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Bin Laden
as a fantasy figure
Riches beyond belief
Most of the factoids that have become canon about Osama bin
Laden and the financing of terror were estimates,
guesstimates or simply made up, as in the case of his
presumed $300m personal fortune. But these fantasies have
driven real and dangerous actions.
By Ibrahim Warde
09/04/07 "Le
Monde diplomatique"
-- - Michael Lewis, in Liar's Poker, his classic
portrait of Wall Street in the 1980s, described how he
invented "logical lies" as an investment banker to explain
otherwise inexplicable events to nervous clients. Asked why
the dollar fell, he would confidently say: "Several Arabs
had sold massive holdings of gold for which they received
dollars. They were selling those dollars for marks and
driving the dollar lower." In his words: "Most of the time
when markets move, no one has any idea why. A man who can
tell a good story can make a good living as a broker. And
it's amazing what people will believe... selling out of the
Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any
clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no
story involving Arabs could ever be refuted." (1).
That story was unavoidable in the wake of the 11 September
2001 attacks. No one knew anything specific about them. The
magnitude of the destruction suggested that a huge financial
and logistical infrastructure had been at work. With the
involvement of Osama bin Laden, usually described as a Saudi
billionaire and terrorist financier, and the participation
of 15 Saudi hijackers, the plausibility of the financial
argument coincided with a common stereotype. As Jack
Shaheen's comprehensive study of the portrayal of Arabs by
Hollywood suggests, they had long been associated with "vile
oil sheikhs with an eye for western blondes and arms deals
and intent on world domination, or with crazed terrorists"
(2). By joining two of the three stereotypes, the
billionaire and the bomber (the third was the belly dancer),
the events of 9/11 seemed to verify the truth of the
caricature.
An instant canon on terrorist financing was established in
the days after the attacks. The laundry list was familiar
and mindlessly repeated: the Bin Laden $300m fortune,
business fronts legal and illegal, Islamic charities,
Saudis, rich Arabs, hawalas, drugs, gold and diamonds, etc.
From the popular press to prestigious thinktanks, the lists
were almost identical. Repetition looked like corroboration.
The lackadaisical way in which the discourse on terrorist
finance had been constructed contrasted with the
authoritative way in which the dubious facts were cited and
recited.
After 2004 there was considerable new information available
about the financial war on terror, but such evidence had
little impact on perceptions or policies. Key players such
as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, and Michael Scheuer,
who headed the "virtual Bin Laden station" at the Central
Intelligence Agency, published memoirs or contributed to
books debunking much of what was commonly believed.
The publication of the September 11 Commission report in
August 2004 helped a clearer understanding of the reality
and contradicted much of the canon. The report, complemented
by a terrorist financing monograph, was based on "a
comprehensive review of government materials on terrorist
financing from essentially every law enforcement,
intelligence and policy agency involved in the effort".
The story lives on
The report and monograph made important points: they showed
how little money is needed for terror attacks; they debunked
the urban legend of the Bin Laden personal fortune; and they
hinted at the politicisation of terrorist financing
inquiries. Since Bin Laden had been singled out in 1998 as
Public Enemy Number One, the financial war was driven by the
belief that his $300m fortune was the core of the al-Qaida
funding network. The report confirmed that the figure was
fictive. Yet the story lives on. A Google search in April
2006 yielded 154,000 hits.
The $300m factoid seems to have originated in 1996, when a
State Department analyst inserted it in a fact sheet on Bin
Laden (3). It was arrived at by a rough calculation based on
approximate figures. The analyst divided assets of the Bin
Laden group (estimated at $5bn) by the number of sons
(estimated at 20). That gave $250m, which he rounded up to
$300m. The calculation rested on estimates and dubious
assumptions about the family, inheritance laws and
practices, the actual worth of the privately-held company
and its ownership structure. Though it was not even a
back-of-the-envelope calculation, the figure soon gained
absolute status.
Most accounts of Bin Laden after 11 September describe a
cave-dwelling heir and tycoon with close ties to the Saudi
establishment who ran his business empire and made shrewd
moves in the stock market while plotting terrorism. The
enduring legend became that "of the world's richest
terrorist, a business-savvy nomad who has used a vast
inheritance and a constellation of companies to finance a
global network of violence" (4).
With almost no exceptions, every news article, every
thinktank report, every book of revelations on terrorist
financing, has repeated the assertion that Osama bin Laden
had a $300m personal fortune, the basis of the financing for
al-Qaida. That figure has been unchanged since 1996: despite
a life of danger, Bin Laden's wealth stayed remarkably
stable: no gains or losses, no expenses or subsidies to
Taliban hosts, no confiscations and no accretions dented or
inflated it.
The terrorist-finance literature was a form of magic realism
- a mix of rich detail, surrealism and fantasy. Numbers were
necessary, even when invented, if only to lend precise
cachet to reports or analyses and, to paraphrase George
Orwell, give the "appearance of solidity to pure wind". The
lawsuit filed on 15 August
2002 against several Saudi princes, banks and charities
(Burnett v Al Baraka Investment and Development
Corporation), which came to be called "the lawsuit of the
21st century", sought "an amount in excess of $100trn" from
dozens of defendants (5). The lawsuit was thoroughly
prepared and lavishly financed. Yet on the day after it was
filed, the attorneys issued a correction, claiming that a
clerical error had misstated the amount asked: the
plaintiffs were only asking for $1trn. Perhaps the lawyers
had realised that the initial amount exceeded the GNP of all
countries in the world combined.
