Ayman al-Zawahiri, in his latest taped address, takes credit for the results of the November election.

SITE Institute transcript:

To the Democrats in America, Zawahiri states that they did not win and the Republicans did not lose; rather, it is the Mujahideen who have won, and the American forces and their allies those who lost.

Do you suppose Speaker Pelosi will invite him to her 4-day celebration?

The Washington Post is reporting a story of the capture in Afghanistan in December of 2001 of documents linking a Pakistani microbiologist named Abdur Rauf to an Al Qaeda project attempting to weaponize Anthrax bacillus.

The documents told of a singular mission by a scientist named Abdur Rauf, an obscure, middle-aged Pakistani with alleged al-Qaeda sympathies and an advanced degree in microbiology.

Using his membership in a prestigious scientific organization to gain access, Rauf traveled through Europe on a quest, officials say, to obtain both anthrax spores and the equipment needed to turn them into highly lethal biological weapons. He reported directly to al-Qaeda’s No. 2 commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and in one document he appeared to signal a breakthrough.

“I successfully achieved the targets,” he wrote cryptically to Zawahiri in a note in 1999.

Despite the evidence in US hands, Pakistan has refused to arrest him, and Rauf remains at large. The Post’s anonymous source said:

We will never close the door, but the chances of getting him into the United States are slim to none,” said one U.S. intelligence official, who, like others, agreed to discuss the case on the condition that he not be identified by name.

Beyond the mysterious reasons for Pakistan’s reluctance to cooperate in this particular case, there is also the question of whether Rauf’s biological weapons research was connected to the US Anthrax mailings in 2001.

U.S. officials are even more reticent in discussing possible links between al-Qaeda’s anthrax program and the 2001 U.S. attacks, which killed five people and briefly shut down the U.S. Capitol. Privately, FBI officials doubt that such a link exists. They note that the attacks came with an explicit warning—a letter advising the victims to take penicillin, resulting in a far lower death toll—but without an explicit claim of responsibility. “It doesn’t fit with al-Qaeda’s modus operandi,” one intelligence official said.

Yet U.S. officials have been unable to rule out al-Qaeda or any other group as a suspect. Earlier this month, FBI officials acknowledged that the ultra-fine powder mailed five years ago was simply made and could have been produced by a well-trained microbiologist anywhere in the world.

Several leading bioterrorism experts still contend that the evidence points to al-Qaeda or possibly an allied group that coordinated its attack with the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These experts point to hijacker Mohamed Atta’s inquiries into renting a crop-duster aircraft and to an unexplained emergency-room visit by another hijacker, Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi, for treatment of an unusual skin lesion that resembled cutaneous anthrax.

The Post’s article references a web site published by a left-wing New York and District of Columbia attorney named Ross E. Getman which extensively discusses the Al Qaeda links to the 2001 Anthrax Mailings, and offers a theory explaining Al Qaeda’s motivations for attacking Senators Leahy and Daschle and the media.

Getman is discussed as one of the amateur investigators of the 2001 Anthrax Attacks in Wikipedia.

The same investigator has also published a shorter article titled, Al Qaeda, Anthrax and Ayman.
——————————————I was wondering why an anonymous intelligence community source would be leaking such a story (not attacking the Bush Administration) to the Post, and it occurred to me that the relationship of spooks to certain elements in the media may have grown so cozy that they might actually use a Post leak to rattle the Pakistani government’s cage on a controversial issue currently in contention.

ABC News tells us that Zawahiri was the target of the attack on the Bajaur madrassa, and the attack came from US Predator drones, not Pakistani helicopters.

Even if the attempt was unsuccessful, there is cause for optimism.

No word yet on whether or not Zawahiri was killed in the raid, but one Pakistani intelligence source did express doubt that Zawahiri would have been staying in a madrassa, which is an obvious target for strikes against militants. That source, however, did express confidence that Pakistani intelligence is closing in on Zawahiri’s location.

