story, as the Curveball thing is pretty much water under the bridge, as it applies the the obvious fact that the Saudis are SO much not with us on the socalled WOT....from a review of his book, summarizing part of Chapter 8. It's MUCH worse in the book:
Risen writes that after Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002, he was discovered to have had two bank cards on his person one from a Kuwaiti bank, and another from a Saudi bank, which Risen writes "had the potential to be keys that could unlock some of al Qaeda's darkest secrets. The cards 'could give us entrée right into who was funding al Qaeda, no link analysis needed,' said one American source. 'You could track money right from the financiers to a top al Qaeda figure.' But something very odd happened when the FBI and CIA team
. There is little evidence that an aggressive investigation of the cards was ever conducted.
"Two American sources familiar with the matter say that they don't believe the government's experts on terrorism financing have ever thoroughly probed the transactions in Abu Zubaydah's accounts..." Risen later reports that his two sources believe that this is because of a lack of oversight, "rather than a political cover-up to protect the Saudis." Risen writes that a "Muslim financier with a questionable past, and with connections to the Afghan Taliban, al Qaeda, and Saudi intelligence agreed to work with " on this story. Risen says that the financier reported that in 2004, "18 months earlier, he said he had been told, Saudi intelligence officials seized all of the records related to ; the records then disappeared… The timing of the reported seizure of the records by Saudi intelligence closely coincided with the timing of Abu Zubaydah's capture in Pakistan in March 2002."
http://www.alternet.org/story/30404/one of the criticisms of Risen is that he lays out lots of details, but pulls his punches, as in this summary. If one reads what he has to see, the conclusion can easily be drawn that there's WAY more going on in the myriad instances he describes as examples of "oversight" or "incompetence."
the Drumheller/Curveball/Powell segment is an excellent example, as well as the case of the thirty plus Iraqis who the CIA got to go back from the US to spy on/with relatives in order to find out how advanced the Iraqi nuke program was, only to find that EVERY single person told them that there WAS none, HADn't been since the first gulf war, when the only enrichment plant had been bombed to fragments. Guess what....the CIA chiefs didn't want to hear anything about that.
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