little money, and the results are unbelievable."
Bridgeman agrees. "I'm sure this whole thing ran less than a million dollars - a lot less," he says. "That's why terrorism is so popular with the underdog - it's so cost-effective."
Funding on that scale would not necessarily have required large international bank transfers of the kind often seen in cases involving drug cartels or corrupt regimes.<h3>That could limit the ability of the National Security Agency to follow the money through its electronic intercepts of such transactions, which are carried out by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), headquartered in Belgium.</h3>
The Treasury Department's first line of defense against money laundering, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also might not be of much help. FINCEN, located in Virginia, studies bank reports of cash deposits of $10,000 or more, as well as other suspicious transactions. But none of the known financial activities of the hijackers would have generated such reports.
If the terrorists used an ATM card to withdraw cash from an account in a bank that does not cooperate with international authorities, that could also prove to be a brick wall for investigators, Fernandez says. In June, the 31-nation Financial Task Force on Money Laundering listed 19 countries that did not meet its reporting standards, including Egypt, Guatemala, Russia, and the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, home to 400 "shell banks" whose purpose is often to hide money. Accounts in those places could prove inaccessible to investigators.
Bin Laden's organization also has used a traditional method for transferring money in South Asia, known by the Hindi word hawala, or "in trust." Under such a transaction, money is deposited with a hawala broker in one country and withdrawn, often the same day, from a second broker in another country. The system produces no records and depends on absolute trust between the brokers, since the money must later be transferred from one to the other.
But some terrorist money moves in an even simpler fashion - in wads of bills passed hand to hand, according to testimony at the trial this summer of four men in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, attacks allegedly directed by bin Laden. An operative named Jamal Ahmed al Fadl testified that when he was ordered to move $100,000 in $100 bills from Sudan to a terrorist cell in Jordan, he simply put the cash in his suitcase "with my clothes" and hopped on a plane.
Al Fadl listed some of bin Laden's legitimate businesses in Sudan, ranging from a construction company to a farm that grew sesame seeds, peanuts and corn - as well as providing a terrorist training ground. In Kenya, bin Laden's organization helped one of its operatives start a fish business in the coastal town of Mombasa, according to testimony.
"It's a pretty diverse portfolio," says Bridgeman, at the University of Cincinnati. "Because they're legitimate businesses, he can use them to move money and to launder money."
Some of the money also might have been diverted from a web of Islamic charities, as occurred in previous terrorist attacks. Several such charities were closed after donations were proved to have been diverted for the 1993 and 1998 bombings.
In an attempt to crack down on bin Laden's finances in August 1998, President Bill Clinton banned U.S. banks and companies from doing business with a number of organizations linked to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But according to a report issued Sept. 10 - the day before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks - by terrorism expert Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, no assets have been frozen by the order, because authorities have not been able to link any to bin Laden.
"Tracing the funding is not so simple," says Alexander, at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. "But one benefit of the investigation may be to shut down some of the financing methods. At least that might make their operations more difficult in the future."
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Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1553153.stm
Wednesday, 7 November, 2001, 17:18 GMT
Following the money trail
by BBC News Online's Sarah Toyne and Jeremy Scott-Joynt
Financial authorities around the world are stepping up their efforts to trace illegal money flows in the wake of the attacks inflicted on New York and Washington DC on 11 September.
Law enforcement agencies in the US are well aware that one of the best ways to prove a case against Osama Bin Laden, who has been identified as the chief suspect, is to follow the money.
How were the hijackers supported? And how did the money make it into their hands in the US and elsewhere without being traced?
No-one is under any illusion that the task will be an easy one.
Tracing the flow of illicit money is a complicated, time-consuming business, and the cards are stacked against investigators.
To help boost the chances of finding a paper trail that could lead back to the perpetrator, regulators are planning to upgrade their systems for uncovering the laundering of dirty money.....
.....Transatlantic efforts
The Bush administration has now unveiled a package of measures concentrating on the biggest of money laundering operations.
US authorities are ramping up the search for terrorist money
On 18 September the Federal Reserve ordered all banks, domestic and foreign, under its jurisdiction to search through their records for any accounts or transactions involving the 19 people identified by the FBI as the
hijackers.
The government will also identify and focus on specific areas of the US where money laundering is rife, via a new body to be called the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center with staff drawn from all US law enforcement and
intelligence agencies.
The aim is to "map" the finances of terrorist organisations. In the UK, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown told the BBC's Today programme that banks needed to tighten their rules on oversight of suspicious transactions.
The reporting of suspicious transactions is seen as a cornerstone of compliance with the global anti-money laundering effort, spearheaded by an international Paris-based group, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF),
affiliated to the OECD.
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown
Brown: plans to tighten up bank oversight
"It's necessary to create that wider (reporting) obligation on international institutions," Mr Brown said.
"But equally it's necessary to have a system of reporting so that there's not only no safe haven (for terrorists) but no hiding place for terrorist money."
One bank account supposedly connected to the US terrorists, at a Barclays Bank branch in Notting Hill in London, has already been closed.
Switzerland, a country whose reputation for banking secrecy has often made its banks a prime suspect in money laundering investigations, says its task force is "working at high speed" to see if any terrorist-linked funds had
flowed through Swiss institutions.
And other European countries are following suit.
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The Daily Telegraph: Police foil hackers' pounds 220m raid on London bank
Daily Telegraph, The (London, England)
March 18, 2005
Author: David Derbyshire Consumer Affairs Editor
.....In order to transfer money electronically, City banks use Swift -- the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications -- system. Hacking into Swift is ``theoretically possible'' but unlikely, Mr Palmer said. ``It is much easier to bribe or blackmail individuals who have access to those codes or have your own people within the banking system,'' he said.
``A lot of banks do not want to admit the fact that there are organised groups that are laundering money and getting away with it.'' He estimates that there are between 2,000 to 3,000 active fraudsters working inside London's 500 banks. Many of them are bribed and then blackmailed to hide transactions or pass on confidential information.
``I believe that keylogging is not terribly relevant here. You can keylog and see what's going on in another person's computer system, but in banking you can't send money overseas without using a third party system like Swift.''
According to research from the High-Tech Crime Unit, more than 80 per cent of British-based companies have been victims of computer crime.
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The above, "old news" is the actual record, and the "noise" from Bush, Cheney, Pat Roberts, Peter King, Jim Bunning, etc.....does not square with the news archive record from 2001.....but your opinion , does square with their "noise".
Last edited by host; 07-07-2006 at 10:01 PM..
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