http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/africa/profile.php A Saudi's luxurious plight in terror's shadow By Landon Thomas Jr.
Saturday, December 13, 2008 JIDDA: Yassin Kadi welcomes a visitor into the sun-drenched living room of his compound in this bustling commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. Expecting to be photographed, he has chosen to appear in Western dress - brown shirt, slacks and blue suede shoes. It is an outfit that Kadi, a multimillionaire businessman with investments and charities that span the globe, rarely wears these days. Once a man of the world, Kadi is confined to Saudi Arabia. His travel is limited mainly to the short drive from his home in Jidda to the office where he manages his shrunken business affairs. In October 2001, right after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. Treasury designated Kadi a terrorist supporter, accusing him of funneling money to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda through a web of businesses, foundations and universities. His ample worldwide assets were frozen, an order supported by the United Nations Security Council, and he has been advised by the Saudi government to not leave the country. But he is not exactly suffering; not financially, at least. "I am not bankrupt," he said, as a servant brought sandwiches and coffee. "I still have my life, my house and my car, but it's embarrassing. I have never been in a situation of asking other people for money." As is customary in such cases, Washington has presented no direct evidence linking Kadi to terrorism. But it has made public a dense labyrinth of associations and business and personal ties that it says establishes Kadi's relationship with bin Laden and his allies. Kadi, who has repeatedly claimed his innocence, is caught up in a legal limbo with no end in sight. The accusations against him are in the form of a government order. But because he has never been charged with any crime, he has not ever had the opportunity to stand before a jury or a judge to plead his case. "We have not found Mr. Kadi guilty of anything," said Adam Szubin, the director of the Treasury's office of foreign assets control. "But we have found that he is a supporter of terror." Washington's broad freedom to sanction those suspected of being terrorism financiers has mostly gone unchallenged since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And few have rushed to defend wealthy foreigners the way civil rights lawyers and others have sought to bring attention to the plight of the prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. But in September, in what Kadi's lawyers have called a major legal victory, the European Court of Justice overturned a lower court ruling that supported Europe's right to freeze his assets. The ruling is nonbinding, however, and the Bush administration continues to maintain that Kadi is guilty. But the decision raises questions about the Treasury's ability to impose such administrative sanctions indefinitely. A scion of a wealthy and well-connected businessman, Sheik Yassin, as he is widely known in Saudi Arabia, has the commanding presence of a chief executive and is quite obviously accustomed to the deference that comes to those who deploy large sums of money. In interviews with government officials, Kadi has said that his net worth is as much as $65 million. His Jidda compound is spacious and well-appointed. He has servants and a chauffeur to drive his luxury cars, and he remains an active investor in world currency and stock markets. (Under the terms of his asset freeze, he can continue to trade his portfolio and to collect dividends, but he cannot take money out.) Kadi is mindful that his position is different from those serving time in Guantánamo Bay but insists that the paradox of his legal condition is no less unfair. "When it is classified," he said, "you can never defend yourself." And, he says, his suffering has been acute in it own regard - he has struggled with bouts of depression, diabetes and the humiliation of having to ask family members for financial help. The Treasury claims that it responds to new evidence presented by designees and says that it took 154 names off the list - 4,102 remain - from November 2007 to November 2008. But Kadi is unlikely to benefit from any reassessment. "We stand by our designation," said Szubin, the Treasury official, "and you can quote me on that." Kadi does not dispute his ties to bin Laden but maintains that he does not support him and has not spoken to him since the early 1990s. They do share a common background: Now in their early 50s, they were both born to wealthy families in Jidda, studied engineering and first met in Chicago in 1981. Kadi was working for the architectural firm Skidmore Owings Merrill, and bin Laden, who then was 24 and working for the family contracting business, had come to Chicago to recruit American-trained engineers to work for the bin Laden group - his first known trip to the United States. As Kadi remembers it, he put bin Laden in touch with a group of engineers, several of whom were eventually hired. They came together again in Pakistan in the late 1980s as enthusiastic backers of the Afghan rebels in their war with the Soviet Union and became large investors in Sudan in the early 1990s. But Kadi says he cut ties after bin Laden began to adopt an anti-American, openly radical attitude in the mid-1990s. In the absence of a full airing of the evidence against him, however, it seems unlikely that Kadi's guilt or innocence will be established. Like many wealthy Saudis, Kadi has been an enthusiastic underwriter of Islamic-hued causes, including hospitals in Peshawar, Pakistan, and in Albania, a university in Yemen and the publication of a definitive English translation of the Koran. But this, he says, is nothing more than a form of blessed relief. But Szubin and others say Kadi's giving is part of a disguised money trail to Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Some of the evidence presented by his accusers, however, raises its own questions. For example, a Swiss prosecutor - who investigated Kadi but did not bring charges - tried to connect him to the fundamentalist Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb. The problem was that Qutb was put to death by the Egyptian government in 1966, when Kadi was 9 years old. On the other hand, Kadi's continued refusal to renounce figures alleged to be terrorism supporters gives ready ammunition to his antagonists. One of those individuals is Wael Juleidan, a prominent Saudi financier who was a close ally of bin Laden in the late 1980s. Another is Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian-American who was accused of sending money to Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. (Salah was acquitted of these charges in a federal court last year.) Salah, who ran a Chicago-based Muslim charity, received about $1 million from Kadi in the early 1990s. "If I wanted to send money to Hamas, I would do it directly, not via Chicago," Kadi said, in his smooth, American-accented English. Such a comment, with its trace of smug self-assurance, illuminates why Kadi remains a target for so many anti-terrorism investigators. He is a man who does not easily hide his disdain for the process that has trapped him in his own country or the efforts by the Bush administration to prevent another major terrorist attack. But he insists that his deepest anger is reserved for bin Laden. Asked what he would say to him now, Kadi takes his time before responding. "I would say, 'Wash your hands of the blood of innocent people,"' Kadi said, using the Arabic word fitna to describe the devastation bin Laden's actions have brought upon him and the Islamic world. "Islam is innocent of all this. This was a big mistake. Now, everyone is suspicious." Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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