The Secret Finan­cial Net­work of Ter­ror
by Dou­glas Farah
2004, Broad­way Books
ISBN 0767915623
Illus­trat­ed, 240 pages.

From the pub­lish­er:
Why has the mon­ey trail around al Qae­da grown so cold? And how is it that, despite Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s vow to “choke off the flow of ter­ror­ist mon­ey” in the wake of 9/11, ter­ror groups are clear­ly still able to fund their oper­a­tions world­wide, as evi­denced by the Bali bomb­ing in Octo­ber 2002, the May 2003 sui­cide attacks in Riyadh, Sau­di Ara­bia, and the March 2004 train bomb­ings in Madrid that left 199 peo­ple dead and more than 1,800 oth­ers injured?

As revealed in Blood From Stones by vet­er­an inves­tiga­tive reporter Dou­glas Farah, the alarm­ing answer to these ques­tions is that al Qae­da and oth­er ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions such as Hezbol­lah have long fol­lowed a finan­cial diver­si­fi­ca­tion strat­e­gy that has ren­dered the crack­down by U.S. and oth­er gov­ern­ments almost use­less. The effec­tive­ness of this strat­e­gy has been aid­ed by diverse fac­tors: the rapid dereg­u­la­tion that came with finan­cial glob­al­iza­tion, which has enabled instan­ta­neous finan­cial trans­fers that are hard to trace; bit­ter in-fight­ing, dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion, and lack of cen­tral con­trol among U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies which con­tin­ue to ham­per our efforts to com­bat ter­ror­ism; and spe­cif­ic intel­li­gence fail­ures by the CIA which, on at least two occa­sions, missed the con­nec­tion between al Qae­da and the West African dia­mond trade.

From The Wash­ing­ton Post:
A Pro­tect­ed Friend of Ter­ror­ism
By Dou­glas Farah
Mon­day, April 25, 2005; Page A19
The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is tout­ing the rule of law and democ­ra­cy as pri­or­i­ties in its effort to cre­ate sta­bil­i­ty and defeat ter­ror­ism. Yet it remains curi­ous­ly apa­thet­ic about the activ­i­ties of one of the world’s most noto­ri­ous indict­ed war crim­i­nals, a man who is also an abet­tor of al Qae­da and Hezbol­lah. I am speak­ing of for­mer Liber­ian pres­i­dent Charles Tay­lor, who has not only escaped answer­ing for his crimes so far but who may be giv­en an oppor­tu­ni­ty to repeat them if the Unit­ed States does not act.
It seems to mat­ter lit­tle here... (Read com­plete arti­cle.)

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT.
Avail­able com­mer­cial­ly. Find out more about Dou­glas Farah.