Free Republic

Unbeknownst to most Americans, federal prosecutors opened their case recently in the terrorism trial of a young American who studied under two Taliban-tied imams in California and whose grandfather was Pakistan’s minister of religion in the 1980’s. The trial of Hamid Hayat, 23, is not taking place in the dark of night nor in a military tribunal from which the media is barred. It is in an open California courtroom, the very kind that has been overrun for trials of the likes of Scott Peterson and O.J. Simpson. Yet in the month of February, the New York Times had exactly...

Pakistani traded cash for silence February 17, 2004 BY PAUL HAVEN ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Abdul Qadeer Khan spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy loyalty -- writing checks for anything from seminars to friends' weddings -- in a scheme that allowed him to elude suspicion as head of the world's most successful nuclear black market, senior scientists and government officials said Monday. Pakistan acknowledged this month that Khan sold weapons secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. But signs that the grandfatherly engineer was up to something illegal had been around for years. ''If you wrote to him that...