Since the Reagan Administration lifted a ban on Chinese arms imports in 1987 more than 2 million weapons and thousands of tons of ammunition have poured into the US from China, The Washington Post reported in a story reprinted in its April 12-18 National Weekly Edition.

"Chinese guns are flooding the market," the Post quoted a US Treasury official as saying. "They're the K mart of weapons manufacturers."

The Post also detailed how the Chinese military - the People's Liberation Army - has set up companies in the US not only to earn money for the Chinese government, but also to sponge US military technology. Companies owned by the Chinese military are operating in at least seven US states, and their profits are being used to beef up China's rapidly growing, 3 million-member army and the country's internal security regime, the Post reported.

A Chinese-owned company in Detroit, for example, reported 1991 sales of $4.5 million, mainly in Chinese-made weapons and ammunition, the Post reported. In the first eight months of 1992, CJA Equipment Import and Export Co. imported 788 tons of ammunition and more than 20,000 guns, according to the Post.

How does the US government feel about what's happening? "Foreigners have rights to set up companies in this country as long as they function according to US law," the Post quotes a State Department official as saying. "There is not an overriding foreign policy interest here."

The article does not discuss the domestic interests of such a policy in a country whose cities have become battlegrounds for well-armed drug dealers and other criminals.

In its March 30 issue, The Village Voice broke a shocking story connecting the growth of US-aided Muslim militance in Afghanistan with the February bombing of the World Trade Center.

Here's the upshot of the Voice's massive cover story, written by Robert I. Friedman:

The US government's financial and military support of the mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan created fertile ground for the organizing and training of revolutionary, fundamentalist Muslims, who had their sights set on opponents other than the Soviet-backed government - namely the United States. As has been the case in other proxy wars, the US' strident support of the mujahedeen led to some unsavory by-products.

'It was no accident that the Sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country. He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA (National Security Agency) and the CIA.' -FBI agent

The US valued the Soviet-battling rebels so much that it allowed Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman - the blind, waxy-eyed fundamentalist cleric believed to have been involved in such terrorist acts as the conspiracy to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat - to enter the US and set up shop in Jersey City, NJ. The Sheikh had established himself as an important US ally by helping the CIA channel money, weapons and men to mujahedeen training centers in the US-supported countries of Egypt and Pakistan, the Voice said.

"It was no accident that the Sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country," the Voice quoted an FBI agent as saying. "He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA [National Security Agency] and the CIA."

The Voice's revelations of US government complicity with the Sheikh are scary but not at all surprising when stacked up against Iran-contra, the spuriously explained invasion of Panama, Iraq-gate and other Reagan-Bush foreign policy debacles.

The Voice article makes the case that the US government purposely whitewashed the investigation of the 1990 murder in Manhattan of right-wing Zionist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane by a member of Sheikh Rahman's Jersey City headquarters, the El Salaam Mosque. Probing too deeply into the killing, the Voice said, would have exposed the Sheikh's connections with the murder suspect and with the US government. It also would have revealed that federal officials discovered a cache of ammunition and terrorist plans - including a "hit list" of US officials - in the alleged killer's New Jersey home.

At the suspect's trial, to the shock of many observers, prosecutors pitched to the jury a lone-gunman theory and posed no motive for the killing. The man was acquitted of the murder though convicted on lesser charges.

With the damning evidence safely under wraps and his cover still intact, Sheikh Rahman got the green light to continue his schemes to commit other acts of terrorism in the US and elsewhere, the Voice said. His protection by US officials continued even after the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, conceivably dropping any incentive the US had to coddle the mujahedeen-friendly Sheikh.

Despite all of the evidence that the Sheikh was planning domestic terrorism, and a recent warning from Egyptian intelligence officials that his New Jersey mosque was a "hotbed of terrorist activity," the US allowed him to stay in the country, according to the Voice. We have now learned that the main suspects in the Feb. 26 Trade Center bombing were frequenters of the Sheikh's El Salaam Mosque.

Alleged cohorts of the Sheikh also are said to be behind the explosion of a bomb packed with rusty nails that killed four and injured 16 at a Cairo restaurant - on the same day as the Trade Center bombing, the Voice said. The article also chronicles other terrorist actions allegedly carried out by associates of the Sheikh, and the deadly reprisals carried out by the US government.

Investigative Digest is compiled by Free Press staff.