How can access to ALL bank accounts internationally....

[whistle]

...deter terror in the U.S.

<snip>

April 10, 2005
U.S. Seeks Access to Bank Records to Deter Terror
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, April 9 - The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, even as many bankers say they already feel besieged by government antiterrorism rules that they consider overly burdensome.

The initiative, as conceived by a working group within the Treasury Department, would vastly expand the government's database of financial transactions by gaining access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks. Such overseas transactions were used by the Sept. 11 hijackers to wire more than $130,000, officials said, and are still believed to be vulnerable to terrorist financiers.

Government officials said in interviews that the effort, which grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes. They said they were mindful of privacy concerns that such a system is likely to provoke and wanted to include safeguards to prevent misuse of what would amount to an enormous cache of financial records.

The provision authorized the Treasury Department to pursue regulations requiring financial institutions to turn over "certain cross-border electronic transmittals of funds" that may be needed in combating money laundering and terrorist financing.

<more>
<link> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/national/10terror.html?th&emc=th

This is something I would expect former Attorney General John Ashcroft to have had a hand in but as the last statement in the article reads, this is not likely to be of any use except as possibly a way for government officials to extract bribes and blackmail from persons hiding their financial transactions.

<snip>

"This strikes me as a fruitless exercise, an impossible task," said Charles A. Intriago, a former federal prosecutor who runs Money Laundering Alert. "This risks further burdening the industry, and it's tough to see how it will produce much if any useful data for the government in tracking terrorist financing."

[leveymg]

1. Neither the Bankers nor the NYT want to admit

that US banks were up to their necks in 9/11 related terrorism financing.

The bankers still don't get it. Nor does the NYT. Note there is not a word about the spike of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by banks in the months before 9/11. Also, I think Lichtblau's made a factual error in the following statement:

"Of particular concern to industry officials are five criminal enforcement actions in the last several years against banks for failing to comply with laws to combat money laundering. None of the cases involved terrorist financing"

Wasn't Riggs busted precisely because it had not been reporting Saudi Embassy accounts which ended up in the hands of the 9/11 hijackers? CNN had reported:

"A report in Newsweek magazine provides more details. Michael Isikoff, who wrote the article, said on CNN's "NewsNight" that one of the students helped the hijackers get an apartment, paid their rent and introduced them around the Muslim community in San Diego, California. Law enforcement sources told Newsweek the FBI has uncovered financial records showing that the family of Omar Al Bayoumi, a student in San Diego, began receiving payments amounting to about $3,500 a month in early 2000. According to Newsweek's sources, the money came from an account at Riggs Bank in Washington in Princess Haifa Al-Faisal's name. She is the daughter of the late King Faisal. After Al Bayoumi left the United States in July 2001, similar payments were being made to another San Diego student, Osama Basnan, Newsweek reported. According to the magazine's report, Al Bayoumi and Basnan befriended two men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon -- Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. Isikoff said the timing of the Riggs Bank payments, which began just a couple months after they arrived in the United States, has raised questions about whether Saudi government money found its way to the two hijackers. "There has been no explanation for why such a high-ranking official, or the wife of such a high-ranking official, would route money to a seeming nobody in San Diego," he said." http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/23/saudi.fbi.911/

[whistle]

2. Oh yes Riggs Bank, the Bush brothers again....

[gratuitous]

3. I think there is some potential for good to come out of this proposal

The fact that it's the corrupt Bush administration gathering the information tells me that whatever is useful that doesn't fit with the Bushistas' preconceived notions will be discarded, while minutiae that buttresses some hare-brained scheme that profits members of the administration will be treated as pure gold.

The only reason I think that is because it's happened so many times before, though.

In the story, the writer says that the impetus for this is the September 11 attack (naturally) and the fact that the hijackers apparently wired in $130,000 from overseas to finance their efforts.

Now, think about that for a second: Surely, there are people around the country who will say to themselves "Oh my gosh! If only we had monitored those transactions and caught those transfers, why we might have stopped them. Enact this legislation at once!"

What isn't stated is how many transactions totalled that $130,000: One? Fifteen? 37? And over what period of time those transactions happened: One day? A week? Three months? Now, think about how many billions of international wire transactions happen all over the world with money going into and out of the United States at the blink of a computer terminal.

The Bush administration, which couldn't figure anything out from a PDB entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside U.S." or from the reports of weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq, is suddenly going to sift through those billions of transactions and identify the dozen transactions that indicate that terrorists are being funded by outside sources and that they're about to strike. Yeah, right.

Naturally, this being the corrupt Bush administration, we should also be comforted that this law and the ability to track money will never, e-e-e-ever be used to harrass folks, or to grant an unfair advantage to the administration's business cronies, or as a cudgel to be used against a "non-complying" banks to provide some extra services to the administration or those business cronies. Nah! Never happen. No way there's any potential for abusing this power. What the heck! Let's go for it. I mean, it's to fight terrorism and everything.

[radfringe]

4. NO MORE WIRE TRANSFERS

----sorry...couldn't resist.... :evilgrin:

[DELUSIONAL]

6. No joke -- the cost of wire transfers have gone up

from about $10 in 2000 -- $30 to $70 in 2005.

The banks claim this is due to their increased paper work due to post 9/11 regulations.

[DELUSIONAL]

5. Could this be a way to control Americans who are leaving the US?

There are many American citizens living outside of the US -- I was amazed at the number -- in the millions.

The websites with information about how to vote during the 2004 election listed the number of US expats eligible to vote.

The majority of the expats would have bank accounts in foreign banks in the countries where they live. Already when money is placed in a foreign account the US requires information about the source of these funds. This is a requirement that the US is placing on foreign banks.