Terror on a Budget

The 9/11 Commission has broken for lunch. For me the most interesting bit of info presented this morning amid a torrent of interesting bits is just how little the 9/11 attacks cost bin Laden. The commission staff estimates direct costs of the plot to be between $400,000 to $500,000. Of that only about $300K was spent in the U.S. to support the actual attackers.

As the report notes, that is absolutely nothing for an enterprise like al Qaeda:

"Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding and a pre-9/11 annual budget estimated at $30 million. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily found enough money to fund an attack that cost $400,000-$500,000 over nearly two years."

Comments

[Paul Z]

Talk about bang for your buck.

[JDM]

The limiting factor to 9/11 type attacks is that there are relatively few people who can get into America, get by day to day in America, be trusted to remain commited to their goal while doing so, and then willingly blow themselves up.

There's more to pulling off suicide attacks here than pulling it off in, say, Israel.

[Idiot Radar]

Way to make the most tasteless comment I've ever heard Paul Z.

[s.m. koppelman]

Doesn't that mean al Qaeda's administrative costs run between 25 and 40 percent? Obviously they've got some of the typical bureaucratic inefficiencies of a donor-supported nonprofit. Tsk.

Does that Islamic-world overhead also include marketing and local recruiting costs directly related to the 9/11 attack, like job postings and HR expenses?

[beanie]

....not to mention internship program expenses, relocation, and a dental plan.

[Hell's HR flunky]

Their real savings are on the retirement benefits.

[thoreau]

Maybe if they moved their base of operations to a place with less violence and mayhem they could save on security costs. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is not the best place to do business.

[snide]

How much of this terror money was spent in the US? This is another example of jobs going overseas when there are perfectly able-bodied people here who are willing to do the work.

Clearly we need a terror terrif.

[thoreau]

Bush should go to the nation's prisons and promise that, if he's elected, terrorist groups that try to outsource jobs to foreign murderers will be barred from this country!

Why should Mohammed Atta steal a job from Tim McVeigh? 🙂

[Dave]

It's amazing how much you can get for you money if you're allowed to do anything you want and not follow 'the rules'. We could probably end the terror war with a "do anything else and every muslim holy site gets nuked, starting with mecca" policy, for far less money than we have spent already. Lucky for them we don't play that way. After all, if you were an Arab, would you rather spend your time being "interrogated" in Abu Garaib, or in the Eygptian/Syrian/Saudi, etc prison system?

[holmie]

This is gonna piss of the Al Qaeda terrorists union. 1% of their annual income went to support the actual attackers, typical. Guess the rest went to Taliban lobbying.

[joe]

"Obviously they've got some of the typical bureaucratic inefficiencies of a donor-supported nonprofit.'

You joke, but that's a pretty good way to think about them. They raise funds, they give grants to deserving grassroots organizations, they hold workshops, the produce PSAs, they undertake their own big projects.

I couldn't help but notice that among the translations for Al Qaeda is "the foundation."

[The Lonewacko Blog]

This approximate amount has been known for a while.

What's more interesting is where and from whom they get their money: a rich Egyptian, a Pakistani, and several Saudis, in addition to various business ventures.

We could probably end the terror war with a "do anything else and every muslim holy site gets nuked, starting with mecca" policy, for far less money than we have spent already

No, not starting with Mecca. Mecca would be the last. And, this ultimatum would not be made to OBL or terrorists, but to those who want to live. If they don't deal with the terrorists and the religious extremists, we start bombing. And, no matter what they do to the U.S. heimat, we've got submarines circling the globe 24/7/365.

[B.P.]

Al Qaeda must've saved some money by buying one-way tickets on those planes instead of round-trip, because every time I've flown one-way since 9/11 I've gotten extra scrutiny.

[James]

The games designer James Dunnigan wrote that wars tend to continue until one side or the other becomes exhausted, or they become enlightened by the absurdity of it all. Since mutual enlightenment doesn't seem to be in the offing, I wonder which side will be exhausted first?