Bush says the only question is who is better on the war on terror. OK....

[blm]

While John Kerry was investigating and exposing the funding of terrorism and the banks that did their dirty work, George Bush was securing 25 million dollar deals with those same banks servicing Bin Laden and other terrorists and selling his Harken shares to a Bin Laden who Kerry had held under arrest.

Reagan and Bush administrations did everything they could to stonewall those investigations and prevent the public from seeing their involvement with the international terrorist network exposed in Kerry's BCCI investigations.

Kerry wrote the legislation Clinton signed to track the funding of international terrorism and which Bush refused to enforce when he took office in 2001.


>>>>>>
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 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."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. Whenever "who is better on the war on terror" is said....

...what is meant is "Who is more likely to kill swarthies with the wrong God without number and without remorse, and to shred the Constitution".

That's why it's about the only internal that Bush leads Kerry on when polls are taken.

Because he has done precisely that.

[blm]

8. Kerry was working against terrorism at its roots as early as the 80s

while Bush was putting money in the bank making deals with terror connected financiers.

[gollygee]

2. Great, we're all in agreement then.

Kerry's our man! Glad to have the prez on board.

[blm]

4. Heh. Funny, no rightwinger can answer WHY Reoublicans were trying to stop

Kerry's investigations into the funding of terrorism and the exposing of banks friendly to terror networks.

Funny, they have no explanation for WHY Bush2 was doing deals with banks and profitting from deals with terror connected individuals WHILE Kerry was working to shut them down.

[King Coal]

3. fixed the link

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html

[klook]

5. Fighting terror in all its guises

Great article. Republicans often like to say "We don't need a new law, we just need to more effectively enforce the laws that are already in place."

Kerry used existing laws and regulations to go after BCCI, thus landing a body blow to drug dealers and terrorists. And the Bush family crime empire.

This quote demonstrates that Kerry has the ability to be simple and direct when he wants to be:

"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."

The whole saga, plus other more recent events, illustrates that Kerry goes after terrorists while Bush protects them--or at best, ignores them.

[blm]

7. even worse, Bush and his cronies did deals with them.....

and then tried to stop Kerry's investigations.

WHO coddles terrorists? If the Bush cronies didn't throw roadblocks ib front of Kerry's efforts, the world could have contained terrorism a decade before 9-11.

[gratuitous]

6. Everyone who was president when the worst terrorist attack ever happened

Please sit down. Thank you, Mr. Bush. The American people can choose from whoever's left standing. Right this way, President Kerry.

[blm]

9. O geez, Blitzer just said on CNN that it's time we talk more about the war

on terror and who is qualified.

So, let's see if Blitzer really means what he says. Let's see him cover both Kerry and Bush's dealings with terrorism over the last two decades and which one of them had the wherewithal to try to shut down terrorism at its roots.