Follow the Money
How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank.

By David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin
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Two decades ago, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a highly respected financial titan. In 1987, when its subsidiary helped finance a deal involving Texas oilman George W. Bush, the bank appeared to be a reputable institution, with attractive branch offices, a traveler's check business, and a solid reputation for financing international trade. It had high-powered allies in Washington and boasted relationships with respected figures around the world.
All that changed in early 1988, when John Kerry, then a young senator from Massachusetts, decided to probe the finances of Latin American drug cartels. Over the next three years, Kerry fought against intense opposition from vested interests at home and abroad, from senior members of his own party; and from the Reagan and Bush administrations, none of whom were eager to see him succeed.

By the end, Kerry had helped dismantle a massive criminal enterprise and exposed the infrastructure of BCCI and its affiliated institutions, a web that law enforcement officials today acknowledge would become a model for international terrorist financing. As Kerry's investigation revealed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, BCCI was interested in more than just enriching its clients--it had a fundamentally anti-Western mission. Among the stated goals of its Pakistani founder were to "fight the evil influence of the West," and finance Muslim terrorist organizations. In retrospect, Kerry's investigation had uncovered an institution at the fulcrum of America's first great post-Cold War security challenge.



More than a decade later, Kerry is his party's nominee for president, and terrorist financing is anything but a back-burner issue. The Bush campaign has settled on a new strategy for attacking Kerry: Portray him as a do-nothing senator who's weak on fighting terrorism. "After 19 years in the Senate, he's had thousands of votes, but few signature achievements," President Bush charged recently at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh; spin that's been echoed by Bush's surrogates, conservative pundits, and mainstream reporters alike, and by a steady barrage of campaign ads suggesting that the one thing Kerry did do in Congress was prove he knew nothing about terrorism. Ridiculing the senator for not mentioning al Qaeda in his 1997 book on terrorism, one ad asks: "How can John Kerry win a war [on terror] if he doesn't know the enemy?"

If that line of attack has been effective, it's partly because Kerry does not have a record like the chamber's dealmakers such as Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) or Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Though Kerry has been a key backer of bills on housing reform, immigration, and the environment, there are indeed few pieces of landmark legislation that owe their passage to Kerry.

But legislation is only one facet of a senator's record. As the BCCI investigation shows, Kerry developed a very different record of accomplishment--one often as vital, if not more so, than passage of bills. Kerry's probe didn't create any popular new governmental programs, reform the tax code, or eliminate bureaucratic waste and fraud. Instead, he shrewdly used the Senate's oversight powers to address the threat of terrorism well before it was in vogue, and dismantled a key terrorist weapon. In the process, observers saw a senator with tremendous fortitude, and a willingness to put the public good ahead of his own career. Those qualities might be hard to communicate to voters via one-line sound bites, but they would surely aid Kerry as president in his attempts to battle the threat of terrorism.

From drug lords to lobbyists

Despite having helmed the initial probe which led to the Iran-Contra investigation, Kerry was left off the elite Iran-Contra committee in 1987. As a consolation prize, the Democratic leadership in Congress made Kerry the chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations and told him to dig into the Contra-drug connection. Kerry turned to BCCI early in the second year of the probe when his investigators learned that Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was laundering drug profits through the bank on behalf of the Medellin cartel.

By March 1988, Kerry's subcommittee had obtained permission from the Foreign Relations Committee to seek subpoenas for both BCCI and individuals at the bank involved in handling Noriega's assets, as well as those handling the accounts of others in Panama and Colombia. Very quickly, though, Kerry faced a roadblock. Citing concerns that the senator's requests would interfere with an ongoing sting operation in Tampa, the Justice Department delayed the subpoenas until 1988, at which point the subcommittee's mandate was running out.

BCCI, meanwhile, had its own connections. Prominent figures with ties to the bank included former president Jimmy Carter's budget director, Bert Lance, and a bevy of powerful Washington lobbyists with close ties to President George H.W. Bush, a web of influence that may have helped the bank evade previous investigations. In 1985 and 1986, for instance, the Reagan administration launched no investigation even after the CIA had sent reports to the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments bluntly describing the bank's role in drug-money laundering and other illegal activities.

In the spring of 1989, Kerry hit another obstacle. Foreign Relations Committee chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), under pressure from both parties, formally asked Kerry to end his probe. Worried the information he had collected would languish, Kerry quickly dispatched investigator Jack Blum to present the information his committee had found about BCCI's money-laundering operations to the Justice Department. But according to Blum, the Justice Department failed to follow up.

