A minor footnote on gvt duplicity, 9-11 vs Eliot Spitzer

[moodforaday]

The 9-11 Commission statement on Al Qaeda financing is notorious for its disingenuity and is well known to all. I'll quote it here again, just to contrast with another statement below:

Page 172 of the report:

To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance. Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding. If a particular funding source had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily tapped a different source or diverted funds from another project to fund an operation that cost $400,000­$500,000 over nearly two years.

While this is of course brazenly, breathtakingly stupid and false, one might presume that this is also the official position of US government, barely if ever challenged in the media. So now check out the following comment from a recent Washington Post story regarding Sliot Spitzer, titled "Spitzer Fall Began With Bank Reports" and describing how a bank's diligent monitoring of "suspicious" transactions became Spitzer's undoing:

A former director of FinCEN, who now works in the industry at a company whose policies prohibit speaking on the record, said that since 9/11, suspicious activity reports had increasingly been used as a source of tips for law enforcement.

“What 9/11 taught us is the value of financial information,” the former director said. “Money doesn’t lie. Money leaves a footprint. And that’s exactly what happened with Spitzer.”

(Full WP article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/nyregion/13legal.html )

[tetedur]

1. Especially if you're a PEP (politically exposed person)

or anyone related to a PEP. 9/11 sure changed everything didn't it?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88132229
Banks Scrutinize Even Routine Transactions by Adam Davidson

Back in the day you could get $70,000 wired to you from a guy with one name in the UAE and that was okay.
Your signature didn't have to match and you could have different addresses on multiple id's and that really didn't matter.

From: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Appendix A: The Financing of the 9/11 Plot

On June 29, 2000, Ali, using an alias, sent a $5,000 wire transfer to a Western Union facility in New York where Shehhi picked it up. Over the next several months, Ali sent four bank-to-bank transfers directly to a checking account jointly held by Shehhi and Atta at SunTrust Bank in Florida: $10,000 on July 18, $9,500 on August 5, $20,000 on August 29, and $70,000 on September 17. On three of
these occasions he used an alias; once he went by “Mr. Ali.” ....Ali
said he sent the final $70,000 in one large transfer because Shehhi had called and asked
him to “send him everything.” According to Ali, KSM was displeased when he later
learned of the transfer because he thought the size of the transaction would alert the
security services. The amount did not worry Ali, however, because he knew that Dubai
computer companies frequently transferred such amounts of money. Ali said he
experienced no problem with this transfer, or any transfer in aid of the hijackers.


On one occasion in June 2001, the hijackers aroused suspicion at a SunTrust branch in Florida while
attempting to cash a check for $2,180. Shehhi presented identification documents with
different addresses, and the bank personnel thought the signature on the check did not
match his signature on file. The bank manager refused to sign the check and issued an
internal alert to other SunTrust branches to watch the account for possible fraud. The
internal alert was a routine notice sent in accordance with SunTrust’s loss avoidance
procedures. SunTrust never considered reporting Shehhi to the government because it had
no evidence he had done anything illegal. No one at SunTrust or any other financial
institution thought, or had any reason to think, that the hijackers were criminals, let alone
terrorists bent on mass murder, and no financial institution had any reason to report their
behavior to the government.

see http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/sourcedocuments/2001/pdfs/fbi911timeline1-105.pdf
for an entry on 9/18/00 when "Hani (Fawar Trading)" wired $69,685 to Atta and Shehhi's account at SunTrust.