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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The government links U.S. businesses to Osama bin Laden and freezes their assets, leaving one woman to defend her husband -- and herself.
Nov 8, 2001 | Garad Jama can't come to the phone.
He's overseas, his wife tells me. She can't tell me where, she says. Can I call back Sunday? That's when he'll be back.
I can't, I tell her. I need to talk to him today. President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have named him as part of the al-Qaida financial network.
They held a press conference Wednesday afternoon at the Treasury Department's financial crimes enforcement network offices in Tyson's Corner, Va., and President Bush himself said that Jama -- a 27-year-old Somali immigrant and owner of a business called Amal Express in Minneapolis, Minn. -- is one of "62 individuals and organizations connected with two terrorist-supporting financial networks, the Al Taqwa and the Al-Barakaat." As a result, all the people and businesses named on the list had their finances frozen, and are prohibited from further financial transactions under a sweeping executive order signed by Bush Sept. 14.
The charges against her husband are not true, Fartune Jama, 28, says. "My husband services money to refugee people in Somalia," she says. "My husband is not a terrorist. He's a citizen of the United States."
She says her husband is visiting family in the United Arab Emirates, which also happens to be one of the primary locations of these financial centers, according to the Treasury Department.
"He is not guilty," she says, adding that neither is she. And she might have her own reason to be afraid, since she is also named -- indirectly -- on the Treasury Department's "Designation and Blocking Memorandum," listing her maiden name -- Fartune Ahmed Wasrsame -- as one of her husband's aliases. "That's my old name," she says. She says that no one from the government has contacted her.
Adding to the confusion, when U.S. Customs agents went to Jama's office Wednesday looking for him, the signs identified the business as being the location of Amal Express. But officials were looking for the Aaran Money Wire Service and the Somali International Relief Organization. Customs agents shut down the offices.
Officials from the Treasury and Justice departments did not return calls for comment.
Fartune says that her husband runs a hawala (Arabic for "trust"), part of an informal and unregulated money-wiring system thousands of years old. An individual can give the halawa broker money, plus a fee, and request that the same amount be received by another individual served by another hawala in another location. Officials say that terrorists often make use of hawalas -- which are prominent in the Middle East and East Asia -- because of the anonymity they provide. The deal is agreed to between halawa brokers -- often with the use of a code word -- and when it is completed all records are disposed of.
A 1999 study by the Treasury Department identified hawalas as having been used by terrorists to fund terrorism in India, and as the principal means of money-laundering from East Asian heroin trafficking.
According to Bush, Jama's hawala was part of a network, Al-Barakaat, that "is a group of money-wiring and communication companies owned by a friend and supporter of Osama bin Laden." Wednesday's action targeted 46 entities affiliated with Al-Barakaat and Al Taqua, an association of offshore banks and financial management firms that the government says have helped al-Qaida shift money around the world.
Nine of these organizations are in the United States, five in Minnesota. Aaran Money Wire Services Inc., and the Somali International Relief Organization are two of them. Sixteen individuals are on Wednesday's list, two of whom were identified as having United States addresses. Jama is one of these individuals.
Al-Barakaat and Al Taqua, Bush said, "raise funds for al-Qaida." The two networks manage, invest and distribute those funds, arranging shipments of weapons and "provid(ing) terrorist supporters with Internet service, secure telephone communications and other ways of sending messages and sharing information.
"They present themselves as legitimate businesses," Bush said, "but they skim money from every transaction for the benefit of terrorist organizations. They enable the proceeds of crime in one country to be transferred to pay for terrorist acts in another."
