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SAAR Foundation
Last Updated: October 13, 2008

The SAAR Foundation provided start-up capital to the Muslim charities and corporations in Northern Virginia that became the target of the largest domestic terror financing investigation in U.S. history.

While a Senate report has accused the foundation of laundering money for Al Qaeda, SAAR representatives and their colleagues were wined and dined by the GOP and Bush White House.

The SAAR Foundation is named for Sulaiman Abdul Aziz Rajhi, a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families. Rajhi appears on the “Golden Chain,” a document found in Bosnia in 2002 that has been introduced in American courts as a list of Osama Bin Laden’s top 20 financiers.

From 1985 to 1990, Abdurrahman Alamoudi served as the executive assistant to the president of SAAR. Alamoudi would later donate seed money to the Islamic Free Market Institute, a non-profit started by GOP power broker Grover Norquist, who is a close adviser to President George W. Bush and a friend of jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In the 1990s, SAAR set up shop in Northern Virginia, basing its many affiliated charities and corporations in two office buildings at 500 and 555 Grove Street in Herndon. According to a U.S. Senate committee, SAAR raised $1.7 billion in 1998 alone. U.S. investigators say that SAAR money moved through Bank al Taqwa, which acted as a vast Hawala network—an Islamic sort of Western Union where people can deposit money to be forwarded to other members around the world.

In 2000, SAAR dissolved and sent most of its assets to the Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea known for holding the accounts of “drug dealers and money launderers.” The Safa Trust succeeded SAAR in Herndon.

After 9/11, several men at the highest level of SAAR and Safa Trust came under the scrutiny of federal authorities investigating domestic terror financing. Investigators claim that SAAR money wound up in the hands of Youssef Nada and Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, two men the U.S. named as Specially Designated Global Terrorists after 9/11. Samir Salah, who helped found the Safa Trust, and his Grove Street colleague Yacub Mirza had served as directors of the Taibah International Aid Association, and the U.S. named that group’s Bosnian branch as SDGT. Salah founded Dar al-Hijra, a Virginia mosque that is known for radical Wahhabi preaching and was visited by two 9/11 hijackers. Salah set up and managed a branch of Bank al Taqwa, which was used by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. The United States shut down the bank in November 2001.

Nonetheless, SAAR veterans continued to mingle with the highest levels of the GOP and Bush administration. Three days after 9/11, Abdurrahman Alamoudi joined President Bush for a prayer service. He also retained the services of lobby shop Janus-Merritt, a firm founded by Norquist and his associate David Safavian, who went on to become the Chief of Staff at the General Services Administration. (Safavian was convicted of obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff

Alamoudi lost some of his cachet when he spoke out in support of Hezbollah and Hamas right in front of the White House in 2001. The Islamic Institute, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush all returned his donations. Three years later, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for terrorist funding and his role in a Libyan plot to assassinate the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

David Safavian later denied working with Alamoudi at Janus-Merritt, although records showed that Alamoudi paid $40,000 in lobbying fees to the firm. Janus-Merritt also resubmitted its forms to say it had represented not Alamoudi but SAAR Foundation officer Jamal Barzinji. Barzinji once worked with SDGT Youssef Nada.

In 2002, federal authorities raided 555 Grove Street as part of Operation Greenquest, a terror financing investigation called that was launched by the Treasury Department under Secretary Paul O’Neill and headed up by U.S. Customs. David Kane, who wrote the affidavit authorizing the raids, called the network the “Safa Group” and noted that his investigation of the group’s money trail was stymied when it got to the Isle of Man. Officials suspected the network of laundering terror money; one said, “Looking at their finances is like looking into a black hole.”

Yacub Mirza, who is an officer or director at most Safa Group organizations, once managed foundations that gave money to Grover Norquist’s Islamic Free Market Institute. He also once acted on behalf of SDGT Yassin Al-Qadi. In private, according to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. officials accuse Mirza and his partners of having Al Qaeda ties.

Mirza also provides a link between “Safa Group” and Massachusetts software company Ptech. Mirza sat on the board of Ptech, which has contracts to provide software to many government agencies, including the FBI and the Pentagon. Ptech eventually hired the White House’s former Deputy Chief Information Officer and worked directly with the FAA on the National Airspace System that failed on September 11, causing NORAD to scramble its jets after a “phantom” plane.

Ptech received $5 million in start-up money from Al-Qadi in 1994. In June 2002, someone alerted the FBI to al Qadi’s role at Ptech, but the agency turned a blind eye. No action was taken until the Treasury Department learned that a WBZ-TV reporter named Joe Bergentino was pursuing the story. WBZ-TV held the story for three months at the request of federal authorities citing national security issues, as did ABC and NBC. In December 2002, U.S. Customs raided Ptech’s offices as part of Operation Greenquest. Just hours after the raid, a National Security Agency official assured the public that Ptech’s software was “completely safe.” (The National Security Council had been scouring government computer systems for malicious code inside Ptech software for several months before the raid, but “completely safe” is overstating it. They simply failed to find any code that could be used for espionage.)

Yassin Al-Qadi is also accused of raising money for Osama Bin Laden associate and SDGT Abdul Latif Saleh. Al-Qadi met Bin Laden once in the 1980s, and he is accused of funneling $3 million to him through National Commercial Bank. National Commercial Bank was run by the family of Saudi banking magnate Khalid bin Mahfouz. Mahfouz’s former financial representative in the U.S. was James Bath, a good friend of George W. Bush. Mahfouz was a director of BCCI, the Middle Eastern bank that later collapsed in what Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau called the “largest bank fraud in world financial history.” Before its collapse, the CIA used BCCI to launder money for clandestine CIA activities. Mahfouz also started Muwafaq Foundation, a Saudi relief agency accused by the U.S. Treasury of sending millions to Al Qaeda. Yassin Al-Qadi was once the head of Mufawaq.

As of August 2006, Samir Salah was one of six trustees who manage the Amana Mutual Funds Trust. Former Amana trustees include Yacub Mirza and Jamal al-Barzinji. Amana’s current independent board chairman Talat Othman gave a benediction at the 2000 GOP convention and once sat on the board of Harken Energy with George W. Bush. Othman was handpicked for the board by major Harken stockholder Abdullah Taha Bakhsh. Bakhsh was also close with Bush’s friend James Bath, and it was this relationship that led a federal financial crime unit to investigate in 1992 whether Bath enabled Saudi wealth to influence U.S. policy. Bakhsh is also a former associate of Ghaith Pharoan, a fugitive tied to the collapse of BCCI.

Although Operation Greenquest was formally dissolved in May 2003 at the climax of a distracting bureaucratic turf tangle between DHS and the FBI, a federal jury in northern Virginia is still investigating the allegations of Safa Group terror financing.

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Homeland Security | 9/11 | Terror Funding | International Finance

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