Posted on 02/25/2006 3:00:55 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
It makes perfect sense for shipping companies to be interested in controlling terminals.
And, since this is the information age, no one needs a crystal ball to see that this is what the Chinese government is attempting to accomplish through the business dealings and partnerships of its government shipping company COSCO.
One only needs to 1) read their web pages and other business news pages and 2) apply good old common sense.
COSCO's plans, mergers, pending deals, (and even their failures) all point in one direction--they want to get into the port/terminal business
COSCO'S failures to get some mouthwatering deals don't mean COSCO wasn't interested in managing prime locations along coasts. Clinton's failure to give COSCO a lease on the old Navy Base in Long Beach, CA, doesn't mean the Chinese government wasn't interest in getting their hands on it. The fact that their deal to get a Greek port isn't finalized, doesn't mean they don't want the port.
. The grandstanding folks in Congress, who are so concerned about port safety, didn't need a crystal ball to see that the UAE was interested in buying P&O either. If they are all that stupid, especially the folks on the Homeland Security-related committees, they don't deserve to represent us.
I agree with you that China and Dubai and Singapore are all interested in controlling port terminals.
I think you need a crystal ball when you draw a line between them wanting to conduct business and them wanting to help blow up a port or use a port to help terrorists. Just think, if Dubai or China screwed up at just one port, they would have to kiss their whole shipping/port business goodbye.
We live in a global economy and that is nothing but good for the United States. The United States profits from participating in the global economy. We will only remain a super-power as long as we participate in that global economy. In the late 70's and 80's Americans opted out of the port terminal managing business because it wasn't profitable at the time. That is not China's fault, or Singapore's fault or Dubai's fault. It's certainly not Bush's fault. I'm of a mind that it's no one's fault, but the Americans that were originally in the port business who sold out.
So now we have a few companies that are qualified to do this business and can afford to win the bids for the business. They all have exemplary records in the business. There is no reason to stop any of them from doing business in the United States.
The Saudis can pump 10 million bbls a day for the next 200 years if one believes their stated oil reserves. We have all heard for decades how oil is running out, but somehow, someway the oil companies have been able to discover new supplies to keep up with ever increasing demand. Whatever happens, it will be a gradual weaning away from oil as the principle energy source. The arabs will have time to make the transition if they are wise enough.
I'm not sure anyone really believes what the Saudis say about their oil reserves. Its a major point of contention in the industry and only increases the risk associated with investments in ultra-deep water and harsh environment exploration. The Saudis maintain that uncertainty in order to manipulate the market to their long-term advantage. None of the majors wants to sink $4-5 billion in a new, high-risk facility and then have the price fall back to below $30 or even $20 a barrel as it has done many times in the last 20 years. The Saudis keep them and the capital markets guessing. Dubai has done well. Six years ago oil was over 25 percent of their economy. When I was working in Italy two years ago it was down to about 12 percent. Now, you say its down to around 6. That is a pretty impressive transformation in such a short time.
So...where do we differ?
It's your life!
I take it you agree with Nicholas Kristof (that well known conservative pundit) when he hails the UAE as "the Disneyland of the Arab world."
The UAE's image makeover has been breathtaking in both speed and scope. Trans-shipment of nuclear weapons materials? Money laundering? Financial and transit ties to terrorists? Weapons transfers to Saddam Hussein? All gone with a wave of the hand, while we whistle our way down the rabbit hole.
thank you so much for linking me here!
Thanks...I subscribe to OGJ and Offshore.
here is a very good article on this issue from national review:
The Politically Correct vs. the Politically Ridiculous
No heroes in the port drama.
With the approval of the Bush administration, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over commercial management of shipping and stevedoring operations at six major American ports, located on the eastern seaboard and in New Orleans. When attention was suddenly drawn to this development last week, the urge toward public-safety questions was understandable. Not panic, but legitimate questions.
Sure as Dean follows Howard, though, understandable concern rapidly degenerated into calculated hysteria from poseurs seeking to claim the high ground from a president against whose measure they stand as national-security Lilliputians. Accelerating the downward spiral, the administration’s initially temperate but unconvincing defense of the transaction devolved just as quickly into nauseating politically correctness.
