and terrorist banking along with a whole bunch of looting of American assets, illegal nuclear proliferation, and political corruption and vote buying by foreign interests, mostly carried out by Saudi bankers and the Royal Family.
This is why the CIA and FBI have found it so hard to shut down these terrorist financial networks. Bush allowed it to happen, and his GOP pals cashed in, along with a bunch of other nasty characters around the world. See,
The Saudi Prince's Secret: Bush, Sr. Sold-Out CIA to Build ...
Khan’s one-stop shop for WMDs made it just as easy for the CIA to keep track ..... Bush-Cheney Closed Down U.S. Counterterrorism Along with the CIA's Khan ...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1281780 - 312k - Jul 24, 2007 - Cached - Similar pages
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118530038250476405.html?mod=hps_us_pageoneThe Al Rajhi empire includes hotels, housing developments, commodities trading, shipping, aviation leasing and poultry. Its core is the bank, with more than 500 branches in Saudi Arabia and other offices abroad, from Pakistan to Malaysia. For 2006, the publicly held institution reported $1.9 billion in profit and $28 billion in assets. Sulaiman Al Rajhi grew up in the Nejd desert, the birthplace of a severe form of Islam, called Wahhabism, that forbids birthday parties, musical instruments and photographing people. In the 1940s, he and a brother, Saleh, went to the Saudi capital city. "From literally nothing -- making change on what were then the dirt streets of Riyadh -- Sulaiman and Saleh al Rajhi built the Al Rajhi Bank," Sulaiman's lawyers told a U.S. court in New York in 2005. Sulaiman described the business in a rare interview with Euromoney magazine in 1983. With two other brothers, he and Saleh began changing money for pilgrims taking camel caravans across the desert to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. When throngs of migrant workers came to Saudi Arabia during the 1970s oil boom, the Al Rajhis helped them send their earnings home to places like Indonesia and Pakistan. In 1983, the brothers won permission to open Saudi Arabia's first Islamic bank, one that would observe religious tenets such as a ban on interest.
But relations with the ruling family frayed. The government-controlled press in 1992 publicized Al Rajhi Bank's tangential role in an international scandal of that era, that of the bank called BCCI, U.S. diplomats reported. Then in 1994, an infant relative of the Al Rajhis died in a kidnapping. Official press accounts said the kidnappers slit the child's throat, but Saudi dissidents claimed police shot the child. Mr. Al Rajhi blamed the royal family, the CIA report says.
Although Al Rajhi Bank continued to make a show of support for the Sauds -- annual reports had flowery tributes to the royal family -- the bank began refusing to make loans to the Sauds or to finance their projects, U.S. diplomats said at the time. With its Islamic procedures, the bank was a magnet for the clerical establishment, which grew rich from alms amid the oil boom. As the clerics' charities spread, they became entwined with Al Rajhi Bank and the conservative Al Rajhi family's own extensive financial support for Islamic causes. There is no reliable estimate of how much the Al Rajhis have given to promote Islam over the years, but an endowment holding much of Saleh Al Rajhi's wealth gives an indication of the scale. Its Web site details nearly $50 million in direct donations within the kingdom to Islamic causes and at least $12 million in donations abroad. The overseas money went to aid embattled Muslims in Kosovo, Chechnya and the Palestinian territories and to finance Islamic instruction. There are indications not all the giving was for such purposes. The Al Rajhi name appeared on a list of regular financial contributors to al Qaeda that was discovered in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 2002. The list was authenticated for the Federal Bureau of Investigation that year by America's top judicial witness against al Qaeda, a onetime al Qaeda business manager named Jamal Al Fadl, who is in the federal witness-protection program. He called the contributor list the "golden chain."
A 2003 German police report said Sulaiman Al Rajhi and other family members had contributed more than $200,000 in 1993 to a charity that financed weapons for Islamic militants in Bosnia, in addition to providing humanitarian aid. The 2003 CIA report tells of efforts by two Al Rajhi brothers to keep some giving secret. It says that Sulaiman and Saleh transferred $4 million to parties in Germany and Pakistan in December 1998 using "a unique computer code to send funds at regular intervals to unspecified recipients, suggesting they were trying to conceal the transactions and that the money may have been intended for illegitimate ends." The report says extremists "ordered operatives in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen" to use Al Rajhi Bank. Mamduh Mahmud Salim, convicted mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, was carrying records of an Al Rajhi account (number 001424/4) when arrested in Germany in 1998, German police found.
In 2000, the CIA report says, Al Rajhi Bank couriers "delivered money to the Indonesian insurgent group Kompak to fund weapons purchases and bomb-making activities." A U.S. intelligence memo dated Nov. 16, 2001, says a money courier for Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, traveled on a visa that the bank had obtained for him. The memo adds, however: "Reporting does not indicate whether bank management was witting" of the courier's terrorist connections. Al Rajhi Bank maintained at least 24 accounts and handled unusual transactions for Al-Haramain foundation -- a charity that Treasury officials say has acted as a front for al Qaeda in 13 countries -- until the Saudi government ordered the charity shut down in late 2004, according to intelligence and law-enforcement reports. The United Nations has designated top officials of Al-Haramain foundation as terrorists, and most of its offices now are closed.
According to a federal indictment in Oregon, a top Al-Haramain official in 2000 carried $130,000 in $1,000 traveler's checks from Portland to Riyadh and deposited them with Al Rajhi -- funds the indictment says were for the ultimate benefit of al Qaeda fighters in Chechnya. The indicted official, Soliman Al-Buthe, now works for the city of Riyadh. In an interview, he confirmed carrying the checks and depositing them with Al Rajhi Bank but said that they weren't for al Qaeda and that he did nothing wrong.
A Jidda-based charity called the International Islamic Relief Organization, or IIRO, arranges for donors to send their donations directly to the Al Rajhi Bank. The IIRO's chairman, Adnan Khalil Basha, says the charity is "absolutely apolitical" and has elaborate spending controls to prevent illicit diversions. The charity says it works with Al Rajhi Bank simply because its fees are low and its service is best. However, the U.N. has labeled two of the IIRO's branches and some of its officials as al Qaeda supporters. In 2004, the IIRO solicited donations through Al Rajhi Bank for the Iraqi city of Fallujah, then largely under the control of insurgents and the base of the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who led al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The IIRO's workers oversaw construction of a trauma clinic in an insurgent-controlled area of Fallujah. The U.S. saw the clinic as a haven for insurgent fighters, and Marines destroyed it in November 2004. That was "a big tragedy for us," says the IIRO's chairman, Mr. Basha. He denies the charity had any involvement with the Iraqi insurgency. Charity officials complain that the U.S. has produced no evidence of their alleged ties to terrorism.
Two years earlier, federal agents raided the Virginia offices of a network of charities funded by Sulaiman Al Rajhi that worked closely with the IIRO and that -- according to Justice Department court filings -- provided funds to Palestinian terrorists. No charges have been filed. A year after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. authorities began to lament the lack of Saudi action in taking down terrorists' financial infrastructure. A November 2002 CIA report said the Saudi government "has made little independent effort to uncover terrorist financiers, investigate individual donors, and tighten the regulation of Islamic charities," largely because of "domestic political considerations." The report advised against a noisy confrontation: "A key factor for continued successful counterterrorism initiatives with the Saudis, whose society is by tradition private, closed, and conservative, will be to ensure that their cooperation with the United States is handled discreetly and kept as much as possible out of the public eye."
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