One of the clerics who is believed to have been killed today, Maulana Liaquat, was one of the two main local leaders believed to be protecting Zawahiri.

Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News they believe they have “boxed” Zawahiri in a 40-square-mile area between the Khalozai Valley in Bajaur and the village of Pashat in Kunar, Afghanistan. They hope to capture or kill him in the next few months.

From a conservative email list this morning:

EV: Apparently, al Zawahiri has called Bush a butcher and a failure. If he’s a butcher, wouldn’t that make him a success?

BP: No kidding. That must be the terrorist equivalent of “the food was so bad, I couldn’t eat it, and the portions were too small.”

The tape released by Ayman al-Zawahiri on al-Jazeera today proves two things: 1) he was not killed in the recent US Predator strike in Pakistan, and 2) that al Qaeda really is on the run and desperate for a truce. The Counterterrorism Blog has translated excerpts, including:

the American refusal to accept the Truce offer by Usama Bin Laden as an honorable way out, under the pretext that the US are winning the war against what it calls Terrorism, is a Bush “mirage.” ...the public in the US and the UK should make Bush and Blair responsible for the bodies which will come from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sounds like Zawahiri could get himself a job over in Monterey in the Defense Analysis Department of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Alexis Debat discusses that intriguing question:

Osama bin Laden’s tapes — like his operational directives — are hand carried from courier to courier in a long and intricate route that involves several dozen “runners.”

According to al Libbi, it takes six to 12 weeks of travel in the remote and inhospitable areas along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri are still hiding. Based on this piece of intelligence, the Pakistani government succeeded in infiltrating parts of these courier networks in 2005.

But because of the extraordinary precautions taken by al Qaeda’s messengers, the Pakistanis were unable to trace them back to either Zawahri or bin Laden.

The system involves each courier hand delivering the tape or the written message to another courier or location without knowing the courier’s identity, the origin of the tape or message or its destination. It makes it almost impossible for intelligence agencies to roll up the entire network.

Some of these intermediaries are recruited among the thousands of travelling Muslim preachers who roam Pakistan’s tribal and northern areas, usually on foot.

Analysts believe this system is still in place today, and may span several countries. According to a senior Pakistani intelligence source, the latest tape was hand delivered by an anonymous source to al Jazeera’s Dubai bureau in the United Arab Emirates.

Hat tip to Andrew Cochran.

The same article in Counterterrorism Blog reveals that the supposedly “new” Zawahiri tape is a recycled older one. This fact provokes the suspicion that perhaps the CIA Predator strike might have really bagged Al Qaeda No. 2 after all, and efforts are being made to conceal the US success.

Southeast Asia News quotes other, more recent sources, indicating that Depkafile and the certain portions of MSM may have been mistaken. Even if Zawahiri is ultimately firmly established not to have been present, the Friday gathering in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district clearly did constitute the proverbial target rich environment, and US forces on the scene were clearly justified in firing on them.

Islamabad – Authorities in the Pakistani tribal region of Bajaur on Tuesday claimed that a controversial U.S. missile strike on the region last Friday killed ‘at least four’ foreign militants.

‘There is no doubt that 10 to 12 extremists including foreigners had been invited to a dinner,’ said a statement from Mohammad Faheem Wazir, senior official in Khar, the administrative centre of the Bajaur agency.

Based on the findings of a joint investigation team, the statement regretted the loss of civilian lives in the strike but said at least a dozen extremists including two Pakistani clerics wanted by the authorities were also present.

The Times originally posted this picture, captioned: “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border ” The same photo with corrected caption is now here.

Skeptics on Free Republic and Reason noticed that the photo actually featured an (unfired) artillery round. Thomas Lifson of American Thinker supplies the whole story.

