Whoa! Perhaps it doesn’t help, at this moment, that I’ve just been reading Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, the scary new book by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.” And it turns out to be a subsidiary of something much bigger that goes by the unnerving name of “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.” It “administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. Its mission description reads chillingly. That’s when I Google OFAC, go to its site, and find out that the acronym stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Entitled “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons,” it turns out to be a list of what seems to be every Muslim business and social organization on the planet. As a long-time reporter I find it a strange question, as strange as finding myself working on a story about me.īy way of an answer, the bank refers me to an Internet link that calls up a 521-page report so densely typed it looks like wallpaper.
Treasury Department that “reviews” transactions. It turns out, the bank informs me, that OFAC is a division of the U.S. Speak carelessly and the name sounds like just what you might say upon learning that you’ve been sucked into the ultimate top-secret bureaucratic sinkhole. It rhymes with Oh-Tack, but you’ve got to watch how you pronounce it. The funds had, in fact, left my account weeks before, along with a wire transfer fee. The bank wasn’t actually holding up the delivery of the money. Long story short: we went round and round for a couple of weeks, as I coughed up ever more morsels of previously unsolicited personal information.
Why not? All my fault, they insisted, for not having provided complete information. When I politely inquired, Citibank told me that the transaction hadn’t gone through. So the first thing I noticed was that one of those wires with money I needed never arrived.
0 kommentar(er)