The young senator from Massachusetts, thus, faced a difficult choice. Kerry could play ball with the establishment and back away from BCCI, or he could stay focused on the public interest and gamble his political reputation by pushing forward.

BCCI and the bluebloods

Kerry opted in 1989 to take the same information that had been coldly received at the Justice Department and bring it to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who agreed to begin a criminal investigation of BCCI, based on Kerry's leads. Kerry also continued to keep up the public pressure. In 1990, when the Bush administration gave the bank a minor slap on the wrist for its money laundering practices, Kerry went on national television to slam the decision. "We send drug people to jail for the rest of their life," he said, "and these guys who are bankers in the corporate world seem to just walk away, and it's business as usual…When banks engage knowingly in the laundering of money, they should be shut down. It's that simple, it really is."

He would soon have a chance to turn his declarations into action. In early 1991, the Justice Department concluded its Tampa probe with a plea deal allowing BCCI officials to stay out of court. At the same time, news reports indicated that Washington elder statesman Clark Clifford might be indicted for defrauding bank regulators and helping BCCI maintain a shell in the United States.

Kerry pounced, demanding (and winning) authorization from the Foreign Relations Committee to open a broad investigation into the bank in May 1991. Almost immediately, the senator faced a new round of pressure to relent. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman personally called Kerry to object, as did his fellow senators. "What are you doing to my friend Clark Clifford?," staffers recalled them asking, according to The Washington Post. BCCI itself hired an army of lawyers, PR specialists, and lobbyists, including former members of Congress, to thwart the investigation.

But Kerry refused to back off, and his hearings began to expose the ways in which international terrorism was financed. As Kerry's subcommittee discovered, BCCI catered to many of the most notorious tyrants and thugs of the late 20th century, including Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the heads of the Medellin cocaine cartel, and Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist. According to the CIA, it also did business with those who went on to lead al Qaeda.

And BCCI went beyond merely offering financial assistance to dictators and terrorists: According to Time, the operation itself was an elaborate fraud, replete with a "global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad."

By July 1991, Kerry's work paid off. That month, British and U.S. regulators finally responded to the evidence provided by Kerry, Morgenthau, and a concurrent investigation by the Federal Reserve. BCCI was shut down in seven countries, restricted in dozens more, and served indictments for grand larceny, bribery, and money laundering. The actions effectively put it out of business what Morgenthau called, "one of the biggest criminal enterprises in world history."

Bin Laden's bankers

Kerry's record in the BCCI affair, of course, contrasts sharply with Bush's. The current president's career as an oilman was always marked by the kind of insider cronyism that Kerry resisted. Even more startling, as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy, Bush himself did business with BCCI-connected institutions almost at the same time Kerry was fighting the bank. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 1991, there was a "mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding [Harken] since George W. Bush came on board." In 1987, Bush secured a critical $25 million-loan from a bank the Kerry Commission would later reveal to be a BCCI joint venture. Certainly, Bush did not suspect BCCI had such questionable connections at the time. But still, the president's history suggests his attacks on Kerry's national-security credentials come from a position of little authority.

As the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, Kerry's BCCI experience is important for two reasons. First, it reveals Kerry's foresight in fighting terrorism that is critical for any president in this age of asymmetrical threats. As The Washington Post noted, "years before money laundering became a centerpiece of antiterrorist efforts...Kerry crusaded for controls on global money laundering in the name of national security."

Make no mistake about it, BCCI would have been a player. A decade after Kerry helped shut the bank down, the CIA discovered Osama bin Laden was among those with accounts at the bank. A French intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post in 2002 identified dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed, and that the financial network operated by bin Laden today "is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI." As one senior U.S. investigator said in 2002, "BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations."

Second, the BCCI affair showed Kerry to be a politician driven by a sense of mission, rather than expediency--even when it meant ruffling feathers. Perhaps Sen. Hank Brown, the ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee, put it best. "John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult investigation," Brown said. "Because many important members of his own party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not. John Kerry did."


