The Price of Fear: The Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror

Finance has taken centre stage since 9/11 and the waging of the "War on Terror". But despite extensive media coverage, the war on this financial front remains little understood. This book traces the origins of the well-tried money laundering template and dicusses the laws, rules and regulations designed to combat its effectiveness. In the process, he reveals the faulty assumption which has formed the basis of the financial war on terror: that Al-Qaeda and other related terrorist groups were comparable to drug lords and other international gangsters, and that the methods derived from the war on drugs could be uncritically transposed to the fight against terror. Warde shows that the tracking of clean money being "soiled" for illicit purposes requires fundamentally different intelligence and law enforcement approaches from monitoring dirty money that is being laundered.

"Ibrahim Warde exposes the Bush administration's much ballyhooed, but often duplicitous 'war on terrorist finances' which has nabbed few bad guys, ruined many innocents, frozen little hot money and vastly complicated worldwide banking for the greater glory of a burgeoning American bureaucracy."—Jonathan Randal, author of Osama: The Making of a Terrorist

"Ibrahim Warde takes a long overdue skeptical look at the widely held view that money is the 'oxygen' of terrorism. That conclusion has resulted in a financial war on terror launched by the US government that in many cases has produced meager or even counterproductive results. Warde writes with great clarity, and his book is very well reported. It is a welcome addition to a field that has been largely the preserve of alarmists with little interest in the kinds of reporting done by Warde."—Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know

"A pleasure to read ... remarkably informative about a subject that the press seems to have mangled. This ought to have a big impact."—Chalmers Johnson, author Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

"Is it any wonder that with thinking like this, American policy went adrift in the war on terror, not able to find a solid base on which to move forward?"—Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, author of North Atlantic Civilization at War

"A witty, irreverent analysis of the financial 'war on terror' ... A must read for anyone interested in the Middle East and the global economy."—Clement M. Henry, co-author of Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East