At the time of 9/11, the Bush administration was bent on
implementing an agenda of financial deregulation which
included dismantling much of the existing anti-money
laundering apparatus. The attacks caused a sharp policy
U-turn. With the zeal of the newly converted, those very
people who had been intent on dismantling the legislative
apparatus found themselves hastily and vigorously expanding
it.
More truthiness than truth
Throughout the war on terror, organised crime analogies came
easily to law enforcement agencies, as well as to
influential pundits. Michael Ledeen of the American
Enterprise Institute, one of the most influential
intellectuals in the early days of the war on terror,
described Osama bin Laden as "the CEO of a multinational
terrorist corporation... very imaginative at finding ways to
make money from his terrorist ventures... The best way to
think of the terror network is as a collection of mafia
families" (6).
In the 1980s the focus was on Central and Latin American
drug lords. After 9/11 the war on drugs was overshadowed by
the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. The massive shift of
resources resulted in a substantial mismatch. Those
government agents who did have some international experience
and cultural-linguistic skills were typically fluent in
Spanish and had no experience of the Islamic world. New
experts appeared who fitted the description of management
scholar Henry Mintzberg: "An expert has also been defined as
someone who knows more and more about less and less until
finally he or she knows everything about nothing. Perhaps
this means that if you understand only certain discrete
chunks, ultimately you understand nothing" (7).
Since none of the "$300m fortune" was traceable, a new
industry purported to reveal the secrets of its whereabouts.
Some practitioners were partisan hacks with a transparent
political agenda; others were imaginative writers eager for
a scoop. Those who made up the original allegations seemed
well-informed and were asked for further revelations. Steven
Emerson, a ubiquitous terrorist expert, said that
immediately after 9/11 he "fielded 1,000 calls, many from
news organisations" (8).
Another founding mythographer was Jack Kelley, star reporter
of USA Today, the largest circulation daily in the US, who
produced countless scoops until, in 2004, his paper
discovered a "pattern of lies and deceit". He found it easy
to write about terrorism and financing. Hiding behind
confidential and anonymous sources, he broke many of the
stories which have since entered the journalistic
bloodstream. They included an eyewitness account of young
Palestinian suicide bombers and their culture of death; the
revelation that prominent Saudi businessmen "worth more than
$5bn" continued to transfer tens of millions of dollars to
Bin Laden as "protection money to stave off attacks on their
businesses in Saudi Arabia"; and the discovery of computer
records in Afghan caves showing links between Chicago-based
Islamic charities and al-Qaida (9). For his suicide bomb
eyewitness account, he was a Pulitzer prize finalist.
With the 9/11 attacks, the lines between fact and fiction
were further blurred since the unbelievability of the events
lent credence to many of the wildest assertions about Arabs
and Muslims. Nobody then knew much about al-Qaida and Osama
bin Laden. Americans were ready to believe he was a James
Bond villain, rich enough to fund his own wars. Indeed, his
hidden wealth has captured the imagination of many
novelists. Chris Ryan's Greed (a bestseller, at least
according to its cover) bears more than a passing
resemblance to non-fiction purporting to reveal the secrets
of terrorism financing. A character says: "Al-Qaida has a
lot of money. Its roots are in Saudi Arabia, and that's a
rich place. But it has a lot of support right across that
region. There are contributions coming from everywhere -
Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia. That's what makes them so
deadly. Fanatics we can handle. Fanatics with cash are a
different story. Overall, we estimate the organisation has
at least $5bn at its disposal. They hide their money, and
they are good at it. So it could be a lot more" (10).
It could be said, to borrow from satirist Stephen Colbert,
that there is much more truthiness than truth in the
terrorist financing discourse - with truthiness defined as
what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts
are. The parallels between Bin Laden's hidden stash and
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are striking.
They caused the financial war against global terrorism and
regime change in Iraq. The usual suspects of terrorist
financing - rich Arabs, the Saudis, Islamic charities, etc -
became as familiar as the smoking guns of WMD - mobile labs,
aluminum tubes, Niger uranium, etc - that helped sell the
invasion of Iraq to the US public. Both wars created created
a new and very real problem through pursuing an imaginary
one.
________________________________________________________
Ibrahim Warde is adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (Medford,
Massachusetts). This is excerpted from The Price of Fear:
The Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror (IB Tauris and
University of California Press, 2007)
(1) Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage
on Wall Street (Norton, New York, 1989).
(2) Jack G Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a
People (Interlink Pub Group, New York, 2001).
(3) Kenneth Katzman, "Terrorism: Near Eastern Groups and
State Sponsors, 2001", Washington, DC, Congressional
Research Service, 10 September 2001.
(4) Karen DeYoung, David Hilzenrath and Robert O'Harrow Jr,
"Bin Laden's Money Takes Hidden Paths to Agents of Terror",
The Washington Post, 21 September 2001.
(5) Jennifer Senior, "Intruders In The House Of Saud", The
New York Times Magazine, 14 March 2004.
(6) Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters
(St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 2003).
(7) Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners
(Free Press, New York, 1994).
(8) Felicity Barringer, "Terror Experts Use Lenses of Their
Specialties", The New York Times, 24 September
2001.
(9) Jack Kelley, USA Today, 26 June 2001, 29 October
1999 and 30 January 2002.
(10) Chris Ryan, Greed (Arrow Books, London, 2004).
© 2007 Le Monde diplomatique
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