David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin work for the American Progress Action Fund, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C.

ttt

What Righty has nothing to say, didn't think so :rolleyes:

If you want to talk about illegal foreign banking and funding, you might as well bring up Kerry's 1996 campaign financing as well:

"Congressional documents obtained by
Newsweek show that Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry met and
personally corresponded with Johnny Chung, a central figure in the
foreign-money scandals of 1996, prior to Chung's throwing Kerry a Beverly
Hills fund-raiser. Kerry has previously maintained that his first meeting with
Chung was at the September 9, 1996, event, reports Investigative Correspondent
Michael Isikoff in the February 9 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday,
February 2). Chung, who visited the Clinton White House 49 times, eventually
pleaded guilty to funneling $28,000 in illegal contributions to the campaigns
of Kerry and Bill Clinton.
In the summer of 1996 Kerry, who was locked in a tough re-election fight,
was told that a generous potential contributor wanted to visit his Capitol
Hill office. The donor was Chung, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, who
brought along some friends, including Liu Chaoying, a Hong Kong businesswoman
later found by Federal investigators to be a lieutenant colonel in China's
People's Liberation Army and vice president of a Chinese-government-owned
aerospace firm.
Told that Liu was interested in getting one of her companies listed on the
U.S. Stock exchange, Kerry's aides immediately faxed over a letter to the
Securities and Exchange Commission. The next day, Liu and Chung were ushered
into a private briefing with a senior SEC official. Within weeks, Chung
returned the favor: On Sept. 9 he threw Kerry a fund-raiser at a Beverly Hills
hotel, raking in $10,000 for the senator's re-election campaign. According to
bank records and Chung's congressional testimony, the campaign contributions
came out of $300,000 in overseas wire transfers sent on orders from the chief
of Chinese military intelligence -- and routed through a Hong Kong bank
account controlled by Liu.

Those funds were returned when it was discovered they were received from illegal sources.

Actually it was the last three paragraphs I wanted to make sure Righty read.

Wow, Kerry did one thing in the last 10 years . So maybe he can base his campaign on this instead of Vietnam. It's also a puff piece buy some DNC shills.

1 positive thing beats 400 negative things hands down.

This just goes to show the kind of integrity he has unlike the Chimpster or was I using Chimperor today :p

Funny how you must have seen something positive in Kerry on this post or you would have replied sooner. I mean I had to bump it to the top twice. Oh I forgot the Right Wing Montra does not allow for ThinKing

Here's another example of sKerry's integrity:

"An Indian-born US citizen, Parthasarathy "Bob" Majumdar, is at the centre of a new scandal affecting the Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry . In a report published by the Los Angeles Times it has come out that Presidential candidate John Kerry pressured Congress and the Pentagon to fund a missile system on behalf of Majumdar, a San Diego contractor who, years later, pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to the senator and other politicians.


Last week, Majumdar pleaded guilty to two counts of illegal campaign contributions and defrauding the government. If convicted, he could be jailed for up to six years and fined more than $250,000.

From 1996 to 1999, Kerry sent 28 letters urging the freeing of funds for an upgraded guided missile system Parthasarathi Majumdar was trying to build for US warplanes.

The letters were sent at a time when Majumdar and employees at his Science and Applied Technology Inc. were donating money to the Massachusetts Democrat, the article said, citing court records.

Kerry received about $25,000 during the period, according to Dwight L Morris and Associates, which tracks campaign donations. "

Was this money returned??? Should I keep going????

Scoreboard:

JFK-1
GWB-0

:p

LT,

No , I pictured you ,a drowning man holding on for dear life. Even though you are a lib my good nature prevents me from shoving your head further under water :p

"Kerry pulls ads from four states." Bows to political realities"

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bowing to political realities, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has canceled plans to begin broadcasting television commercials in Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana and the perennial battleground of Missouri.

The decision to shrink his political playing field reduces Kerry's strategic options -- at least for now -- in the homestretch of the campaign. George W. Bush won all four states in 2000, and Kerry can't win the White House without taking one or two of them away from the Republican incumbent.

The ads were scheduled to begin airing October 5 as part of a $5 million investment through November 2, but campaign advisers concluded Kerry isn't doing well enough in the states to justify the cost.

The campaign, which has reserved commercial time in 20 states through Election Day, notified television stations in the four states that Kerry would not follow through on his plans for the first week of October."

So King if we ever go fishing you would throw me a rope if i fell over board :p

Kerry has integrity? Oh then I suppose Teresa Heinz Ketchup is a class act too?

Having those two in the white house would truly be an embarassment.

Yeah probably alot like the way the people in Brier, Washington feel huh?

pwned!

OOOOO good zinger Stew!!!