AL QAEDA'S SUGAR DADDY

The US military says that American and Iraqi troops have arrested a financer for al Qaeda. The financer had received over $100 million from donors in order to fund insurgent operations in Iraq.

For a while the military has been saying that al Qaeda's expansion was due to its access to external financing. It is hard to tell the exact scale of the financing operation that they are facing.

The man in question distributed $50,000 a month to al Qaeda and employed up to 50 terrorists to plant roadside bombs ... and paid them $3,000 for each operation.

In 2006 there was an attack on the Golden Shrine in Samarra, which is a holy Shia site. This man's money was linked to purchase of explosives used in that attack, which severely escalated violence in the region.

Details of the man's nationality have yet to be released, but apparently he used a leather merchant business as a front, which allowed him to smuggle weapons and explosives. He had shops in Iraq's Falluja and in Syria and Jordan.

The sad part of this story was that he was arrested rather than just killed. But maybe we can get some information out of him that would lead us to some of the people funding Islamic radicalism. Torture him? To tell you the truth .. wouldn't upset me all that much.