Neither corner of the ring has distinguished itself. In one, leading Democrats and some Republicans are evidently shocked to learn that many of the nation’s ports are managed by foreigners. Indeed, even as they railed against the prospect of this buy-out by UAE’s Dubai Ports World, Inc., they skipped past the inconvenient fact that the seller, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, is a British concern.
Naturally, they prefer to cast the issue as one of foreign port-terminal management because they lack the gumption to state that the problem is Islamic participation in what is a gaping soft-spot in our armor. Yet, as usual, such too-clever-by-half cravenness has landed them in a box. Terminals at the ports in question — like many others in the country — have long been under the management of non-Americans. Should we expel everyone?
THE CLINTONS AND THE PORTS
Especially precious in this regard is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s newfound passion for port security. Fresh from throwing in her lot with partisan efforts to derail the Patriot Act and frame the NSA’s surveillance of wartime enemy communications as a crime, the ’08 stars in Mrs. Clinton’s eyes have suddenly twinkled with a fond memory: namely, how her husband managed to win the 1992 election, in large part, by getting to the right of the first President Bush on what was that era’s great global menace — post-Tiananmen Square China. So here she is, trying to elbow her way to the right of the current Bush administration on the scourge of al Qaeda … and hoping the rest of us are struck by amnesia.
You may recall, however, that, upon election, President Clinton proceeded to get tough with Beijing for, oh, about ten minutes. After that, there was no transfer of precious technology and no national security secret that couldn’t be had for the right price. Oh, and guess who now controls several port operations on the West Coast? And has for years? Well, whaddya know? It’s China.
Indeed, Chinese infiltration of U.S. ports would have been even more pervasive if Senator Clinton’s husband had had his way. In 1998, the Republican Congress (led by Senator James Inhofe (OK) and Congressman Duncan Hunter (CA)) had to stop him from turning over management of a 144-acre terminal at the former U.S. Naval Station in Long Beach to the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company — a subsidiary of the People’s Liberation Army linked to arms trading to Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, and even the street gangs of Los Angeles.
Of course, in the Clinton years, when anyone had the temerity to suggest that maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to give away the store to thuggish, democracy-crushing Communists, we were told such troglodyte notions were insentient to the alchemy of “constructive engagement.” This was the very “why make friends when you can let them buy you?” philosophy that led these super-competent, obsessed-with-national-security Clintonistas to sell $8 billion worth of F-16s, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, other advanced weapons, and sundry munitions to — guess who? — The United Arab Emirates.
That happened in early 2000. For those keeping score, that’s less than two years after al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It is one year after the Clinton administration had Osama bin Laden targeted at a camp in Afghanistan … but called the strike off because the al Qaeda chief was in the company of high UAE officials, including an Emirati prince. A few months later, while the Clinton folks were getting the UAE its new military hardware, the regime’s friends at al Qaeda were blowing up the U.S.S. Cole.
So why do I have this crazy feeling that, in a new Clinton era, we’d be apt to find a lot more “engagement” than exclusion of the UAE (not to mention other dubious “partners”) at our ports? In any event, now that Senator Clinton is all over this port thing, it’ll be interesting to hear how she plans to tackle those dread Chinese foreigners managing California’s coastline — not to mention her explanation of why the administration in which she figured so prominently thought it was okay to sell lots of stuff that goes boom to a country apparently not even fit to run a port terminal.
PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE PORTS
Meanwhile, President Bush, who has never, ever vetoed anything in five years — not campaign-finance “reform” that shredded core First Amendment protections, not bursting budgets they haven’t built calculators big enough to tally, not a law extending Fifth Amendment protections to alien enemy combatants, etc. — has somehow decided that this, the great principle of equal-market access for checkered Muslim regimes, is where he draws his line in the sand.
The president is promising to kill any legislation aimed at derailing the deal, so offended is he by the suggestion that, in the middle of a war against jihadists, a tiny Islamic country with a history of terror ties, which lives in an unstable, al Qaeda-friendly neighborhood, maybe, just maybe, might be a smidge less suitable for port management than, say, a private company based in England. (England, for those with a short memory, is a country with which we have a bit of history, and which was, for example, patrolling the no-fly zone with us in Iraq while the aforementioned Emirati prince was cavorting with bin Laden in Kandahar.)
I mean, does it get any more chauvinistic than that?
