Banks Not Suited To Help vs Terrorism?

This slanted piece about the costs to the banking industry in the war on terror shows a severe lack of insight by its author, Stephen R. Heifetz. Here's how he is described at the bottom of the column:

"The writer is a Washington attorney. He represents financial institutions on anti-money-laundering matters and worked on these issues at the Justice Department."

Not like there isn't some special interest invoved here. This quote makes it hard to take the entire piece seriously:

"...financial institutions are not good at detecting funds flowing to suspected terrorists"

Duh. The banks have been given specific guidelines to follow. The taking of a few moments to spot a certain threshhold of cash transactions doesn't cost money, or at least very much.
Taking the time to fill out whatever paperwork is necessary and forwarding it to the Feds can't cost 7 Billion dollars. I don't care what the International Institute for Economics says.

I'll be back

CC