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| Arabia |
| Saudi money doing suspicious things - (the surprise here is that MSNBC is reporting it) |
| 2004-04-04 |
| EFL By Michael Isikoff A federal investigation into the bank accounts of the Saudi Embassy in Washington has identified more than $27 million in "suspicious" transactions—including hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Muslim charities, and to clerics and Saudi students who are being scrutinized for possible links to terrorist activity, according to government documents obtained by NEWSWEEK. The probe also has uncovered large wire transfers overseas by the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. [the article has a picture with Bandar and GWBush - some of the hard left is pro Arab, but others might use this to smear Bush - not that it will fool anyone with the brains that God gave to goats] The transactions recently prompted the Saudi Embassy’s longtime bank, the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., to drop the Saudis as a client after embassy... [coincidentally I closed my account with these people in 2002 also but it was because they raised the price for a lockbox so high I decided to buy one for my house and didn’t need theirs - so I also closed the savings account I had there which qualified me for the lockbox] |
| Posted by:mhw |
| #3 The 9/11 lawsuit leagle beagles are investigating Riggs Bank too... |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2004-04-04 9:29:20 PM |
| #2 Anyone who considers the Saudis to be a friend of America is flat out delusional. Their blind eye and carte blanche attitude regarding Wahhabism has bred up much of the terrorism in our world today. We should have boycotted and sanctioned them ages ago. Let them drink oil. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-04-04 5:22:19 PM |
| #1 I doubt they will find any big smoking guns in this, the Saudis don't need to use their embassy's accounts - they (including powerful connected Saudi individuals and their companies) have tens of thousands of other accounts to launder payoffs to whomever. I understand this is an attempt to link activity directly to the Saudi Gov't - so do the Saudis. It won't find dick. I knew a guy in Saudi in '92 who was the security advisor for one of the significant Saudi Princes. He was planning arrangements for his Prince to visit the US with his entourage. The Prince had directed him to bring $500K in USD cash for incidentals. My friend suggested they use traveller's checks, instead - for saftey and to prevent theft by insiders(heh). The Prince refused because he did not want to sign anything - giving no reason. So My friend called CitiBank and got him a set of credit cards, with signatory rights for those designated by the Prince, against a new account and wired the half-million to fund it. Now this wouldn't be a big deal (except that they needed $500K for incidentals - us little people must understand and accept such a staggering figure) if that had been all there was to it. But it wasn't. By the time the 5 week visit was over, my friend had needed to put another $2.2M into the account. This was for a minor vacation for a single Prince of The Magic Kingdom. The story's reference to "hundreds of thousands of dollars" is trivial to these people. Scale, people. Scale. I'm no friend of the House of Saud, but they are smater than this - and the fact that we will never get a straight answer about any transfers which look fishy but we can't prove anything -and- the fact that we can't force them to do dick, makes this a political game - much like the 9/11 Commission - and prolly won't result in diddley-squat. Tracing backward from the bad guys strikes me as a far more effective technique. When / if it hits the stone wall of SAMA (S.A. Monetrary Agency) then you're screwed - they don't control their system, regards accounts, closely because they don't want accounts under scrutiny, certainly not by an external agency. I've related how my banks accounts there were handled in past posts, so I won't repeat it, but the core problem is that we have to prove our case outside of SA and we have to accept that they wouldn't need to use Official Gov't accounts to do their slimy payoffs and bribes, whether to a jihadi or a UN or State Dept official. So, there's this stolen 40km wide strip along the Eastern coast of Saudi Arabia that provides the funding for the vast majority of the terror in the world and removing it from the hands of turbans of any stripe would stop the insanity dead in its tracks in 90 days... |
| Posted by: .com 2004-04-04 4:20:18 PM |