The War In The West

Claudia Rossett has a long article on Fox
News (hat tip reader K) describing the possible link between Al-Qaeda and
the UN's Oil for Food Program. She focuses on the unusual role of the Malaysian
Swiss Gulf and African Chamber (MIGA) in receiving millions of dollars in overpayments
from Saddam Hussein in conjunction with the circumstance that its principal
corporate officers are on a variety of Al-Qaeda watchlists.

As the Oil-for-Food program actually worked, however, the United Nations
let Saddam choose his own business partners. The world body also kept secret
the details of those contracts and the identities of the contractors, and it
let Saddam graft at least $4.4 billion out of the program through manipulated
contract prices, by estimates of the U.S. General Accountability Office.

Saddam's standard scam was to underprice oil sales and overpay for relief
supplies, thus generating fat profits for his business partners. Many of those
contractors would kick back part of the take to Saddam's regime � or divert
it to whatever uses Saddam might fancy. By various accounts, those uses ranged
from building palaces to buying arms to supplying Saddam's sadistic son Uday
with equipment for torturing Iraqi athletes.

One of the big questions is whether any of the money skimmed from
Oil-for-Food also slopped into terrorist-financing ventures such as MIGA.

The circumstantial evidence is pretty damning. Rossett describes MIGA as a
"terrorist chamber of commerce". Its founder and president, Ahmed
Idris Nasreddin was on a watchlist of suspected Al-Qaeda financiers, as was his
business partner Youssef Nada. Another MIGA founder, who remains unindicted
still runs the far-flung Hayel
Saeed Anam Group of Companies (HSA) which continues to operate worldwide.
The HSA was also a large player in the Oil for Food Program and handled at least
$400 million in transactions for the former dictator.

The trail peters out behind the wall of confidentiality the United Nations
has flung over the Oil for Food documents. But one of Rosett's resource links is
to the United
States Office of Foreign Assets Control, part of the Department of the
Treasury.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") of the US
Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade
sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against
targeted foreign countries, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers,
and those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction. OFAC acts under Presidential wartime and national emergency
powers, as well as authority granted by specific legislation, to impose
controls on transactions and freeze foreign assets under US jurisdiction. Many
of the sanctions are based on United Nations and other international mandates,
are multilateral in scope, and involve close cooperation with allied
governments.

Although there is little new detail to be found there, OFAC provides a list
of Specially Designated Nationals (a watchlist) available as delimited text
files. There are three tables. The parent table, SDN, contains a list of
blacklisted organizations, individuals and ships. There is a detail
address table called ADD and a table of aliases called ALT which I whacked into
SQL Server. These seem to be in the public domain and if anyone is willing to
host a download site, I can email him the .BAK files. (Approximately 3 MB in
size).

If we breakout the distribution of countries of blacklisted individuals
(businessmen) who are on the terrorism watchlist (there are other types of
watchlists) we get this (I've ommitted the those with counts smaller than 2).

Country	Number in watchlist
Italy	56
Germany	12
Afghanistan	6
Switzerland	6
Pakistan	5
England	4
Belgium	3
Lebanon	3
Somalia	3
Morocco	2
Syria	2
Gaza (Palestinian Authority)	2

However, if we look at the distribution of countries of blacklisted
terrorist-affiliated funding organizations we get a different, but not
altogether surprising list:

Country	Number in watchlist		Country	Number in watchlist
Somalia	22		Iraq	2
U.A.E.	19		Lebanon	2
Pakistan	14		Spain	2
U.S.A.	9		Turkey	2
Afghanistan	9		Belgium	2
Bosnia-Herzegovina	6		Azerbaijan	2
Liechtenstein	6		Albania	2
Italy	6		Algeria	2
United Kingdom	6		Austria	2
Yemen	5		Ethiopia	2
Sweden	4		France	2
Switzerland	4		Gaza Strip	2
Bahamas	4		Georgia	2
Bangladesh	3		Germany	2
Canada	3
Netherlands	3
West Bank	3

Though this tells us nothing about MIGA or HSA specifically it provides a
suggestive statistical picture of the way in which terrorist funding (at the
least the part we know about) may operate. The real surprise for me is how many
of the individual terrorist moneymen are associated with Italy, Germany and
Switzerland, and I wonder if there is any connection between the frequency
distribution and adjacency to the Swiss border. MIGA for example, was according
to the Rossett's report headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland. The second list is
more suggestive of places that are either world financial centers or places
where shell companies can be established without too many questions asked.
Because OFAC releases a new list for each year it will be fascinating to do a
time-series to see how the shape of the terrorist money funding machine has
changed over the last year. Maybe not by much. The topography of the financial
system does not change overnight any more than that of the hills.

Armies unconsciously return to same battlefields over the course of centuries
because topography compels them to same patch of disputed ground. (Al-Anbar
contains not only the Sunni towns but the smuggling routes to Syria. Falluja was
a smuggling center. There's a reason people fight in particular places.) For
like reason the battle over terrorist finances will probably return to the
financial centers, laundering sites and multilateral organizations which are
their commanding heights. Like the Ides of March in Julius Caesar, the United
Nations Oil For Food Program may have come, but they are not yet gone.