So while Democrats pander to our fears (and thus adopt the very cudgel they claim the administration has clubbed them with since 9/11), the president panders to what he takes to be our sense of fair play. He has he challenged lawmakers, the Wall Street Journal reports, to “step up and explain why a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard” than a British company.
Well, okay. The Middle Eastern company is wholly owned by an Islamic autocracy. The president says we need to democratize the Islamic world because autocracies are unstable. And this particular one, oil-rich but only about the size of Maine, has more non-citizens than citizens among its four million or so residents, is enmeshed in a territorial dispute with those famously reasonable mullahs in Iran (over the Tunb Islands and Abu Musa Island), and has been a hub for international narcotics trafficking and money laundering.
Nonetheless, the administration regards the regime — which does not show much promise of democratic reform — as both friendly and adherent to moderate Islam. As usual, “moderate” is in the eye of the beholder. For example, it is a crime punishable by imprisonment in the UAE for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man — because that is a violation of the meta-tolerant Religion of Peace’s sharia law, which governs the realm. Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women (and more than one if they like), but you can get sent to prison for such crimes as urging Muslims to convert to other faiths.
Moreover, as my friend Frank Gaffney points out, the regime despises our close ally, Israel. The UAE promotes the idea of a one-state solution in “Palestine” (hint: the one state is not Israel), and may well be funding charities in Gaza and the West Bank — where “charities” are notorious for underwriting terrorism.
It was also a key supporter of the Taliban — one of only three countries to recognize bin Laden’s kindly hosts as the official government of Afghanistan. In fact, the UAE is the country through which bin Laden was allowed to transit when al Qaeda moved its headquarters to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.
All that aside, we are at war with jihadists who, more than anything else, seek to strike us domestically with weapons of mass destruction — including nukes if they can access them. Lo and behold, it turns out that the UAE has been used as a transfer-station for nuclear components in the conspiracy of Pakistani proliferator A. Q. Kahn, who was selling technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Obviously, the Kahn enterprise would have made other plans had it not believed it was on safe footing with the UAE.
SHOULD WE CANCEL THE DEAL?
Does all this mean the port deal ought to be scotched? I think it does, but I have a (slightly) open mind — as do a lot of other people who fret over our security.
The Bush administration contends that the UAE has cleaned up its act since 9/11. There are reasons to be skeptical. The administration, after all, also counts Saudi Arabia and Yemen as cherished friends. It has set a laughably generous grading curve for Islamic regimes (and Islamic leaders) seeking the “moderate” diploma which qualifies them for the status of “ally” in the war on terror. Moreover, while the UAE has plainly taken some steps in the right direction, its facilitation of the enemy prior to 9/11 was substantial. It is not generally our practice to consider hardened criminals redeemed after only four years of good behavior — especially when “good” in this context is, to put it mildly, relative.
On the other hand, port commercial management is not exactly the same as port security. If it really insists on pressing ahead with this deal, the administration should have a chance to demonstrate why, at a time when our homeland is a target and it takes very few operatives to execute a massive attack, we should be comfortable with the UAE in such a prominent role at our borders — even if security remains primarily the task of the Department of Homeland Security.
But the administration should make that case to Congress and the American people, not to a secret tribunal (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) which is run by the Treasury Department — rather than the Pentagon or DHS — and for whom the promotion of commerce has pride of place over national security.
Which is all to say: This transaction needs a long, careful look. It doesn’t need stone-throwing from opportunists who would be better advised to check their own glass houses. And it doesn’t need bully-pulpit demagoguery.
You don’t need to be an “Islamophobe” to have doubts here. You just need to have an IQ of about 11.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200602231409.asp
I've been to Dubai, so my impressions are based on personal observation. Upon what do you base your negativity? Where do you get your marching orders?
To Moderator:
if my post #412 was inappropriate, please delete it.
thanks.
"UAE they strongly suggested that he not leave the resort areas."
This one made me chuckle. I was in Washington DC in October and got a very similar warning!
I go to the UAE (well Dubai to be specific) a couple of times a year. In fact I will be there this coming Friday. It's a safe, clean modern country of such spectacular ambition that it blows your mind. It is to the Middle East as Hong Kong is to China. An example of how it all could work if we put our minds to it, despite our differences. The real danger from this furore over nothing is that Arabs who have bought into the US message that it is a war on radical islam, not a war on Arabs per se, will begin to have doubts...
