The 9-11 Commission statement on Al Qaeda financing has become notorious for its disingenuity and is well known to all. I'll quote it here again, just to contrast with another statement below:

Page 172 of the report:

To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding. If a particular funding source had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily tapped a different source or diverted funds from another project to fund an operation that cost $400,000­-$500,000 over nearly two years.

While this is of course brazenly, breathtakingly stupid and false, one might presume that this is also the official position of US government, barely if ever challenged in the media. So now check out the following comment from a recent Washington Post story regarding Eliot Spitzer, titled "Spitzer Fall Began With Bank Reports" and describing how a bank's diligent monitoring of "suspicious" transactions became Spitzer's undoing:

A former director of FinCEN, who now works in the industry at a company whose policies prohibit speaking on the record, said that since 9/11, suspicious activity reports had increasingly been used as a source of tips for law enforcement.

“What 9/11 taught us is the value of financial information,” the former director said. “Money doesn’t lie. Money leaves a footprint. And that’s exactly what happened with Spitzer.”

(Full WP article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/nyregion/13legal.html )