Free Republic

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

President Bush says we're waging a "War on Terror," but the terrorists have made it clear what they're fighting for. A vote for Bush or Kerry will be a vote for or against the war on terror. Kerry, of course, has already famously said, "I think there has been an exaggeration" of the terror threat by the Bush White House. Others on the Left go even farther, complaining that the word terrorism itself is being kept deliberately imprecise: "Few American politicians or commentators," asserts John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer based in Saudi Arabia, in Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune, "dare...

The death toll from the terrorist bomb attack in the Southern Philippines has risen to 21. The terrorist group Abu Sayyaf is being held responsible for the atrocity. Hamsiraji Sali, a commander in an Abu Sayyaf terrorist group was hiding out on the southern island of Basilan, admitted that he is getting funds from Iraq. Sali bragged the money would be spent "on chemicals for bomb-making and for the movement of our people." His boast led to the expulsion of Husham Hussein, an Iraqi diplomat, last week. Husham had been discovered contacting Abu Sayyaf by phone. Intelligence linked him to...