{"id":162,"date":"2002-02-17T14:01:37","date_gmt":"2002-02-17T21:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/02\/big-time-\/"},"modified":"2002-02-17T14:01:37","modified_gmt":"2002-02-17T21:01:37","slug":"big-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/02\/17\/big-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Time &#8211;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tMy speculation that hawala is small potatoes is contradicted by this WaPo story <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A22303-2002Feb16.html\">Al Qaeda&#8217;s Road Paved With Gold <\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn small shops and businesses along the border, the money and gold, taken from Afghanistan&#8217;s banks and national coffers, were collected and moved by trusted Taliban and al Qaeda operatives to the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, according to sources familiar with the events.<\/p>\n<p>\nThen, using couriers and the virtually untraceable hawala money transfer system, they transferred millions of dollars to this desert sheikdom, where the assets were converted to gold bullion. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And so much for the theory that they hate us because they&#8217;re poor.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My speculation that hawala is small potatoes is contradicted by this WaPo story Al Qaeda&#8217;s Road Paved With Gold : In small shops and businesses along the border, the money and gold, taken from Afghanistan&#8217;s banks and national coffers, were collected and moved by trusted Taliban and al Qaeda operatives to the port city of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/02\/17\/big-time\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Big Time &#8211;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-2C","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}