First, you left out a part of the article that's interesting:
Bergman points out that the August 2001 withdrawals may have been, to a large extent, caused by the Argentinian banking crisis that was occurring at the time. However, he raises the point that no explanation has yet fully answered the important question: Why was the cashing out of billions of dollars just before the 9/11 attacks never investigated?
So, the money transfers may in fact be perfectly explainable, but the issue from Bergman's point of view is that he doesn't believe it was sufficiently investigated. Fair enough -- provided that we accept Bergman's perception that it wasn't. But that could be a mis-perception: he might just be unaware of a follow-on investigation. I don't know, of course, but that would be an issue before jumping to conclusions.
But then, the article implies that there's something suspicious about an "error" in a commission staff report's footnote: "Footnote 28 of the Staff Monograph on Terrorist Financing from the official 9/11 Commission Report states that the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 “didn’t mention terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages.” True? No. The NMLS Report mentions it 17 times. One gets the impression that the commission staff (under Philip Zelikow) was trying to paint the picture that there wasn’t a lot of co-operation between those involved in counterterrorism and the banking regulators in 2001."
So, what is footnote 28 in reference to?
With the exception of some limited attempts by Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to match classified information with reports filed by banks, U.S. financial institutions and Treasury regulators focused on finding and deterring or disrupting the vast flows of U.S. currency generated by drug trafficking and by high-level international fraud. Large-scale scandals, such the use of the Bank of New York by Russian money launderers to move millions of dollars out of Russia, captured the attention of the Department of the Treasury and Congress. As a result, little attention was paid to terrorist financing.
28
...
28 The 2001 National Money Laundering Strategy, for example, issued by Treasury in September 2001,
does not discuss terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages.
Let's not make too big a deal about the article's misquoting the footnote ("didn't mention terrorist financing" versus "didn't discuss terrorist financing") but journalists should be more careful. But looking at that document, I could only find "terror" mentioned
or discussed in the following section:
Priority 3: Aggressively exploit OFAC-held information about blocked assets of foreign terrorist groups and agents and of those individuals and entities appearing on the OFAC Narcotics Sanctions Programs designation lists for potential forfeiture.
Lead: Director, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Department of the Treasury; Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice.
Goals: Pursue investigative leads developed from exploitation of information concerning assets blocked pursuant to OFAC?s Narcotic Sanctions Programs or Foreign Terrorists Programs. By October 2001, create a mechanism to develop investigative leads and evidence from exploitation of information concerning assets blocked pursuant to OFAC?s Narcotics Sanctions or Foreign Terrorists Programs. FLETC will incorporate this mechanism into its advanced asset forfeiture training programs.
The President, through the promulgation of Executive Orders pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and Congress, through the enactment of other statutes, have established sanctions programs that prohibit named foreign terrorists, foreign drug kingpins, and their fronts and operatives from using their assets within U.S. jurisdiction or engaging in business or other financial activities with U.S. persons, including companies or individuals. Asset blockings are a valuable tool to fight foreign-origin threats to U.S. national security and foreign policy, including foreign criminal organizations. The 2001 Strategy requires that law enforcement step beyond the sanctions programs and use the sanctions-based asset blockings as a ?force multiplier— to pursue all foreign terrorist and narcotics program asset blockings as leads for potential forfeitures through money laundering prosecutions.
Inter- and intra-agency cooperation is essential to implement this priority. OFAC, the Executive Office of Asset Forfeiture, and bureau heads will cooperate to design a mechanism that identifies leads from OFAC-held information relating to blocked assets of foreign narcotics traffickers and terrorists, as well as from the relevant administrative record in support of a designation. Criminal investigative agencies will, thereafter, pursue these leads to determine if legal cause exists to civilly or criminally forfeit the assets.
So, it appears to me that this section
doesn't really do much to "discuss terrorist financing" (except to state the obvious, that asset blocking is an "valuable tool"); it talks about
seizing already blocked assets. I would expect a discussion of terrorist financing in a strategy document to have some goal of detecting suspicious activity by cooperating with counterterrorist intelligence offices, and perhaps blocking more assets as a result. So, where are all the other "mentions" that are alleged to be in there? Are they just implicit? It seems to me that the footnote is not entirely misrepresenting the situation.
And that looks like a pretty flimsy case to base this accusation on:
To state the obvious, there are two reasons why Zelikow et al. made the false statement regarding there having been no references to terrorism in the National Money-laundering Strategy Report. One reason could be to justify and encourage more scrutiny (legal or otherwise) of small transactions generally, e.g. via USAPA, and the other could be to establish (read: invent) a reason for missing the evidence pertaining to the attacks. ('Transactions too small. No one could find.') And since the real money trail points to foreknowledge within the financial community at large, and, possibly, the Federal Reserve specifically, the "low-budget terrorism" story-line that the 9/11 Commission had established needed to be protected.
Sorry, Jack, but this looks like, um, a bit of a reach to me. Well, actually it looks like a giant stretch. After not really making the case that the staff report's characterization of too little cooperation between banking and counterterrorism -- a characterization I read as a criticism -- was inaccurate (and basing even the weak case it made on one footnote!) the article nonetheless proceeds to invent a conspiracy-assuming, Zelikow-bashing rationalization for the alleged misrepresentation, which it calls "obvious" but I call obviously strained.
I'm no Zelikow fan, for sure, but CTists seem to be a little too eager to tar the entire commission and staff on fairly flimsy pretext, then insinuate that the pretext is credible just because Zelikow was the head of the commission. I think there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the commission -- most especially in the areas that were avoided, and the lack of any real action or accountability coming out of any of it -- without doing that sort of thing.