With all this talk about BushCo’s Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) program…described in the Washington Post as “the international banking cooperative that quietly allowed the Treasury Department and the CIA to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world,” I thought of an expert who could explain it all.

BushCo could have saved themselves the trouble of pissing off the entire world by peeking into their bank records by reading Loretta Napoleoni’s book, which I reviewed in these pages a couple of years ago…here’s the review of a book that lays out how terror funding really works:

Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks
by Loretta Napoleoni (Pluto Press, October 2003, $24.95. 295 pages)

On April 19, 1995, I was making photocopies of an article I had written about AIDS research as a science writer at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. As I stood at the copier, rereading my story on the advances made in fighting the plague of the century, I heard what sounded to me like someone slamming a door.

“Who the hell slammed that door?” I yelled from the copy room.

Soon I became painfully aware that a door had not been slammed in my office, but an entire office building had been brought down a few blocks away by terrorists. A different kind of plague erupted in my city and, like the first few cases of AIDS, an attempt to treat the symptoms was ultimately defeated until the true cause was discovered. Only now has the true cause of the viral nature of the world terrorist economy been reported.

The seeds of discontent with the ruling class, governments or even an autocratic boss have, since humans became “civilized”, served as impetus for the disgruntled, disaffected and even psychotic to lash out with acts of terrorism. But acts of terrorism cost money. They are organizations with payrolls, “benefits” and material needs. Terrorists need dollars, and stopping the flow of dollars to the balaclava-clad “revolutionaries” could effectively end large-scale terrorism. Unfortunately, it could also send the world economy into a spiral of depression and even collapse.

Dr. Loretta Napoleoni sheds light on the global “economy of terror” in Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (Pluto Press, October 2003, $24.95). In this well-researched, painstakingly-footnoted book, Italian economist and author Napoleoni identifies a $1.5 trillion “fast-growing economic system” comprised of illegal businesses such as arms and narcotics trading, diamond smuggling, charitable donations, profits from illegal businesses and yes, oil.

In Modern Jihad, Napoleoni reveals the interdependency between autocratic state-shell economies run by armed groups and “democratic” western economies, ranging from consumption of narcotics to the production of arms to laundering money and even to stock speculation, as occurred prior to Sept. 11, 2001.

Napoleoni, whose method of converting the florint was later used as the blueprint for the convertibility of the post-Berlin Wall ruble, was one of the few journalists to interview the leaders of the legendary Italian terrorists The Red Brigades, Napoleoni understands all too well that “money, not politics” keeps an armed organization alive.

Cross Posted from SoonerThought

See the rest of the review here.