Free Republic

...Any serious evaluation of the war on terror must gauge the balance of power between the U.S. and its enemies, not the level of American popularity with the Arab public. It is a fatal miscalculation to treat the war as a zero-sum game, with every mistake by the Bush administration somehow translating into a victory for Osama bin Laden. In order to win the war, America need not be popular. In fact, it can afford to be hated. What it cannot tolerate is a global balance of power that favors al Qaeda, kindred groups, and rogue regimes that might be...

MADRID A Saudi cleric funneled money to an Egyptian suspected of being one of the masterminds of the Madrid train bombings in March, Spanish and Italian newspapers reported Thursday. The Egyptian suspect, Rabei Osman Ahmed, arrested in Milan in June on a request from the Spanish authorities, identified Sheik Salman al-Awdah, a former university professor in Saudi Arabia, as his financier while he was living in Spain between 2001 and 2003, El Mundo of Spain and Corriere della Sera of Italy said in a joint report. The March 11 train bombings killed 191 people and have been attributed to Islamic...

Even as war rages in Iraq, federal agents have begun to unlock the secrets of an unlicensed, unregistered Islamic charity in upstate New York that allegedly pumped millions of dollars into Baghdad. Flouting U.S. economic sanctions, the group shipped cash out of Syracuse, laundered it in banks in Jordan and then illegally funneled it into Iraq, according to an unsealed federal indictment. Operating under the name Help the Needy, the organization described itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit that provided food and humanitarian assistance to the "starving children and suffering Muslims of Iraq." But it lacked charitable status, misrepresented itself in...