Terrorist financiers still traveling freely, running businesses
COX NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON-Two years after the United Nations Security Council designated nearly 300 people as terrorist financiers, most continue to elude authorities.
Some are running lucrative businesses in Europe and traveling without regard to a travel ban, according to recent United Nations report by the council's investigators.
"Many of the al-Qaida sources of funding remain uncovered and al-Qaida continues to receive funds it needs from charities, deep-pocket donors and business and criminal activities, including the drug trade," the U.N. report notes.
Just 86 of 191 countries have submitted reports to the U.N. on suspected terrorist financiers. Only a third of the countries that have complied have placed the designated terrorist financiers on their own border watch lists, according to the report issued earlier this month.
As money continues to flow to al-Qaida, the terrorist group hopes to acquire and use chemical and biological weapons, according to the head of the U.N. group monitoring the network.
"We believe there is every probability that they would try and do it if they could," Michael Chandler, chairman of the U.N.'s monitoring group on al-Qaida and Taliban sanctions, said in an interview. "We don't think they've acquired or perfected how to disperse or deliver them. That, thank God, is what is holding them up."
Another recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative agency of Congress, found that the federal government's law enforcement agencies do not "systematically collect and analyze data" on the variety of ways that terrorists fund their attacks.
Taken together, the two reports expose troubling vulnerabilities in the federal government's struggle to choke off funding to terrorist groups such as al-Qaida, lawmakers and terror finance experts say.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, a leading panel investigating the funding sources of al-Qaida, said her committee will hold a series of hearings on the subject when Congress reconvenes next month.
"Reports like this strongly suggest the U.S. and other nations need to take more aggressive public action against terrorist financiers," Collins said.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who ordered the GAO report with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he was dismayed by the studies' findings.
"At this point, we have yet to understand our enemy," said Durbin, who closely watches terrorist threats as a member of both the Senate intelligence and judiciary committees. "What I have learned from these two reports is there is a world below the radar of low-tech financing which can easily finance the low-budget, high-impact terrorism."
Jonathan Winer, who investigated terror financiers as the former deputy assistant secretary of state for international narcotics, said the U.N. report was especially troubling because it showed that governments around the world are not enforcing global sanctions intended to stop the money flowing to terrorists. |
