Swiss al Taqwa Decision a Blow to Terror Finance Fight
By Douglas Farah
The decision of the Swiss government to halt an investigation into Yusef Nada and the al Taqwa network he ran is a serious setback for efforts to prosecute those suspected of funding al Qaeda and other radical Islamist terrorist organizations. News reports say the evidence available, and there is substantial, is not enough to convince the Swiss authorities they can successfully bring a criminal prosecution after investigating for more than three years.
Besides sources and methods questions in intelligence sharing among the Swiss, U.S. agencies and others, a huge problem for all sides is the sheer volume of documents that were seized when al Taqwa and its many affiliates were raided in the months after 9-11. Several rooms piled high with documents, many in Arabic, made it virtually impossible to decipher the operations of an organization that was designed to be opaque from its inception. With only two or three translators available at at time, and no way to determine what was important and what wasn't, the task has proved overwhelming. But it is not irrelevant.
The importance of al Taqwa, especially Bank al Taqwa and its sister bank, Akita Bank International, both registered in the Bahamas, is that the institutions were the financial centers of the Muslim Brotherhood. Here is my full blog for more thoughts.
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