Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

My response: Identifying state sponsors of terrorism is a relatively easy task compared to finding individual terrorists. The main distinction to bear in mind, and which intelligence agencies should be focused on determining, is which foreign countries possess governments that are actively supporting terrorist networks; which countries are being exploited by terrorists against the will of, or without the knowledge of, their governments; and which countries are victims of both state-sponsored and revolutionary terrorism. Israel, Egypt, Iran under the Shah in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as well as many weak African nations have been directly implicated in the sponsorship of terrorist groups and have also endured significant anti-government terrorism. The Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Syria, and contemporary Iran would probably fall into the second category of passive terrorist workshops. Meanwhile, very few countries have governments that are powerful enough to sponsor terrorism with impunity while repressing most revolutionary terrorism--but they do exist, as in China.

However, it does become very difficult to figure out which foreign governments are guilty of sponsoring terrorism--as Mr. Hannity says--when political intrigues and corruption infect our foreign policy, leading some governments to be assumed guilty unless proven innocent. After 9/11, the US began to accuse Saddam Hussein of training, harboring, and assisting terrorists responsible for those attacks despite a persistent failure by US, British, and other intelligence to produce concrete evidence of such activity. Convicting a foreign government of involvement in terrorism without evidence is a travesty of justice.

Furthermore, Mr. Hannity should know that the individual Osama bin Laden is the primary financial source for "Islamic" terrorists rather than state sponsors. His abundant money rests in a dozen interest-free bank accounts scattered through Persian Gulf countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Since international anti-money laundering regulations apply only to banks that charge interest, that money is safe. So instead of being the source of terrorism, state sponsors often function as merely a passive link in the chain of terrorist support.