Sure money gets to them but my point is that post-bin laden and al queda central, assuming we coulf pull that off, no billionaire could do the transfers necessary to do bin laden redux.
Michael, ask yourself how the drug cartels manage to repatriate the Billions they make from selling narcotics in the US and Europe?
They don't necessarily have to move money. They can purchase commodities and manufactured goods with their drug proceeds, and then reship those back to their "home base", reaping an even great profit.
This is what the Nigerians were doing for a number of years. They would sell Heroin here in the states, then purchase used SUVs and other vehicles to be smuggled back to Nigeria, where they would be sold and the profits banked. The Columbians/Venezuelans were doing the same thing with appliances.
So it's not much of a stretch to believe terrorist finance networks are using the same methods.
Hawala is one method, but the amount of money that can be "transferred" is dependent upon the amount of money the Hawala operators have on either side of the transaction. Hawala networks, from my understanding, can only really work where there is a "balance of trade" (representing flows of money back and forth) between the Hawala operators. A Hawala operator asked to move a million dollars to Pakistan from the US has to find someone in that country willing to disperse that million dollars to the recipient holding the "chit". In return the Pakistani Hawala operator will need to find someone who wants to transfer 1 million dollars to the US (with that million being dispersed by the US operator). Either that, or the US operator has to figure out a means of transferring that million to his Pakistani based counter-party in order to balance out the books.
Hawk |
