WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.
They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.
Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.
“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs.
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2 comments:
Keep voting for liberals and you'll keep losing our tax dollars through the hands of inexperienced and disillusioned politicians. And equipping our enemies on top of it!
why in the hell do we provide cash to any of these "governments." We need to stop cash going to any of the countries ending in -stan and iraq, egypt, iran, etc. We need to only consider granting money to those governments and countries who are friendly to us and help us. The rest goes to feeding our hungry and paying our debt.
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