The Middle East and your price at the pump

What to do about Syria?  One thing is to rid ourselves of the remaining vestiges of oil dependence on that part of the world.

In a recent op-ed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Chris Faulkner points out that Syrian energy output is minimal, but the political volatility puts a Middle Eastern premium onto our gas bills.  If we pursue further steps toward energy self-reliance in North America, we could minimize the risks of price volatility and supply disruptions.

Policies being proposed by the energy sector are making more sense than the policies being pursued by our elected officials.  Read it all:

Energy independence is the best response to Syria crisis

When an American missile strike in Syria seemed inevitable, oil futures shot up to a two-year high. Just days later, as U.S. officials began considering a diplomatic response, prices fell.

Many analysts have blamed these fluctuations on investor overreaction — Syria provides less than 0.1 percent of the world’s oil. But such assessments are dangerously naïve.

Any intervention in Syria would have impacted America’s access to oil and no one can safely assume there won’t be another Middle East crisis on the horizon.

That’s why the United States must reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Syria might not be a major oil producer or exporter, but one of President Bashar Assad’s chief supporters, Iran, holds the world’s fourth-largest proven conventional oil reserves.

More than that, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, a shipping lane that’s essential to the transport of roughly 35 percent of all seaborne oil.

There’s no telling what an Iranian response to a U.S. attack on Syria might look like, but if the mullahs even hint at shutting down the Strait, oil prices could jump dramatically.

The ripple effects of a U.S. military action wouldn’t stop there. A strike against Assad’s regime would inflame relations with other oil-rich nations.

The conflict has already worsened sectarian tensions in Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer of crude oil.

Even defusing the Syrian crisis won’t end the civil war there, nor diminish the prospect of future strife, rebellions, or war. Indeed, the Syrian civil war has stoked anew the centuries-old enmity between Islamic sects that threatens to engulf the entire region — a region that holds more than half of the world’s proven conventional oil reserves.

The situation in Syria has made clear why it’s so important for the United States to make certain our energy interests aren’t tied to the volatile politics of the Middle East.

In practice, this means embracing technologies like hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling and projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. These represent historic opportunities for America to gain greater control over our own energy security.

In the case of Keystone XL, a proposed pipeline that would deliver crude from western Canada’s vast oil sands to America’s Gulf Coast, the Obama Administration could dramatically increase the amount of oil we receive from our neighbor to the north.

The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that, once completed, the pipeline would deliver as much as 830,000 barrels of oil a day, or roughly half of what we currently import from the Middle East…

Canadian auditors: Game over for Islamic charity

It’s final.  ISNA’s tax-exempt status has been revoked by the Canada Revenue Agency after an efficient and pointed audit that revealed ISNA sent nearly $300,000 to a terrorist organization in Kashmir.  Language from auditors and tax professionals is normally guarded, nuanced, and measured.  Read with that understanding of their profession in mind, the public announcement by CRA of their findings is scathing.  An excerpt follows.  Thanks to the reliable Gisele for sending this in:

…Our analysis of the information obtained during the course of the audit has led the CRA to believe that the Organization had entered into a funding arrangement with the Kashmiri Canadian Council/Kashmiri Relief Fund of Canada (KCC/KRFC), non-qualified donees under the Act, with the ultimate goal of sending the raised funds to a Pakistan-based non-governmental organization named the Relief Organization for Kashmiri Muslims (ROKM) without maintaining direction and control. Under the arrangement, KCC/KRFC raised funds for “relief work” in Kashmir, and the Organization supplied official donation receipts to the donors and disbursed over $281,696 to ROKM, either directly, or via KCC/KRFC.

Our research indicates that ROKM is the charitable arm of Jamaat-e-Islami, a political organization that actively contests the legitimacy of India’s governance over the state of Jammu and Kashmir, including reportedly through the activities of its armed wing Hizbul Mujahideen. Hizbul Mujahideen is listed as a terrorist entity by the Council of the European Union and is declared a banned terrorist organization by the Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967.

Given the commonalities in directorship between ROKM and Jamaat-e-Islami, concerns exist that the Organization’s resources may have been used to support the political efforts of Jamaat-e-Islami and/or its armed wing, Hizbul Mujahideen.”

