The concern coursing through security circles over the billions of dollars going to Asia in the wake of the tsunami is one of those issues that is bigger than the airing it has yet received. It was epitomized by a photo we first saw in the New York Post of a Sri Lankan in a town stricken by the big wave wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Osama bin Laden. It’s not so much, though, a case of individuals who don’t like us receiving rice and bottles of water – or even a new house. It’s the danger that some significant amounts of what will become billions of dollars in emergency aid and forgiven loans will be siphoned off before it gets to individuals and diverted to institutions allied with our enemies.

No one – certainly not us – wants to discourage giving to the governments and institutions serving the devastated communities of the shores of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. But we live in a world where humanitarian impulses can be seized upon by our enemies and our generosity can be manipulated and distorted. Look no further than the United Nations, whose secretary-general, in the midst of a historic investigation into its oil-for-food program, is suddenly demanding the “immediate” disbursement of billions of dollars in aid to countries where Muslim extremists, and their charities, are operating in the most dangerous ways.

Several people with whom The New York Sun spoke on the dangers of aid being hijacked in the wake of the tsunami were wary of speaking on the record, lest they be seen as being scrooge-like or uncharitable in the midst of what is, in Asia, a historic crisis. One who would comment on the record, Police Commissioner Kelly, made it clear that he wanted to see people give, but that they needed to take care that their giving would get to where they intended. Recently, the Ford Foundation, which had run into problems when its support for the United Nations Conference on Racism was used to finance anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agitation, has begun imposing restrictions on recipients to make sure that they would ensure that Ford’s largesse was not used, even indirectly, to finance terrorism. In the case of the current crisis, it is none too soon to start devising protocols to make sure our charity is not mis-used in a time of war.