Hasan’s secret Santa

Earlier this month the Dallas Morning News reported that Nidal Malik Hasan may have wired funds to Pakistan prior to his Ft. Hood rampage.  I had originally speculated in a comment over at Sharia Finance Watch’s blog that the recipient of Hasan’s largesse was Al Qaeda.  But the intrepid Times of India is reporting now that Hasan’s dance partner was actually Lashkar-e-Taiba:

NEW DELHI: Investigations into the Fort Hood massacre have begun to point to acccused Nidal Malik Hasan’s links with Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Sources aware of the FBI investigations into the killings by Hasan said the army psychiatrist, who went on a rampage killing US armed forces personnel, regularly wired money to LeT in Pakistan. Coming just after the arrests of two Lashkar jihadis — David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana — the finding is seen as a manifestation of LeT’s growing clout in the US.

Congressman Peter Hoekstra had earlier claimed to have received information from independent sources that Hasan may have wired money to contacts in Pakistan suggesting that he had links with terror groups based in that country. Hoekstra, who is also a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said US agencies were probing Hasan’s links in Pakistan.

Investigations since, according to sources here, had identified recipients of Hasan’s money as Jamat-ud-Dawa — the front organisation of Lashkar. Sources said the accused, who regularly accessed Hafeez Mohammad Saeed’s speeches on JuD’s website — had wired thousands of dollars to contacts known to the LeT chief…

Meanwhile, the mainstream media still insist that LeT is solely interested in the Kashmir issue… If true, the report goes to show that jihadist organizations and sympathizers are jihadists first, and any regional focus is secondary to the broader jihad.

Are Western Union’s controls enough?

As the one-year anniversary of the 26/11 terrorist attacks against Mumbai passed yesterday, many questions in India remain unanswered.  Government officials are still prosecuting and arresting those involved, and are still trying to figure out what steps to take to prevent terrorist attacks in the future.

The role of Western Union money wires has come under special scrutiny in India, which receives $50 billion a year in remittances from Indians living in other countries.  Reportedly, Western Union has taken additional steps to verify the identity of those involved on both sides of the transaction.  The Economic Times offers this report:

MUMBAI: The person at the Western Union counter has a delicate job these days. When a burkha-clad lady steps into the agency, likely to collect the money her husband sends on the first Friday of every month from Muscat, she is politely asked to lift her veil just for a second — a standard operating procedure to make sure that the lady behind the veil is the same person whose photo appears on the ID.

Hawala still rampant 8 years after 9/11

At an anti-terrorism conference in India this week, one year after the jihadist attacks on Mumbai, the police chief for Jammu and Kashmir said that not enough is being done to stem the tide against hawala.  For readers who may be a little confused by hawala, this old diagram from the Washington Post illustrates the basics:

Unfortunately for our security in the world today, many hawala transactions are not so benign as WP’s cabbie scenario.  Here’s the real lowdown from The Hindu on the hawala today:

Jihadists demand their Koranic cut

Pakistan, a country that already has a fully Islamized tax system, isn’t done placating jihadist notions of Islamic public revenues just yet.  Now “insurgent” jihadists in Baluchistan are demanding a share of oil and mineral profits based on rates invented by Muhammad.  From Bloomberg:

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani invited insurgents in the country’s oil- and gas- rich southwest Baluchistan province for talks as he announced in Parliament a new package to end the fighting.

“The government hopes the proposed economic, political and constitutional reforms package will end deprivation of the people of the province,” Gilani said in the capital, Islamabad. He asked lawmakers to debate and approve the proposals soon.

Pakistan’s government says the insurgency in Baluchistan, which accounts for 44 percent of the country’s area, is backed and fueled by neighboring India and groups in Afghanistan. India denies the charge. The province produces a quarter of Pakistan’s natural gas output.

The Baluch group of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a tribal leader killed in an operation by security forces in 2006, says it’s fighting for rights for local people, including royalties from the minerals and fuels discovered in the province.

This article didn’t specify the amount, but as soon as I read the sentence above, I thought to myself, “I bet it’s 20 percent.”  And guess what their cut really is?

Diplomatic dynamite: ISI-Headley connection

Yours truly, American Delight, has been ALL OVER Pakistani-American Muslim David C. Headley with posts here on Money Jihad and comments (here and here) at Jihad Watch.  This is the creep who was arrested in Illinois for plotting against the Danish newspaper that printed the Muhammad cartoons, who traveled to India prior to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks to size up targets for Lashkar-e-Taiba, and whose buddy’s halal goat slaughterhouse was raided by the feds.  This is the only photo I could find.

Jihadist David Headley

Quite the looker… Is it just me or does Headley look like a Pakistani Michael Meyers?

Lately, I’ve also been posting about the troublesome activities of Pakistan’s intelligence service ISI, especially ISI’s connection to the jihadist organizations LeT and the Taliban.