The Government of Canada has made it clear that it will not tolerate the abuse of the registration system for charities to provide any means of support to terrorism. Canada’s public policy recognizes that the tax advantages of charitable registration should not be extended to organizations whose resources may have been made available, knowingly or unknowingly, to a terrorist entity, whether such financing is direct or indirect through organizations that claim to have nominally “charitable,” social, or cultural aims…

Taliban nets 650 million rupees from ransoms

In the last 18 months, the Taliban has received at least Rs 650 million (over 6 million USD), in ransoms for kidnapping businessmen in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan.  The International News speculates that the real figure is higher than official reports—probably billions of Pakistan rupees.  Some of the captives’ families are able to pay the ransoms; some are not.  Those who don’t are killed:

Over Rs650m paid to Taliban as ransom

Billions of rupees paid but not reported; police, agencies totally flopped

Usman Manzoor

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

ISLAMABAD: Despite the payment of hundreds of millions from taxpayers’ money, not only the police but all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have failed to trace extortion and kidnapping for ransom cases in the federal capital and Rawalpindi, being carried out by the Taliban.

Latest official documents show that some Rs650 million have been paid to the Taliban by the businessmen of the twin cities during the last 18 months alone. The billions of rupees paid have not been reported to the police and agencies, and the businessmen have dealt secretly with the Taliban to save their lives.

Documents available with The News reveal that in Rawalpindi and Islamabad alone, a list of 45 cases of kidnapping for ransom and extortion has been prepared in which Rs653 million have been paid to Taliban while billions have remained undiscovered…

The report submitted to the high-ups of the police, accompanied by the list of 45 cases since January 2012, states that at least four traders have been killed by the Taliban for not obeying their command to pay ransom and extortion money…

The Taliban is biding their time until U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.  They’ve got plenty of money in the bank from schemes like this to coopt, bribe, or conquer Karzai.  While asset freezes and sanctions against Al Qaeda have been somewhat useful, Western financial pressure on the Taliban has been ineffective for a decade.

Financial mischief: recommended reading

• “We should bleed America economically,” says Zawahiri…  more>>

• It was a lot of fun laundering $1.4 million for terrorist guerrillas, until he got caught… more>>

• The Muslim Brotherhood created international sharia-compliant finance, and still controls it… under Saudi supervision.  More>>

• If Muhammad Atta II waltzed into SunTrust today, would he qualify for a bank account?  More>>

• Uzi Shaya could prove to be a crucial witness in the terror finance trial against the Bank of China—if Israel lets him testify… more>>

Al-Shabaab steals British foreign aid

As if we needed another reason to discontinue aid to such countries, al-Shabaab has given us another demonstration.  It is almost impossible to ensure that aid such as this gets to the right people who actually need it.

There are enough supply chain risks in war-torn countries like Somalia that most private sector companies wouldn’t invest in them or touch them with a ten-foot pole.  But Western governments swoop in without regard to the regulatory risks. The standards of compliance that apply to banks and multinational corporations, who are routinely excoriated for the slightest export control or anti-money laundering program deficiencies, don’t seem to apply to our governmental aid agencies.

From Channel 4 last month:

Muslim Brotherhood associates broker €2 million deal from Kuwait for Dutch mosque

Nooh al-Kaddo

Nooh al-Kaddo, who plays a leadership role in several European affiliates of the international Muslim Brotherhood, has positioned himself as a central dealmaker in obtaining financing from Kuwait for the controversial Blue Mosque in Amsterdam.

A special report from the Investigative Project on Terrorism has revealed that al-Kaddo secured €2 million from Kuwait to be funneled through the Europe Trust Netherlands (ETN), a leading Dutch-Muslim group.  In exchange the Kuwaitis largesse, Kuwait’s minister of religious affairs is being designated as the new the chairman of ETN.  Kuwait will also essentially retain control over mosque.

According to IPT, al-Kaddo runs the Islamic Cultural Center of Ireland (an entity tied to Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Youssef Qaradawi), serves as a trustee of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated charity Human Appeal International, and worked on the Kuwait/Blue Mosque deal with three other Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic leaders—Ahmed Al-Rawi, Yahia Bouyafa, and Yassin Elforkani.

Read it all at ITP here.  Hat tip to Arun and TCJR.

EU court further limits blacklisting authority

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) set a high bar this summer for justifying individual sanctions against terrorist financiers by tossing an appeal of the court’s earlier decision on sanctions against Yasin al-Qadi, the Saudi multimillionaire creator of the Muwafaq Foundation.

