Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog discusses news reports of a new Osama bin Laden tape broadcast by Al Jazeera offering a truce. If it really was bin Laden, this would be his first new broadcast since December 2004. He links also an Evan Kolhmann posting arguing against the likely veracity of the recent Michael Ledeen story of Osama’s death in December in Iran.

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Reuters reports that Major General Jay Hood, the US Guantanamo Bay commander, told the press yesterday that prisoners held at the US facility had provided important information on last summer’s UK bombings:

He said “a good, significant number” of mid-level al Qaeda associates were captured during the war in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo and had discussed men they knew or trained who may have since moved up in the hierarchy of the militant Islamist group.

“Who knows those people better than anyone else? The people that were training them, the people that were preparing them for future roles in that terrorist organization,” Hood said.

He said the Guantanamo prisoners learned about the London bombings shortly after they occurred, probably from visiting lawyers who are challenging their detention in the U.S. courts.

“Most of the information available to detainees comes to them from their contacts with legal counsel,” Hood said.

Michelle Malkin thinks these lawyers’ relationships with terrorist prisoners will bear watching, asking “How many of those lawyers are the next Lynne Stewarts?”