An investigation by an international consortium of journalists just examined a massive leak of 11.9 million records of offshore financial firms that have been evading taxes and financial disclosure for their many clients. The result of what is known as The Pandora Papers has been a cascade of scandals.

This column has long maintained that the US has been deeply involved in massive international corruption. Chief tawdry examples are the largest recipients of US 'aid,' Israel, Afghanistan and Jordan. Washington spent over two trillion dollars on the now lost, 20-year Afghan conflict.

All that money has vanished. Among the largest recipients was the Afghan Communist Party and the drug mafias that made US-run Afghanistan the world's largest producer of illegal heroin and morphine.

The third recipient of US largess, Jordan, has gotten $22 billion from the US since the 1950's. Last year it received $1 billion alone from Washington, mostly to support the Trump administration's crude attempts to buy, threaten and cajole Arab dictatorships into a security pact with Israel that seriously screws the Palestinians. In addition, the US has also given $1.7 billion to Jordan to care for the large numbers of Syrian refugees it shelters. But they were the result of a war stared by the US to overthrow Syria's Assad regime, one of the last independent Arab nations.

In addition, Jordan's royal family received tens of millions in secret funding from Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and, reportedly, from Israel. Jordan and Oman have long been known as favorite dependencies of Britain's MI6 intelligence service and the CIA.