Farah: Blood from Stones

But as with all fact books, the credibility is in the facts not in how they were obtained. And therefore if those facts that the reader knows are seen to be open to question, the credibility of those facts that the reader does not know is adversely affected.

And unfortunately, within the first few pages, there are two statements that do raise questions about the credibility of the detail in the book. First is in the acknowledgements where credit is given to the SITE Institute. This is the organisation set up by Rita Katz when she left Stephen Emerson‘s organisation just before writing the book "Terrorist Hunter," feigning anonymity. For why this causes us grave concern, see WMLR Vol 5 No 1.

Secondly, is the claim that one of those implicated "opened accounts in the Dubai branch of Hong Kong’s Standard Chartered Bank." In fact, Standard Chartered is a London bank, although there is talk of it moving its headquarters to Hong Kong so that it gains preferred access to the China market.

If we accept that there are such basic errors in things that simple fact-checking should have picked up, then we must be cautious about other issues presented as fact.

Having said that, the principles are sound and the book is not a diatribe against Muslims. It is clearly focussed on how non-financial services are used by money launderers and those seeking to fund terrorism. And in doing so, it makes an important contribution to the background knowledge that practitioners should have.

The book demonstrates how entire governments are corrupted by their leaders who are able to create alternative wealth systems, which are largely untraceable. It demonstrates what has been known for years - that once they are out of the ground, diamonds are largely untraceable back to their point of origin so that conflict diamonds are able to mix freely with others (the book’s research pre-dates the certification process designed to avoid conflict diamonds reaching the market. And it demonstrates that diamond traders are really not overly concerned with the provenance of the stones.

Especially fascinating - and the importance of this is why we place such store by the credibility issue described above - is the claim that Jewish diamond merchants would buy stones from representatives of Hezbollah, the Palestinian terrorist movement, which Hezbollah had bought, often at a premium, from Charles Taylor of Liberia.

Equally fascinating is the claim that much of the information relating to the use of the diamond trade for terrorist funding was in the hands of US intelligence agencies for several years before 11 September 2001 but they simply did not understand the relevance or importance of it, and dedicated minimal resources to the study of the subject.

A buy rating? High. Whilst we cannot be sure of some of the details, the general principles that the book recounts are valuable and will certainly help practitioners understand more about the deeper aspects of money laundering and the financing of crime.

Blood from Stones: the secret financial network of terror

Farah, Doug, Broadway Books, ISBN: 0 7679 1562 3

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