The financial war on terror as a Potemkin village:
*p. 191ff: O'Neill, meanwhile, would head up the first active assault: the financial war [on terror]. But how? Over the next few days, O'Neill met with David Aufhauser, who, he decided, should act as an honest broker... organizing a fractious interagency group to track terror assets... seize some assets, and quickly. The President was to announce the new executive order on September 24[, 2001], launching the war on terrorism. He needed some assets to point to. "It was almost comical," Aufhauser said. "we just listed out as many of the usual suspects as we could and said, Let's go freeze some of their assets."
* (2003), The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster: 0743255453).
Posted by DeLong at January 13, 2004 09:46 PM | TrackBack
I think that there is a significant reason for the weakness of this part of the war on terror. One the one hand, the power to track large international financial transactions is not something that Bush's core supporters want government to have.
And on the other, a high proportion of the big supporters are wealth oilmen from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and Bush has a multitude of reasons for not wanting to bother them.
Posted by: zizka on January 14, 2004 11:28 AMActually, this says less about Bush than about O'Neill and the American intelligence community. Bush sets the goal: money transfers that support terrorism need to be identified so they can be stopped. His Treasury Secretary (he "would head up the first active assault") meets with - CIA? FBI? Secret Service? - no, he meets with the Treasury lawyer (Aufhouser) and they "listed out as many of the usual suspects as they could". This is sabotage.
Posted by: Leopold on January 14, 2004 02:17 PMIn February of 1995 (or was it '94?) the revolutionary Islamacist governing clique of Sudan cobbled together a railway full of heavily armed soldiers with air cover and staged a major incursion into the Southern, Dinka and Nuer, areas of Sudan, killing as they went.
They apparently concentrated on killing the educated -- but this may be an illusion, since the relatives of the illiterate do not circulate lists of their dead here in Canada. Among the victims of this killing spree were one of my partner's sisters, her husband (a Scots-educated M.D. like many on the Sudanese side of our family) and their six children.
The whole effort, and the Chinese-supplied weapons that made it possible, cost about $300 million -- and amount paid for out of personal funds by a Saudi contributor to the cause.
When Joahna and I visited the State Department to express our concern, and to drop off video-tapes of the horror on the ground, the Sudan Desk Officer told us that the US knew that this crime had been paid for by one of ten people they knew to a.) pay for such things, and b.) have the wherewithall to write a personal cheque for $300 million.
"The Usual Suspects."