Terrorist mouthpiece Aljazeera, with its customary pose of journalistic impartiality, aired today a videotape showing four Western moonbat hostages captured in Iraq by a previously unknown group, calling itself “the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. ”

DebkaFile reports today that:

Interrogations of al Qaeda adherents captured in 9 countries in November have finally exploded the myth of Osama bin Laden as a semi-retired inspirational figurehead. (DebkaNet)’s intelligence and counter-terror sources reveal that bin Laden has emerged as a vitally active planner of all al Qaeda’s terrorist operations up to the present.

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In an interview on Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CIA Director Porter Goss said the agency has made progress in finding the leaders of al-Qaida, and knows a “great deal more about (Osama) bin Laden, (Abu Musab) al-Zarqawi and (bin Laden aide Ayman) Zawahiri than we’re able to say publicly.”

Meanwhile, the ever-perspicacious democrat Majority Leader Nevada Senator Harry Reid of Nevada said this week he thinks Osama Bin Laden was killed in last month’s earthquake in Pakistan.

LeeBert at ApognosiS provides a useful reference collection on Iraqi WMD evidence.

reviewed by David Lipsky:

[Kaplan] chastises the ‘elite’ for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war ‘every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.’.. we’ve been too thrifty with our troops; to prevail in the war on terror, he advises, we ought to become more tolerant of American casualties. So what’s the holdup? It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines. ‘Their concern is misplaced. The grunts have an ‘unpretentious willingness to die,’ which is in part ‘the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns.’..

The elites, having become global citizens, represent a threat to ‘the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.’ For Kaplan, it comes down to interests and allegiances: ‘Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends . . . did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.’

Wretchard proposes a provocative way of looking at current events:

The fundamental issue… is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people…

That Islam traditionally had no fixed hierarchy helped it adapt more readily to networked war. For the Jihadi the requirements of public policy and international law not only proved no hindrance, in a fundamental sense they did not apply: things like the Geneva Convention were the impedimenta of nation-states. Holy warriors were accountable only to Allah, which in practice meant they answered to no one but themselves. This circumstance exculpated the Jihadists from a multitude of sins in the eyes of a Western media capable of recognizing only state actors. Attacks against hospitals, schools, churches; and the use of children as combatants excited no opprobrium because these were understood to be acts of individuals; unfortunate to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial. Only states could commit war crimes, so that Jihadi atrocities, even on the scale of September 11, were only the subject of police action…

The key challenge is whether America, in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level.

American Enterprise Online notes and debunks Urban Legends originated by the Left about the war.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds and Rand Simberg.

(Apologies to our readers. The blogging software has difficulties with exceptionally long postings, so I divided the original into two.)

The altered scene reads in the original:

TAMBURLAINE. Now, Casane, where’s the Turkish Alcoran,
And all the heaps of superstitious books
Found in the temples of that Mahomet
Whom I have thought a god? they shall be burnt.

USUMCASANE. Here they are, my lord.

TAMBURLAINE. Well said! let there be a fire presently.
[They light a fire.]
In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet:
My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell,
Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends,
And yet I live untouch’d by Mahomet.
There is a God, full of revenging wrath,
From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.
So, Casane; fling them in the fire.–
[They burn the books.]
Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,
Come down thyself and work a miracle:
Thou art not worthy to be worshipped
That suffer’st flames of fire to burn the writ
Wherein the sum of thy religion rests:
Why send’st thou not a furious whirlwind down,
To blow thy Alcoran up to thy throne,
Where men report thou sitt’st by God himself?
Or vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine
That shakes his sword against thy majesty,
And spurns the abstracts of thy foolish laws?–
Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell;
He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine:
Seek out another godhead to adore;
The God that sits in heaven, if any god,
For he is God alone, and none but he.

Churchill and Wellington, Shakespeare and Milton, and all the other heroes of English history and English letters must be revolving in their graves at a speed of 78 rpm-s today at news of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great being presented on the London stage in censored form, the famous scene in which Tamburlaine burns the Alcoran rewritten in deference to Muslim sensitivities at a time when British military forces are in the field fighting Islamo-fascism.

Can one even begin to imagine imagine London stage performances removing (rather than adding by the barge-load) uncomplimentary references to Nazis during the time of Churchill? or scenes offensive to French sensibilities being excised during the Napoleonic wars? or the London theatre grovelling to Spain in the time of the Armada?

