WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (AFP) - US authorities have failed to completely cut off funding to the Al-Qaeda network, despite stepping up efforts to disrupt terrorism financing since the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to a report presented Monday to the US Congress.
"Stopping the flow of funds to Al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups has proved to be essentially impossible," Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman of the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks, told the House Financial Services Committee.
Al-Qaeda has found ways to skirt US efforts to shut off its sources of money, said Hamilton, who cited a report on terrorism financing prepared by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
"Despite our efforts, it appears that Al-Qaeda can still find money to fund terrorist operations," he said.
"Al-Qaeda now relies to an even greater extent on the physical movement of money and other informal methods of value transfer, which can pose significant challenges for those attempting to detect and disrupt money flows," Hamilton said.
Before September 11, the Islamic extremist group financed its 30-million-dollar a year budget by diverting money from Muslim charities and using "facilitators" who gathered funds from "witting and unwitting" people, Hamilton said.
Prosecuting Al-Qaeda fundraisers remains difficult, as US authorities have been unable to acquire financial records from other countries and have struggled to link funding sources to the extremist group, he added.
Although Al-Qaeda's budget has "decreased significantly" since the fall of Afghanistan's Taliban regime, US authorities still do not know "with any precision" how much money the group raises, where it comes from or how it is spent, Hamilton said.
But US efforts have hampered Al-Qaeda's ability to raise money, he added.
"The death or capture of several important facilitators has decreased the amount of money available to Al-Qaeda and increased its cost and difficulties in moving money," he said. "Captures have produced a windfall of intelligence," he said.
The independent commission's Democratic and Republican members have not voted on the staff's report on terrorism financing, but Hamilton said its findings would help Congress's effort to reform the country's counter-terrorism efforts.
Eliminating Al-Qaeda's funding was not a priority of the US intelligence community before September 11, the commission's staff 155-page report says.
"The lack of specific intelligence about Al-Qaeda financing frustrated policymakers, and the intelligence deficiencies persisted through 9/11," the report says.
But stripping Al-Qaeda of its funding sources has become a top priority, and US authorities have used financial information as investigative tools, Hamilton said.
"Vigorous efforts to track terrorist financing must remain front-and-center in US counterterrorism efforts," he said. "The government has recognized that information about terrorist money helps us to understand the networks, search them out and disrupt their operation."