Free Republic

The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning when federal agents arrested two men at Kennedy Airport who were found with more than $140,000 hidden in cardboard boxes with honey jars bound for Yemen. For the agents, aware that terrorists were said to use honey shipments to hide money, that slender lead could not be ignored. If the world was suddenly different for everybody back then, in October 2001, with federal agents and prosecutors both properly alarmed and also under sudden pressure to make terrorism cases, they still relied on old techniques developed in generations of Mafia and...

Counterterrorism efforts got a major boost last week when an American district court found three Muslim organizations and one individual, mostly based in the Chicago area, guilty of funding Hamas and fined them an astonishing US$156 million. The four were found liable for their roles in the murder of an American teenager, David Boim, on May 13, 1996, when he was shot by Hamas operatives as he waited for a bus near Jerusalem. This case is important in itself, providing some measure of justice and relief for the Boim family. Beyond that, it helps fight terrorism in four ways.First, it...