So many have no clue how they are making it harder for good guys to accomplish the mission. They are so frightened, and so full of hatred, that they don't care about the thousands of Americans and British and others who are embedded with Arab organizations in Muslim countries and dependent upon those people for their continued survival and the successful prosecution of the war.
So what? Before 9-11, Norman Schwartzkopf used to say that kind of stuff about Saudi Arabia. I wonder what he thinks of them now.
Do you think Franks will have "nothing but praise" for the UAE the next time we get hit?
Frankly, I don't give a damn. This deal stinks, and even if it clears its well deserved (and nearly neglected) scrutiny, I expect to never feel comfortable with it.
Bumpasaurous to you too.
Did you hear the double-speak and stonewalling coming from our Homeland Insecurity Secretary Michael Chertoff on this deal?
What a buracratic joke!
Hey Chertoff; Secure our borders!
Your comment was: "I've been to Dubai, so my impressions are based on personal observation. Upon what do you base your negativity? Where do you get your marching orders?"
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My marching orders? Sheesh.
As for Dubai and the UAE, I'm afraid your rather vague, personal endorsement isn't compelling.
Following is a small selection of other views concerning Dubai and the UAE that you might wish to consider:
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From US News and World Report:
An Unlikely Criminal Crossroads
12/5/05
"From Egypt to Afghanistan, when terrorists and gangsters need a place to meet, to relax, maybe to invest, they head to Dubai, a bustling city-state on the Persian Gulf. The Middle East's unquestioned financial capital, Dubai is the showcase of the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich federation of sheikdoms. Forty years ago, Dubai was a backwater; today, it hosts dozens of banks and one of the world's busiest ports; its free-trade zones are crammed with thousands of companies. Construction is everywhere--skyscrapers, malls, hotels, and, soon, the world's tallest building."
"But Dubai also serves as the region's criminal crossroads, a hub for smuggling, money laundering, and underground banking. There are Russian and Indian mobsters, Iranian arms traffickers, and Arab jihadists. Funds for the 9/11 hijackers and African embassy bombers were transferred through the city. It was the heart of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's black market in nuclear technology and other proliferation cases."
"Half of all applications to buy U.S. military equipment from Dubai are from bogus front companies, officials say. "Iran," adds one U.S. official, "is building a bomb through Dubai." Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents thwarted the shipment of 3,000 U.S. military night-vision goggles by an Iranian pair based in Dubai. Moving goods undetected is not hard. Dhows--rickety wooden boats that have plowed the Arabian Sea for centuries--move along the city center, uninspected, down the aptly named Smuggler's Creek."
"U.A.E. rulers have taken terrorism seriously since 9/11, but Washington has a half-dozen extradition requests that they refuse to honor. The list includes people accused of rape, murder, and arms trafficking, and the last fugitive of the BCCI banking scandal. The country has put money laundering controls on the books but has made few cases. Interior Minister Sheik Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan told U.S. News the U.A.E. has made great strides in cracking down, but he insists that the real problems lie elsewhere. "We are a neutral country, like Switzerland," he says. "Give us the evidence, and we will do something about it. Don't blame others." Not everyone agrees. "All roads lead to Dubai," says former treasury agent John Cassara, author of Hide and Seek, a forthcoming book on terrorism finance. Cassara tried explaining U.S. concerns about Dubai to a local businessman but got only a puzzled look: "Mr. John, money laundering? But that's what we do."
-David E. Kaplan
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051205/5terror.b1.htm
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December 29, 2005:
"Retired Professor Emeritus in the mathematics department of Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, M C Puri, was killed and four serving scientists were injured when an unidentified gunman opened fire indiscriminately on a group of scientists as they were coming out of a conference hall in the prestigious Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore on Wednesday." "The explosions were carried out by Dawood Ibrahim, then based in Dubai, with the help of some Mumbai-based Muslims, who were taken to Pakistan via Dubai and got trained and armed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence."
