Soccer Dad

Commiserating with kadi

The New York Times uses a celebrity profile to highlight a Saudi "businessman" who is under international sanctions for being a financier of Al Qaeda, Yassin Qadi.

YASSIN KADI, a multimillionaire businessman with investments and charities that span the globe, does not get out much these days. Once a man of the world, Mr. Kadi is confined to Saudi Arabia and spends most of his time in his sun-drenched compound in this bustling commercial capital of the country. His travel is limited mainly to the short drive from his home in Jidda to the office where he manages his shrunken business affairs.

Instead of investigating the charges against him, the profile is an opportunity for the Times to question the charges against him, and, more generally, the war on terror.

As is customary in such cases, Washington has presented no direct evidence linking Mr. Kadi to terrorism. But it has made public a dense labyrinth of associations and business and personal ties that it says establishes Mr. Kadi's relationship with Mr. bin Laden and his allies.

For a man who has repeatedly claimed his innocence, Mr. Kadi is caught in a legal limbo with no end in sight. The accusations against him are in the form of a government order. But because he has never been charged with a crime, he has not had the opportunity to stand before a jury or a judge to plead his case.

"We have not found Mr. Kadi guilty of anything," said Adam J. Szubin, the director of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. "But we have found that he is a supporter of terror."

Washington's broad freedom to place sanctions on people suspected of financing terrorists has gone mostly unchallenged since the Sept. 11 attacks. Few have rushed to defend wealthy foreigners, in contrast to how civil rights lawyers and others have sought to publicize the plight of the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Yes the U.S. Treasury has designating as a financier of terror. People who know something about such things find that Qadi's "charitable" foundations were used to fund terror.

Previous suits filed in foreign courts, including in Britain, Turkey and Switzerland have had more success -- certainly more than they deserve. Fellow Saudi Financier Yasin Al Qadi (aka al Kadi), who headed the Saudi-based Muwafaq charity foundation implicated in the Al Qaeda US Embassy Bombings, for example, sought and received supposed vindication in Turkish courts earlier this year. Turkey's Chief Public Prosecutor ruled in March 2005 that there was no evidence to suggest that al-Qadi has been involved in any funding for Al Qaeda and no grounds for the Turkish authorities to bring further proceedings against him( See my earlier Blog on the Al Qadi Case).

The Times could just as well have laid out the case of how many Islamic charitable organizations provide cover for terror financing and explain the difficulty in making such cases. Instead its reporter decided to write a sympathetic portrayal of a man who is suspected of funding the 1998 embassy bombings.

It's also interesting to note that the law that allows the Treasury Department to make such designations is a pre-9/11 law, passed during the Clinton Administration.

President Clinton's January, 1995 executive order designed to curb money flows to 12 groups (10 Arab and two Jewish) that threatened the use of violence against the Middle East process was followed up by more detailed legislation that Congress eventually enacted as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. (Public Law No. 104-132, 110 Stat.)

A material support provision, 18 U.S.C. 2339B, makes it a criminal offense for American citizens or residents to knowingly provide funds or other forms of material support that the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Treasury, designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The legislation covers such forms of support as funding, weapons, and training as well as the provision of financial services and has been used in dozens of cases.

In other words, the actions taken against Kadi aren't some part of some post-9/11 witch hunt, but the result of applying a law that was passed earlier and applied to the tangled web of terror financing.