Anyone care to ask former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami for further details on the item below? — as his UN-leveraged U.S. speaking tour takes him this evening to a $250-per-plate fund-raising dinner (or $500-per-person including private reception beforehand) in Arlington, VA for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — and then on to Harvard. (Boldface is mine).
The U.S. Treasury has just cut off Iran’s Bank Saderat from access to the U.S. financial system, with Under-Secretary Stuart Levey noting:
“It is remarkable that Iran has a nine-digit line item in its budget to support terrorism.”
Treasury’s press release explains how despite U.S. sanctions on Iran, Bank Saderat has been using the U.S. financial system — noting further that “Bank Saderat is one of the largest Iranian-owned banks, with roughly 3400 branch offices. The bank is used by the Government of Iran to transfer money to terrorist organizations, including Hizballah, Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A notable example of this is a Hizballah-controlled organization that has received $50 million directly from Iran through Bank Saderat since 2001.”
Levey spoke about the terrorist money trail at greater length earlier today, in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute.
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