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/dec/29raman.htm
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“In April of this year, Treasury released a list of Saddam front companies its investigation has so far uncovered, including a major Oil-for-Food contractor in the UAE, Dubai-based Al Wasel & Babel. Along with trying to procure a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system for Saddam, Al Wasel & Babel did hundreds of millions' worth of business with Baghdad under Oil-for-Food, and was just one of some 75 contractors authorized by the U.N. to deal with Saddam out of the UAE. (As it happens, the 9/11 Commission found that some of the hijackers' funding flowed through the UAE, but working backward from the al Qaeda end, the trail eventually vanishes.)"
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/436zhuju.asp?pg=2
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March 4, 2004:
WASHINGTON - "America's relations with Pakistan and several other Asian countries have been rocked by the discovery of the vast smuggling network run by the Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Unfortunately, one American ally at the heart of the scandal, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, seems to be escaping punishment despite its role as the key transfer point in Dr. Khan's atomic bazaar."
"Dubai's involvement is no surprise to those who follow the murky world of nuclear technology sales. For the last two decades it, along with other points in the emirates, has been the main hub through which traffickers have routed their illegal commerce to hide their trails. Yet the United States, which has depended on the emirates as a pillar of relative stability in the Middle East and, since 1991, as a host to American troops, has done little to pressure it to crack down on illicit arms trade."
"In the wake of the Khan scandal, Washington has at least acknowledged the problem. President Bush singled out SMB Computers, a Dubai company run by B. S. A. Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman living in Malaysia, as a "front for the proliferation activities of the A. Q. Khan network."
"According to the White House, Mr. Tahir arranged for components of high-speed gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium so it can be used in nuclear weapons, to be manufactured in Malaysia, shipped to Dubai and then sent on to Libya. (In its investigation, the Malaysian government implicated another Dubai company, Gulf Technical Industries.)"
"American authorities say that Mr. Tahir also bought centrifuge parts in Europe that were sent to Libya via Dubai. In return for millions of dollars paid to Dr. Khan, Libya's leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, was to get enough centrifuges to make about 10 nuclear weapons a year."
"Why ship through Dubai? Because it may be the easiest place in the world to mask the real destination of cargo. Consider how the Malaysian government is making the case for the innocence of its manufacturing company. "No document was traced that proved" the company "delivered or exported the said components to Libya," according to the country's inspector general of police. The real destination, he said, "was outside the knowledge" of the producer. One can be certain that if the Khan ring's European suppliers are ever tracked down, they will offer a similar explanation."
"Dubai provides companies and governments a vital asset: automatic deniability. Its customs agency even brags that its policy on re-exporting "enables traders to transit their shipments through Dubai without any hassles." Next to Dubai's main port is the Jebel Ali free trade zone, a haven for freewheeling international companies. Our organization has documented 264 firms from Iran and 44 from rogue regimes like Syria and North Korea."
"With the laxity of the emirates' laws, there is simply no way to know how many weapon components have passed through. . . ."
http://www.wisconsinproject.org/pubs/editorials/2004/dubai-oped-nyt-030404.htm
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Just a little 9/11 connection?
"One of Moussaoui's associates and co-conspirator was Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, the key financier of the WTC attack. Al-Hawsawi first opened a bank account in a Standard Chartered Bank branch in Dubai, UAE with a cash deposit. On the same day, another of his friends, Fayez Rashid AH Alqadi Bamihammad too opened an account in the same bank. Less than a month later, Bamihammad gave a power of attorney to Hawsawi to operate his accounts. Hawsawi picked up Bamihammad's Visa and ATM cards from the Dubai branch and shipped them to Florida between July 18 and August 1, 2001. Bamihammad was one of the terrorists who flew the United Airlines flight 175 into the World Trade Center's south tower. . . . On September 11, 2001, al-Hawsawi flew from Dubai to Karachi to take shelter."
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And following is an excerpt from an interesting February 18, 2002, Washington Post article:
"The interviews offered a tantalizing glimpse into the critical yet mysterious role played by gold in the finances of Al Qaeda, both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks. Gold has allowed the Taliban and bin Laden largely to preserve their financial resources, despite the military attack that battered their forces in Afghanistan, investigators and intelligence sources said."
"Al Qaeda also used diamonds purchased in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, tanzanite from Tanzania and other commodities to make money and hide assets. But gold played a uniquely important role in the group's financial structure, investigators and intelligence sources said, because it is a global currency."