In 2008, the ECJ ruled that the authorities levying such sanctions had to provide a summary to the sanctioned individual of the information that led to the sanctions.  The European Commission complied by providing a summary to al-Qadi and his lawyers.

But ECJ and al-Qadi still weren’t satisfied.  An even higher standard has been promulgated:  the allegations in the summary must be “well founded.”  Surely, the litigants in the case which included the U.K., the European Commission, and the EU’s Council of Ministers, believed the evidence was well-founded enough to impose the sanctions, but not well-founded enough to meet the ever shifting standards of the ECJ.

The law firm of Brick Court Chambers notes that the judgment “is of considerable general significance in relation to the standard of review to be applied in sanctions cases, and the treatment of national security-sensitive material, in the European courts.”

Indeed.  The judgment essentially forces European governments to divulge sensitive intelligence to terrorists to explain why the terrorists are being sanctioned by those governments.

European Voice has a good article explaining the background and the ruling:

Top EU court clears Saudi terror suspect

By Toby Vogel  –  18.07.2013

European Court of Justice rules that the UK and the European Commission failed to provide evidence of Al-Qaeda links.

In a final judgment delivered today, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg has sided with Yassin Abdullah Kadi, a Saudi national who had fought his blacklisting by the United Nations and the European Union for over a decade.

Kadi was blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council in October 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, over alleged links to al-Qaeda, with the European Union following suit days later. He launched a legal challenge against the freeze of his considerable assets in the EU. In 2008, the ECJ ruled that his rights had been violated because he had not been given the reasons for his blacklisting. The United Kingdom, the European Commission and the EU’s Council of Ministers appealed against that ruling.

Following the 2008 ruling, the Commission provided Kadi with a summary of the reasons for his blacklisting and re-imposed sanctions against him.

The ECJ has now dismissed the appeal by the UK, the Council and the Commission, ruling that “no information or evidence has been produced to substantiate the allegations, roundly refuted by Mr Kadi, of his being involved in activities linked to international terrorism”, according to a summary of the judgment.

The Court also found while the summary the Commission gave to Kadi of the reasons for the sanctions was sufficiently detailed and specific, there was insufficient evidence for his alleged terrorist links.

While the court procedure was underway, and following a decade of litigation in the EU, the US and Switzerland, the UN last year removed Kadi’s name from its sanctions list, following a recommendation from the UN’s ombudsman. Once again, the EU simply implemented the UN’s decision and removed Kadi from its own list as well.

French burger joint robbed to fund Syrian jihad

Four Islamists from a 12-man terrorist cell in Paris have been arrested after an armed robbery of a fast food restaurant in Yvelines, France.  The men, all in their 20s or early 30s, stole 3,000 euros which authorities say would be used to finance jihad in Syria, including travel by cell members to the war front.

Some of the cell members have already departed for Syria.  French authorities say that at least 100 fighters currently in Syria are from France or were living in France prior to joining the battle against Bashar al-Assad.

Given that France has Western Europe’s largest Muslim population, the use of France as a funding base for Islamic terrorism is critically important to understand and monitor.  Thanks to Arun for sending this in from AP:

French police detain 4 suspected of robbing restaurant to finance jihad in Syria

Friday, September 6, 2013

By The Associated Press

PARIS – French authorities have detained four suspected extremists accused of robbing a fast food restaurant in order to finance their planned travel to fight alongside Islamic extremists in Syria.

Prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre says the four men, all French citizens, are being held on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act, as well as armed robbery of a Quick hamburger restaurant Wednesday in the suburbs of Paris.

She said the suspects were being questioned Friday by anti-terrorist investigators.

They can be held up to four days under France’s anti-terrorism laws.

More details are available in French from Europe1.

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Muslim Brothers’ revenue tactic: ransoming Copts

Copying the tactics of jihadists in Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Sahel, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has increasingly turned towards kidnap-for-ransom schemes as a fundraising method.  As the Brotherhood will also tell you, the imposition of ransoms is justified by Islamic law.  The revenues also help them buy arms or fund terrorists in the Sinai.

One difference, however, in the Egyptian case is that the captors seem to have an inflated sense of how much money the Coptic minority can pay to redeem their loved ones.  Many of the ransom demands are simply too high, resulting in no profit for the abductors and the death of the captive.

