Stephen Hayes lists more evidence emerging from declassified documents captured in Iraq: a series of memos from the spring of 2001, showing that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s; memos on efforts by Iraqi Intelligence to support Saudi opposition groups, including evidence of cooperation with Osama bin Laden 1994-1996; and a memo from “Republican Command, Intelligence Division,” dated September 15, 2001, addressed to “Mr. M.A.M.5,” reading:

Our Afghani source number 11002… has provided us information that the Afghani consul Ahmed Dahestani (his biographic information attachment #2) has talked in front of him about the following:
1. That Osama bin Laden and the Taliban group in Afghanistan are in communication with Iraq and that previously a group of Taliban and Osama bin Laden have visited Iraq.
2. That America has evidence that the Iraqi government and the group of Osama bin Laden have cooperated to attack targets inside America.
3. In the event that it has been proven that the group of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban planning such operations, it is possible that America will attack Iraq and Afghanistan.
4. That the Afghani consul heard of the relation between Iraq and the group of Osama bin Laden while he was in Iran.
5. In the light of what has been presented, we suggest to write to the committee of information.

Meanwhile, Foreign Affairs in its May/June issue is running a major article by Kevin wood, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, titled Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside, drawn from a recently declassified military report. It contains (page 6):

In a document dated May 1999, Saddam’s older son, Uday, ordered preparations for “special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].” Preparations for “Blessed July,” a regime-directed wave of “martyrdom” operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

The government has finally begun to release unclassified documents captured in Iraq. link

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard played a conspicuous role in bringing pressure for their release. 3/20

Michelle Malkin is collecting coverage of this emerging news event.

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.

Posner brings lucidity and skepticism to the NSA electronic surveillance brouhaha in New Republic.

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.

Jack Kelly at Real Clear Politics reports a possible terrorism connection the MSM studiously overlooks:

Last month Italian authorities arrested three Algerians who were members of the al Qaida -linked terror group GSPC.

The three were plotting attacks on ships, railway stations and stadiums in the United States in a bid to outdo the casualties caused on 9/11, said Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu.

The arrests made front page news in newspapers in Italy, Britain and France. But apparently the only U.S. newspaper to mention them was the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a short AP dispatch on page A-6. The AP did not mention that the principal targets of the plotters were in the U.S.

The incuriosity of our news media about the plotters and their plots is curious, especially in light of the mysterious death of Joel Hinrichs, 21, a Muslim convert who, wearing a suicide vest, blew himself up Oct. 1 on a park bench outside the stadium in Norman where the university of Oklahoma football team was playing Kansas State. When Hinrichs’ apartment was searched after his death, the FBI found a plane ticket to Algeria.

Hat tip to AJStrata

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And Thomas Joscelyn has an article in the Standard backgrounding the same al Qaeda-affiliated Algerian terrorist group, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC).

The man who trained shoe-bomber Richard Reid, Zacharias Mousssaoui, hundreds of other terrorists, 52 year-old Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was one of the Al Qaeda leaders present at last Friday’s meeting in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district, slain in a Predator-drone missile strike directed by US Intelligence operatives. The US government had been offering a $5 million reward for Mirsi’s capture.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, had been also been expected to be present at the targeted meeting, but is –so far– reported to have failed to attend.

ABC News report.

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Meanwhile, AP is offering a rather confusing story by Riaz Khan, describing Pakistani Intelligence searching for missing bodies of the terrorist victims of last Friday’s missile strike.

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Update

Reuters reports that Pakistani intelligence has identified two others of the slain terrorists. One was Abdul Rehman Al-Misri al Maghribi chief of al Qaeda’s media department, and a son-in-law of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. The other was Abu Obaidah al Misri, al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Kunar province, Afghanistan. The presence of Zawahiri’s son-in-law tends to suggest that he was indeed scheduled to be present. The fourth deceased terorist has allegedly not yet been identified.

Hat tip to John Hinderaker.

I was discussing the (indeterminate at this point) results of yesterday’s CIA attempt to nail al Qaeda number 2 man Ayman al-Zawahiri with a friend, who had not yet seen news of the previous day’s report by Michael Ledeen of the alleged death last month of Osama bin Laden. For his convenience, and those of any others who have not seen it, I am quoting, and linking, the story:

According to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden gave the world the most marvelous Christmas present he could possibly give by departing from it in mid-December. The Al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year’s message in conjunction with the Moslem Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.

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.

John Hinderaker at Power Line quotes the article below, containing news you won’t find in the New York Times.

The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. – because it would tend to support President Bush’s use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups.

News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media.

Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S.

Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations, and the terrorists’ goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.

Italian authorities stepped up their internal surveillance programs after July’s terrorist bombings in London. Their domestic wiretaps picked up phone conversations by Algerian Yamine Bouhrama that discussed terrorist attacks in Italy and abroad.

Italian authorities arrested Bouhrama on November 15 and he remains in prison. Authorities later arrested two other men, Achour Rabah and Tartaq Sami, who are believed to be Bouhrama’s chief aides in planning the attacks.

The arrests were a major coup for Italian anti-terror forces, and the story was carried in most major newspapers from Europe to China.

“U.S. terror attacks foiled,” read the headline in England’s Sunday Times. In France, a headline from Agence France Presse proclaimed, “Three Algerians arrested in Italy over plot targeting U.S.”

Curiously, what was deemed worthy of a worldwide media blitz abroad was virtually ignored by the U.S. media, and conservative media watchdog groups are saying that is no accident.

“My impression is that the major media want to use the NSA story to try and impeach the president,” says Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media Report published by the grassroots Accuracy in Media organization.

“If you remind people that terrorists actually are planning to kill us, that tends to support the case made by President Bush. They will ignore any issue that shows that this kind of [wiretapping] tactic can work in the war on terror.”

“The mainstream media have framed the story as one of the nefarious President Bush ‘spying on U.S. citizens,’ where the average American is a victim not a beneficiary,” commented Brent Baker, vice president of the Media Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to encouraging balanced news coverage, “so journalists have little interest in any evidence that the program has helped save lives by uncovering terrorist plans.”

The Associated Press version of the story did not disclose that the men planned to target the U.S. Nor did it report that the evidence against the suspects was gathered via a wiretapping surveillance operation.

Furthermore, only one American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is known to have published the story that the AP distributed. It ran on page A-6 under the headline “Italy Charges 3 Algerians.” The Inquirer report also made no mention of the plot to target the U.S. – although foreign publications included this information in the headlines and lead sentences of their stories. Nor did it advise readers that domestic wiretaps played a key role in nabbing the suspected terrorists.

One obvious question media critics are now raising: Did the American media intentionally ignore an important story because it didn’t fit into their agenda of attacking President George Bush for using wiretapping to spy on potential terrorists in the U.S.?

“It’s clear to me,” says AIM’s Kincaid, “that they’re trying their best to make this NSA program to be an impeachable offense, saying it is directed at ordinary Americans. That’s why they keep referring to this as a ‘program of spying on Americans’ – whereas the president keeps pointing out it’s a program designed to uncover al-Qaida operations on American soil.”