"'Gold is a huge factor in the moving of terrorist money because you can melt it, smelt it or deposit it on account with no questions asked,' said a senior U.S. law enforcement official investigating gold transactions. 'Why move it through Dubai? Because there is a willful blindness there.'"
"Since it is exempt from international reporting requirements for financial transactions, gold is a favored commodity in laundering money from drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorist activities, U.S. officials said. In addition, Dubai, one of seven sheikhdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, has one of the world's largest and least regulated gold markets, making it an ideal place to hide."
"Dubai is also one of the region's most open banking centers and is the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates, one of three countries that maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban until shortly after Sept. 11. Sitting at a strategic crossroad of the Gulf, South Asia and Africa, Dubai has long been a financial hub for Islamic militant groups. Much of the $500,000 used to fund the Sept. 11 attacks came through Dubai, investigators believe."
"'All roads lead to Dubai when it comes to money,' said Patrick Jost, who until last year was a senior financial enforcement officer in the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. 'Everyone did business there.' When the U.S. bombs began pounding Taliban and Al Qaeda targets last autumn, the rush of gold and money out of Afghanistan intensified."
"The Pakistani financial authorities said that $2 million to $3 million a day is usually hand-carried by couriers from Karachi to Dubai, mostly to buy gold. Late last year that amount increased significantly as money was moved out of Afghanistan, they said."
"Pakistani and U.S. officials estimate that $10 million from Afghanistan was taken out by courier over three weeks in late November and early December. The Taliban's fighters fled Kabul on Nov. 12 and abandoned Kandahar on Dec. 7."
http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/corrupt/2002/0218gold.htm
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U.A.E.: Central Bank Freezes 62 Accounts:
"In response to the U.S. Bulletin the central bank of the U.A.E. has frozen the banking accounts of 62 organizations and individuals suspected of connections with Al-Qa'ida."
"Among these are two prominent Muslim banking and money-changing organizations, the "Al-Taqwa" and "Al-Barakat." The following is a partial listing of these entities as an indication of the width and breadth of their activities and geographical expansion:
Al- Barakat Bank: Somalia, Dubai (U.A.E.)
Al-Barakat International (a.k.a. BARACO Co.): Dubai, U.A.E.
Barakat Wiring Service: Minneapolis, MN
Barakat International: Sweden
North America Barakat, Inc.: Toronto, Canada
Barakat Telecommunications (a.k.a. Btelco): Somalia, Holland
Barakat Enterprise: Columbus, OH
Barakat Wire Transfer: Seattle, WA
Taqwa Trade, Property and Industry Co: Vaduz, Liechtenstein
Bank Al-Taqwa Ltd.: Nassau, Bahamas"
"The United States has accused Bank Al-Barakat and Bank Al-Taqwa and their subsidiary financial institutions of operating unofficial money transfer known as "hawala" in the millions of dollars from their extensive network system to terrorist organizations and for keeping no records of their transactions."
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=economic&ID=EA1201
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"Financial investigators tracking al Qaeda assets rely heavily on data and paper trails from commercial banks and financial regulators in pursuing and investigating leads. Such data have included the tracing of wire transfers between suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta and Shaykh Saiid of Dubai, believed to be one of Osama bin Laden's key financial operatives."
"Unfortunately, these efforts have achieved little success to date in reaching the core of the al Qaeda financial network."
"The problem is that much of the organization's funding mechanisms—like its cells—are small and inconspicuous, often using a traditional Muslim method of money exchange called Hawala."
"Although Pakistan, India, and the Persian Gulf states are home to the largest concentration of Hawala organizations, Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, perhaps handles the largest volume of transactions. The system has global reach. Investigators believe Hawala organizations exist throughout the United States and Europe."
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/nov02/southAsia.asp
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You may also wish to peruse the US State Department's Human Rights reports on the UAE (patriarchal and tribal rule, trafficking in persons, the predominance of Shari'a law and courts, etc.)
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/41734.htm
And as noted in the CIA Factbook, as of January 10, 2006: "The UAE is a drug transshipment point for traffickers given its proximity to Southwest Asian drug producing countries; the UAE's position as a major financial center makes it vulnerable to money laundering; anti-money-laundering controls improving" (improving, eh? very reassuring)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ae.html
Spamming works both ways, hero.
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