Free Republic

The Underworld Bank scandal is oozing out all over. Conceived in Karachi, financed in Abu Dhabi, the conspiracy reached into the world's Western capitals and perhaps the U.N. under the protection of high-paid lobbyists and naive spooks. The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system. For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the...

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

ASSOCIATED PRESS An Iraqi scientist has told U.S. interrogators that her team destroyed Iraq's stock of anthrax in 1991 by dumping it practically at the gates of one of Saddam's main palaces, but never told U.N. inspectors for fear of angering the dictator. Rihab Rashid Taha's decision in 2003 to remain silent stoked suspicions of those who contended Iraq still harbored biological weapons, contributing to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq two years ago this month. "Whether those involved understood the significance and disastrous consequences of their actions is unclear," the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group says of Mrs. Taha and...