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Six weeks [after 9-11] later a 10-member American team slipped quietly into Abu Dhabi for the meeting about money-laundering and the financial underpinnings of terror. Officials said the team had been led by the State Department and drawn from a diverse group of agencies including the National Security Council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Treasury Department. The group was not invited to any other Middle Eastern country, officials said, though such invitations would clearly be welcome.
The meeting lasted more than 10 hours, longer than planned. One administration official attributed the meeting's collegiality and candid exchanges to Mr. Suweidi, who they said broke the ice by urging his fellow gulf regulators to explain their views of the financial monitoring problem along with their solutions.
The last time a team of investigators visited the country, the meetings were not as cordial. Stuart E. Eizenstat, the deputy secretary of the Treasury in the last years of the Clinton administration, said that officials in both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates were "not as responsive" as officials from other Middle Eastern countries.
Mr. Suweidi said relations had improved since those earlier meetings. Mr. Suweidi and American officials said that much of the discussion focused on cultural and political differences in their countries' financial systems. For instance, regulation of charities in the United States is far more rigorous than in the gulf. In the United States, charities must file detailed annual reports about their donors and programs with the Internal Revenue Service. At the symposium in Abu Dhabi, American officials described that process, citing examples of how Roman Catholic charities had been prosecuted for funneling money to the Irish Republican Army.
That discussion helped ease Arab concerns that the United States was singling out Muslim and Arab groups in its terrorism investigations, one participant said.
Officials agreed that both countries shared responsibility for failing to uncover the financial threads of the Sept. 11 attack. "If the financial institutions of the U.A.E. are to be blamed, U.S. financial institutions should be blamed too," Mr. Suweidi said. "The money that came from here popped up there." To stop terrorism, he added, "We should work together."
I guess we can't be trusted either. Now who will manage these commercial concerns? Amtrak-AmPorts?
Can you post a link to that? We can;t post that much information from the NYT. I have to inform the admin moderator to delete your post.