[Mitchell]

Thanks for the information. I didn't know about the connection between BCCI and bin Laden.

[BlackVeil]

The story of the links between BCCI and Bin Laden has yet to be written. One reason, I believe, why no one is tackling it is because it does not easily fall into either a left or right wing agenda - it is a story of Third World corruption and the real agenda of many Islamic "anti-imperialists", which is not to the taste of most progressive writers. But also, senior figures in both Democrat and Republican politics come out badly, along, of course with the CIA et. al. So conservatives are not motivated to get onto it.

One person writing about this is left-wing journalist Marsden. Apologies to post such an anti-Bush source, I am not promoting his analysis, just making reference to the facts he collected. Much of the stuff of BCCI was written in the 1990s, and reads even more alarmingly now. The strange tangle of oil money, the CIA, Islamic fundamentalists, drug dealers and bankers indicated an established network of covert operations, which could easily get out of control.

Wayne Marsden, "Questionable Ties" BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the ’80s in what has been called the “largest bank fraud in world financial history” by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. During the ’80s, BCCI also acted as a main conduit for laundering money intended for clandestine CIA activities, ranging from financial support to the Afghan mujahedin to paying intermediaries in the Iran-Contra affair... (Bin Mahfouz’s sister is also a wife of Osama bin Laden, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony.) http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/25/feature3.shtml