“The new thinking is that bin Laden’s fortune didn’t really enter into al Qaeda that much, or wasn’t the driving force in al Qaeda.”
The report from the September 11 commission concluded that al Qaeda has many financing avenues and could easily find new sources, particularly given the attack’s price tag of just $400,000 to $500,000 over two years.
While the report said the government has been unable to determine the source of the attack’s financing, the commission said it appears al Qaeda’s financial support doesn’t come from bin Laden personally.
“The CIA now estimates that it costs al Qaeda about $30 million per year to sustain its activities before 9/11 and that this money was raised almost entirely through donations,” the report said.
[ . . . ]
By February 2002, Katzman had updated the estimate, indicating that bin Laden may be worth anywhere from $50 million to $300 million, but that the group had apparently become self-sustaining. The change got little notice.
[ . . . ]
“When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fund-raising efforts by drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals that he had established during the Afghan war in the 1980s.”Responding to an inquiry from a Senate panel late last year, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said the overstated estimates about bin Laden’s wealth and his financial backing of al Qaeda actually trivialized the threat posed by his group.
Perhaps even more dangerous, bin Laden’s benefit to radical Islam is that he — “coming from a wealthy and influential family” — was considered a trusted person and had the ability to receive and dispose of charitable money, the office wrote in a memo, obtained by The Associated Press in April.
So not only is he on the loose, he’s just as or more dangerous than before, and his principal source of income is wealthy Saudis. And not only is Saudi Arabia a US client state (though I’m not sure the relationship really works out that way) but the Bush family has ties to the House of Saud going back three generations. I wonder if Dennis Hastert is going to show the same intensity about others who profit from the sale of addictive substances.