What the 9-11 Commission Did NOT Say

I finally was able to plow through the 9-11 Commission's Staff Monograph on Terrorist Financing, released last week. Several things stand out as glaring ommissions, either because of lack of time to research the information (much of it available now from open U.S. government sources), or a lack of understanding. The report correctly identifies the lack of FBI and CIA attention to terror financing before 9-11, and their inability to develop a coherent strategy for confronting the problem. It also goes to great lengths to describe how bin Laden was not the multi-millionaire inheritor of $300 million, but rather someone who received about $1 million a year from his inheritence. And it offers some other minor insights into how the money moved. But what is most interesting is what it did not cover.

The biggest hole is the complete lack of attention to the role the Muslim Brotherhood has played in the financing of al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. While the ties are extensive on a personal level, they also prevade the financial structure of al Qaeda.

Since at least the time of Sayd Qutb in the 1940s, the Brotherhood has been strongly anti-Western, and is wellspring for much of al Qaeda's radicalism. Hassan al-Turabi, bin Laden's benefactor in Sudan, is a leader of the Brotherhood. Hamas, or the Resistance Movement of Palestine, is a direct offshoot of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood also has strong ties to neo-Nazi groups on Europe. Abdullah Azzam, a stalwart of the Jordanian Brotherhood, co-founded, along with bin Laden, the Afghan Service Bureau or MAK, which eventually formed the core group of al Qaeda.

The clearest documented link between al Qaeda and international leaders of the Brotherhood comes through Bank al Taqwa, a small, off-the-shelf bank registered in Nassau, Bahamas. It was a center of the Brotherhood's sprawling financial empire stretching around the world, one that encompasses businesses and banks, communications systems and political clout. The al Taqwa consortium is led by Yousef Nada, an Egyptian and naturalized Italian. According to U.S. Treasury Department, the bank and Nada's other financial service companies proved al Qaeda not only with banking facilities, but internet services and access to encrypted communications. The companies even arranged arms shipments for al Qaeda.

Operating out of the same small office in Nassau was Akida Bank Private, Ltd., run by Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, a wealthy Eritrean and longtime business partner of Nada. Nada sponsored the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, Italy, where many al Qaeda recruits were first approached. The Treasury Department dubbed it "the main al Qaeda station house in Europe. It is used to facilitate the movement of weapons, mena nd money across the world." The bank directors of both banks are a virtual who's who of the worldwide Brotherhood structure.

And of course the Brotherhood has ties to the series of Muslim charities under investigation in Northern Virginia, called the Safa Group by law enforcement officials and prosecutors. For more information on all of this, see pp. 147-149 in the book.

I find it curious that the whole al Taqwa-Akida connection was ignored, when it was an important part of the al Qaeda structure, and one where almost every person and institution involved has been designated a sponsor of terror not only by the United States but by the United Nations as well.

The mongraph also virtually ignores the reams of cases of terrorists using petty crime (coupon fraud, knock off T-shirts etc, see Chapter 8) that have allowed terrorists to raise millions of dollars. This is another curious ommission from a study that is supposed to be covering all the bases.

According to sources who provided classified briefing to the Commission staff, most of the information that was provided was ignored, especially in the case of the al Barakaat, the money transfer system that was shut down after 9-11 because of alleged ties to terror financing. As with the case of diamonds, the Commission staff simply did not include any information that was at odds with the official line of different agencies.

While it is important to have these documents made public, including a great deal of information that was unnecessarily classified, the report remains curiously incomplete. Perhaps it is because, while the staff recognizes and states the FBI and CIA have had little understanding of terror finance, they rely almost exclusively on those very instititions for their information and interpretation of that information. A very unsatisfying combination.