Now it all comes together, as the Hindustan Times reports that David C. Headley may have been coordinating with the ISI prior to the Mumbai attacks:

Iran pushing trade with Latin America

As if his overtures within the Muslim world weren’t unsettling enough, Ahmadinejad is coming to our half of the earth again to stir the pot.  This time he’s trying to promote uranium extraction with Venezuela and “business” with Brazil (including sharia banking no doubt).  From the LA Times this morning:

In Brazil, Ahmadinejad and Lula are expected to sign cooperation agreements in biotechnology, energy and agriculture. An Iranian deputy foreign minister told the official Brazilian news agency last month that Tehran hopes to expand trade with Brazil to $15 billion from $2 billion in the petrochemical, energy, agricultural and medical fields.

About 200 Iranian businessmen are traveling with Ahmadinejad, who is scheduled to address the Brazilian Congress and speak to students in Brasilia.

Venezuela’s ambassador to Tehran announced this month that new uranium deposits had been discovered in Venezuela and that his country and Iran “are now cooperating on a research and development project,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

“At this juncture, Iran and Venezuela have no nuclear cooperation,” said David Velasquez Caraballo, the envoy. “But in the future, such cooperation might be established.”

These trade initiatives could end up facilitating Iran’s nuclear program.

Does anybody else miss the Monroe Doctrine?

Media whitewash hawala in Italy

As the investigation of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks expands throughout the planet, Italy has arrested two men involved with financing the attacks.  A Pakistani father and son who ran a “money transfer agency” are accused of transferring money to the 26/11 assailants the day before the attacks began.

Newspaper accounts (AP, Agence France-Presse, The Times), briefly summarize the arrests, briefly reference the Mumbai connection, and refer to the problem as “concealment” or “fraud.”

But they have all left out the obvious nexus between this “money transfer agency” and hawala, the Islamic system of debt transfers.

Following the money trail in Mumbai

Indian newspapers are abuzz these days about progress in the investigation of the Nov. 26, 2008, (“26/11”) attacks on Mumbai, which led to the deaths of more than 160 at the Taj Mahal & Oberoi hotels, a Jewish center, and hospital.

The bloody dividends of the money jihad (Mumbai, November 2008)

We know that the Pakistan and Kashmir based jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba was involved.  More recently, the role of two North American Muslims, David Headley (aka Daood Gilani) and Tahawwur Rana (who were arrested in Illinois last month on separate charges for their plot against the Danish newspaper that printed the Muhammad cartoons) has also been exposed.  Today, Money Jihad blog zeroes in on where Lashkar-e-Taiba, Headley, and Rana got their money in the first place.

New book shows Taliban’s hierarchical finances

In his new book Decoding the New Taliban, Antonio Giustozzi exposes the latest developments in Afghanistan’s most despicable organization.  As Money Jihad has pointed out several times, the Taliban is primarily funded through taxes imposed by Islam itself.  A review of the Giustozzi’s book offers even more proof: 

What Giustozzi tries to put a finger on is the development of the hierarchy with a definite command. Strict control, apparently, is maintained by the central leadership over commanders, who are transferred regularly and rested, along with the fighters, at certain intervals. The command structure has a lot to do with the financial control maintained by the leadership. Commanders, as Gretchen Peters points out in her study of the importance of the drug trade in financing the insurgency, are required to give to the leaders a steady amount through their collection of drug money via taxation at several junctures. The money comes back from the high command in the form of cash or weapons or other assistance.

First, it’s interesting that the Taliban use an itinerant system for small group leadership.  It shows that the Taliban is more interested in promoting their core jihadist ideas & beliefs as opposed to cultivating personal loyalties among platoons.

Second, the recognition that Taliban revenues originate from Islamic taxation at the local level reaffirms the argument I’ve been making all along about jihadist financing.  But I’m sick of being right.  I wish there weren’t a religion that imposes taxes to fund violence, murder, and oppression.

CIA pays billions to Pakistan’s spooks

If the Taliban is Frankenstein’s monster, who is Dr. Frankenstein, its creator?  That’s a close call between Saudi Arabia who provided the brain (through indoctrination of Afghans and Pakistanis at Saudi-funded Wahhabist mosques, madrassas, and orphanages), and Pakistan who provided the body (through personnel, funding, training, and political support).

Within fractious Pakistan, the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) has played a major role in the expansion of the Taliban in the 1990s, and in its survival today.  Despite this, the United States has continued to fund the ISI.  The full scope of American involvement has just been revealed this week:

Washington–THE CIA has funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan’s intelligence service since the September 11, 2001, attacks, accounting for one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget, according to current and former US officials.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had also collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that paid for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

US officials often tout US-Pakistani intelligence co-operation. But the extent of the financial underpinnings of that relationship has never been publicly disclosed. The CIA payments are a hidden stream in a much broader financial flow; the US has given Pakistan more than $US15 billion ($A16 billion) over the past eight years in military and civilian aid.