From the Middle East Forum:

Egypt: Christians Killed for Ransom

by Raymond Ibrahim
September 2, 2013

Not only are the churches, monasteries, and institutions of Egypt’s Christians under attack by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters—nearly 100 now have been torched, destroyed, ransacked, etc.—but Christians themselves are under attack all throughout Egypt, with practically zero coverage in Western media.

Days ago, for example, Copts held a funeral for Wahid Jacob, a young Christian deacon who used to serve in St. John the Baptist Church, part of the Qusiya diocese in Asyut, Egypt. He was kidnapped on August 21 by “unknown persons” who demanded an exorbitant ransom from his impoverished family—1,200,000 Egyptian pounds (equivalent to $171,000 USD). Because his family could not raise the sum, he was executed—his body dumped in a field where it was later found. The priest who conducted his funeral service said that the youth’s body bore signs of severe torture.

In fact, kidnapping young Christians and holding them for ransom has become increasingly common in Egypt. Last April, 10-year-old Sameh George, another deacon, or altar boy, at St. Abdul Masih (“Servant of Christ”) Church in Minya, Egypt, was also abducted by “unknown persons” while on his way to church to participate in Holy Pascha prayers leading up to Orthodox Easter. His parents said that it was his custom to go to church and worship in the evening, but when he failed to return, and they began to panic, they received an anonymous phone call from the kidnappers, informing them that they had the Christian child in their possession, and would execute him unless they received 250,000 Egyptian pounds in ransom money.

If those in Egypt being kidnapped and sometimes killed for ransom money are not all deacons, they are almost always church-attending Christians. Last April, for example, another Coptic Christian boy, 12-year-old Abanoub Ashraf, was also kidnapped right in front of his church, St. Paul Church in Shubra al-Khayma district. His abductors, four men, put a knife to his throat, dragged him to their car, opened fire on the church, and then sped away. Later they called the boy’s family demanding a large amount of money to ransom child’s life.

The hate for these Christians—who are seen as no better than dogs—is such that sometimes after being paid their ransom, the Muslim abductors still slaughter them anyway. This was the fate of 6-year-old Cyril Joseph, who was kidnapped last May. In the words of the Arabic report, the boy’s “family is in tatters after paying 30,000 pounds to the abductor, who still killed the innocent child and threw his body into the toilet of his home, where the body, swollen and moldy, was exhumed”…

Financial data mining yields no gold nuggets

Financial privacy is becoming a fading memory of the past due to aggressive regulations by Western governments that require bankers to serve as snitches against their own customers for transactions that may or may not be criminal in nature. These regulations are costly for the banks to comply with (costs which are ultimately passed on to customers), and they carry a price for citizens’ privacy as well.

All that might be forgiven if the invasive policies actually result in stopping terrorists, their financial transactions, or their operations.  But according to new research being conducted in the European Union, the results of such programs are “meager and sometimes debatable.” The government holds the data while you’re left holding the bag.

A tip of the hat to Andrew S. Bowen for sending this over:

Terrorism financing barely traceable using data analysis

28 August 2013

Doctoral research by Mara Wesseling has shown that the data analyses being performed as part of the European fight against terrorism financing are of little use for preventing terrorism. Wesseling will receive her doctorate from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) on 3 September.

Immediately following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the European Union created the EU Action Plan for Combating Terrorism, which included action against terrorism financing as a ‘core component’. Politicians, policymakers and legal experts stress the importance of combating terrorism financing, as they see money as a crucial element in the propagation of terrorism. Specific programmes have been set up to address the problem.

‘My research shows that it cannot yet be demonstrated whether these programmes have had much success with regard to tracking down suspected terrorists or preventing terrorist attacks. In light of the meagre and sometimes debatable results of both programmes, the question arises whether the social and political changes instituted as part of the data-analysis-driven fight against terrorism are (still) desirable or justified,’ Wesseling says.

Terrorist Finance Tracking Program

In her research, Wesseling analysed the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP – better known as the SWIFT programme in the wake of the ‘SWIFT affair’) and the Third European AML/CFT directive. These two programmes constitute the most significant initiatives in the European fight against the financing of terrorism.

It has been shown that risk analyses carried out by banks as part of the Third European AML/CFT directive have revealed virtually no patterns that point to terrorism financing. Wesseling goes on to say that the preventive power of the TFTP to detect terrorist networks at an early stage is also limited…