IT WAS the surprise hit of the autumn season, selling out for its entire run and inspiring rave reviews… (but) audiences at the Barbican in London did not see the Koran being burnt, as Marlowe intended, because David Farr, who directed and adapted the classic play, feared that it would inflame passions in the light of the London bombings. Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, said that if they had not altered the original it “would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions”.

The burning of the Koran was “smoothed over”, he said, so that it became just the destruction of “a load of books” relating to any culture or religion. That made it more powerful, they claimed.

aj-Jazeera gets some women and a kid right up front for their “manipulate the dumb Americans” shot in an insolent new blog titled “Don’t Bomb Us,” devoted to cynically exploiting the recent British press story and otherwise influencing Western public opinion.

Depkafile is following up on its earlier report, stating that

Syria claims US forces suffered 11 casualties in a Syrian-US clash Thursday night, Nov. 24 without clarifying whether they meant dead or wounded.

Internal Syrian communications channels report Syrian “Desert Guards” border units fought US Marines who crossed into Syria at a point west of al Qaim. They also claimed 30 Syrian casualties.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report the battle took place at the Syrian-Iraqi border town of Abu Kemal. US forces were in hot pursuit of a group of al Qaeda operatives who fled across to Syria in escape an American attack pinning them down in Mosul. The US military delivered Syria an ultimatum to hand the terrorists over. The American pursuit continued Friday when Syria failed to respond.

Hammorabi, a pro-democracy Iraqi blog, has heard locally a version of the same story:

There are news of at least 12 American soldiers have been killed and wounded near the Al-Bo-Kamal area when they followed insurgents escaped to Syria. Fighting then broke down with the Syrians who had at least 3 casualties.

EARLIER REPORT

Scott Johnson at Power-Line discusses a very sensible editorial in the New York Sun: “Should Bush and Blair Consider Bombing Al-Jazeera? ” observing that the vehemence of the British government’s response [to recent press reports] alone suggests that this matter is being taken seriously both in London and in Washington.

What interests me about the conversation in dispute is why anybody… should be surprised by it. Indeed, I would be surprised if Messrs. Bush and Blair had not discussed ways of limiting the damage done by Islamist propaganda, whose main conduit is indeed Al Jazeera TV. It may well be that the thought of silencing the Arab network crossed their minds, only to be dismissed as too risky. If so, were the two leaders wrong to consider that option?

I don’t think so. That shutting down Al Jazeera would be desirable from the Anglo-American point of view is obviously true. And if Qatar, a Gulf state that is nominally an ally of America (on which it relies for its independence), has allowed its capital to become Al Qaeda’s principal propaganda base, it has no right to expect America automatically to refrain from punitive action on its territory.

The wider issues raised by the Bush-Blair Al Jazeera exchange are two. First, how far can the West tolerate the dissemination of Islamist propaganda intended to poison the minds of Muslims against Jews and “Crusaders”? Second, how much information are Western governments obliged to give about their internal decision-making process, and are they justified in suppressing sensitive information, even if this means penalizing the press, to protect Western interests?

The not-always-reliable Debkafile, an Internet publication devoted to reporting and analysis on terrorism, intelligence, Islam, military affairs, & security issues, published in English and in Hebrew, is reporting:

US Marines are locked in battle with Syrian troops after crossing the border from Iraq into Syria at a point west of al Qaim

November 25, 2005, 12:27 AM (GMT+02:00)

Both sides have suffered casualties. US soldiers crossed over after Damascus was given an ultimatum Thursday, Nov. 24, to hand over a group of senior commanders belonging to Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al Qaeda force. According to US intelligence, the group had fled to Syria to escape an American attack in Mosul. Syrian border guards opened fire on the American force.

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Pravda is meanwhile corroboratively reporting that:

The Iraqi government on Thursday called on Syria to detain “dangerous” insurgents who fled across the border to escape a joint U.S.-Iraqi military operation in the area this month. Government spokesman Laith Kubba also said that insurgent attacks are expected to rise before the Dec. 15 general elections. He said attacks by “Muslim extremists and Saddam (Hussein’s) criminals” will be their last stand.

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Who is Debkafile? This WIRED article answers some of the questions.

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No reports from other sources more than 24 hours later. Depkafile has added a an update.