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.”
I’d like to see this story sprout legs. Why hasn’t the Kerry camp been pushing this issue? This is a great counter-point to anyone who says Kerry is soft on terrorism, that Bush and Kerry are the same, or to anyone who believes that the only way to win the war on terrorism is to wage expensive wars on poor nations and sacrifice our civil liberties.