One more instance of MSM misreporting has been debunked by the Blogosphere, and this one demonstrates all too clearly the unbecoming eagerness of the MSM to publish, in time of war, when US forces are operating under fire overseas, reports damaging to the reputation of American forces, reports calculated to manipulate the emotions of its readers in favor of the enemy. So eager is the liberal MSM to engage in this kind of journalistic treason that it will consistently publish uncritically, not only staged propaganda photographs like the one above, but also the most hostile and partisan characterizations of US war actions , and evaluations of their results, by foreign adversaries.

The often unreliable Depkafile is reporting that the CIA was fooled by an enemy disinformation operation. Depkafile claims that:

al Qaeda or Taliban had managed to plant a false lead with US intelligence by means of informers. This decoy operation had two objectives:

1. To confuse the commanders of the American forces hunting for bin Laden and Mullah Omar and expose their failure to penetrate al Qaeda’s top ranks.

2. To expose US pursuit tactics and uncover any American collaborators in their midst. The speed with which the news of the air raid appeared on US TV channels Friday night was a mark of the CIA’s certainty that this time it had hit one of its primary marks in the war on terror, Zawahiri.

DEBKAfile’s Special Correspondent in Pakistan reported earlier:

The target was a cluster of three houses owned by a jeweler named Abdul Ghafoor, whose relatives were among the victims.

The Pakistani authorities pointed out that in December, the Americans claimed to have killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a leading al-Qaeda operative, in an air strike in the Pakistani tribal area. However, the body was not produced, leaving the American claim in doubt.

DEBKAfile adds: Bajaur is one of the seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA running down the border with Afghanistan. These mountain areas, home to six million inhabitants, have long been used as sanctuaries and rear bases by Al Qaeda and Taliban.

This item is offered, not as a probably factual analysis to be believed, but simply as yet another rumor, evidencing the profusion of possible versions of what actually occurred in the case of one covert wartime action, whose facts we are unlikely to know any time very soon.

Can one imagine British and American papers during WWII operating in the fog of war during the uncertain aftermath of necessarily secret military operations happily publishing characterizations of Allied efforts by enemy spokesmen and echoing the viewpoint of the German press? Not very easily, but in our modern, more enlightened age, the MSM in both Britain and the United States has evolved an internationalist perspective, unburdened by patriotic loyalties, characteristically anti-America, anti-Bush Administration, and anti-Iraq War, which treats any murderous outrage by the forces of barbarism in the manner it would treat a particularly successful soccer play by a prominent visiting team, which carefully studiedly ignores Allied successes, and which makes a policy of publishing enemy allegations as factual news.

Under 48 hours after the US attempt to eliminate Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri by missile fire in remote tribal regions of Pakistan, the Guardian and the Washington Post pretend to have all the answers. There was a “botched operation” based upon “flawed intelligence” which resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including women and children. They know all this on the basis of the testimony of a combination of irate Islamic villagers, who—of course—would be among the hosts of targetted Al Qaeda terrorist commanders, and sundry Pakistani officials representing a government obliged in the circumstances created by precisely this kind of reporting to assume a posture of indignation in order to avoid bringing down upon itself the wrath of its own domestic Islamofascist sympathisers by appearing too closely aligned with Western governments.

Regrettably, the CIA is not in the habit of playing “Gotcha!” with the MSM, but they may have a good opportunity on this occasion. Earlier reports mentioned five terrorist bodies being carried off for further investigation. And even the New York Times quotes a senior Pakistani official as admitting that

11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.

Whether Zawahiri was killed or not is obviously, at present, unknown, whatever local Pashtoons, Pakistani officials, the WaPo or the Guardian claim.

Earlier report
——————————————————————————————————————-

Today’s front-page coverage in the same papers, by some strange coincidence, accidentally overlooks the story of the rescue of a British free-lance journalist in Iraq by US forces.

The CIA had good evidence of Zawahiri’s presence in a Pakistani location, and called in a Hellfire missile strike fired by Predator drone aircraft earlier today. News reports indicate, so far, that seventeen people were killed, and three houses destroyed. Pakistani officials are being quoted as saying five al Qaeda members are dead, and estimating a 50/50 chance that Zawahiri is among the casualties.