I don’t care. Tim Blair is awesome: It’s a read-in-full column, filled with Tim Blair’s personal brand of Juvenile Scorn (and yes, he is absolutely a Master of Juvenile Scorn™). It’s all about the sudden concern for the well-being of mass-murdering terrorist mastermind’s corpses.

Best blog comment ever: Pst, al Kada, we R in UR d@t@z, plotin UR d00m. Read the story it goes with.

Yeah, they were wrong.

The wealth of information pulled from Osama bin Laden’s compound has reinforced the belief that he played a strong role in planning and directing attacks by al-Qaida and its affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, senior U.S. officials said Friday.

And the data further demonstrates to the U.S. that top al-Qaida commanders and other key insurgents are scattered throughout Pakistan, not just in the rugged border areas, and are being supported and given sanctuary by Pakistanis, a senior defense official said.

Our pals, the Pakistanis. Hey, Obama called them our friends. So what’s up with him and our buds? How’s he doing? Not so good.

President Barack Obama’s promised trip to Pakistan this year, once seen as a reward for a key ally in the fight against terrorism, is now a looming headache for the White House as it tries to determine whether the government in Islamabad was complicit in allowing Osama bin Laden to live for years within the country’s borders.

Obama told Pakistani officials in the fall that he planned to travel there in 2011, in part to soothe concerns that the president was favoring Pakistan’s neighbor and archrival, India, by visiting there first. White House spokesmen questioned this week by The Associated Press refused to say whether Obama still planned to go.

I love this AP analysis:

Canceling the visit could be seen as a sign of U.S. mistrust of Pakistan’s handling of extremists within its borders – as underscored by the news that bin Laden lived in what Brennan himself called within “plain sight” in a neighborhood home to many in the Pakistani military.

Gee, ya think? We don’t trust the effers that hid the man behind the murder of 3,000 Americans for six years right next to their darling ISI officers? Whyever would we mistrust those guys?

And this is my favorite al Qaeda quote:

Al-Qaida confirmed the killing of Osama bin Laden Friday and vowed revenge, saying Americans’”happiness will turn to sadness” in the first statement by the terror network since its leader was slain in a U.S. commando raid against his Pakistani hideout.

Hm, let me think for a minute… Nah. Still pretty happy bin Laden is dead.

He’s a witch! Burn him! The modern state of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in all of its modern modernity, is accusing Ahmadinejad supporters of being witches. Really, you can’t make this stuff up. On the other hand, there’s a serious rift going on right now between Mad Mahmoud and the Mad Mullah-in-chief. And may I say: Rock on, you two! Killing each other would be the best case scenario, but I’ll settle for one offing the other.

The CIA has got its mojo back: Read this account of how they found bin Laden. Good. We need a good spy service to protect us from the likes of bin Laden. Here’s hoping they catch the next one before the next 9/11.

A tale of two headlines:

The New York Times: Strong Job Report Shows U.S. Economy Gaining Steam

CNBC: Jobs Report Has More Bad News Than Good News

To everything, spin, spin, spin, there is a season, spin, spin, spin.

Seriously? Three hundred years too late: I mean, seriously? Now the Spaniards are sorry for the Inquisition? Yeah? Then let them be more supportive of Israel to prove it. (Of course, this isn’t all of Spain. Just Majorca. Figures.)

Hamas spokesliars and their media enablers: Why, exactly, can’t the media point out that Hamas is simply saying what the West wants them to say in order to push forward a Palestinian state so they can attack Israel from closer range, more openly? Just once, let Ethan Bronner ask Khaled Meshal to define “occupation” truthfully, and he will hear that all of Israel is “occupied Palestine.” In fact, he said so.

“All Palestinians know that 60 years ago they were living on historic Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Right there, he has defined what Hamas will accept as a Palestinian state. So why put forth the two-state fiction? They’re just words that Hamas has learned the world wants to hear. Will the media point out the flaws in the Hamas claims? No. They’re too busy passing along Hamas anti-Israel spin as factual statements. Witness:

Mr. Meshal said that there was recent activity on ways to release Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held for nearly five years by Hamas, but that there had been no breakthrough. He blamed Mr. Netanyahu, saying he was responsible for the delay.

“Delay”? Five years in captivity because Hamas wants Israel to release mass murderers, and the Times calls it a “delay” in obtaining a prisoner exchange?

Propagandists. That’s what reporters are these days.

Do I see gloating in the undertone here? The NY Times is all over the bin Laden story, including this “Bush missed, nyah nyah!” article. Also, putting out as much information on our top-secret stealth helicopters as possible (thanks!). And, surprisingly, an op-ed that says it’s only human to celebrate the death of America’s biggest enemy.

Conflicting reports: First France and Britain say they’ll recognize the new Palestinian unity government, even though it’s now filled with openly anti-Semitic terrorists working for the destruction of Israel (as opposed to doing it all secretly). Now they say they’ll stand with Israel and refuse to recognize the government unless Hamas recognizes Israel. Yeah, not gonna happen. So the real question is: Will the unity government fall before the Europeans change their minds? Because they will. Let’s not pretend that they have suddenly gained a conscience regarding Palestinian terrorism and their aims toward Israel.

Seriously? Haredi schools are open for Israel’s Independence Day when even Arab schools are closed? Seriously? Dudes. Way to make friends among secular Jews.

Are you watching, Nasrallah? Of course you are. Israel held a major logistics drill for the northern front, testing its ability to bring food and materiel to soldiers in the event of a battle with Lebanon. I’m quite sure that all eyes in Lebanon were upon the south.

They won’t miss him in Kenya: They remember bin Laden in Kenya. With curses. And in Somalia with threats. Hokay. Next on the list, dudes. On the other hand, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is lying through its teeth again. He says there’s “no connection between Islam in violence.” In the previous breath, he predicted terrorist groups would take revenge for bin Laden’s death. But hey, no connection there. None at all.

Awesome way to make friends in America, dude: Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas—that same Hamas that kept getting those op-eds in major American newspapers touting its moderation and its insistence that deep down, Hamas wanted what Americans wanted—is condemning America for killing bin Laden. Yeah, they’ve totally moderated since they had to deal with taxes and garbage collection in Gaza. Not.

Seriously? Oil is cheaper because bin Laden is dead? Now that’s the second-best news about his death. And stock futures are up. Heh.

Headline roundup: WaPo. The Times. The Cable (timeline). The NY Post. The NY Daily News. Celebrations at Ground Zero and Jersey City. (Don’t forget, hundreds of New Jerseyans were murdered that day as well.) World leader reactions. Behind-the-scenes of the attack. What bin Laden’s death means to al Qaeda.

P.S.: My server is the subject of a DDOS. I have no idea who’s the target, as hundreds of websites share the server. I doubt it’s little old me.

Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday.

”What we know about this most recent information is that it is being directed from the senior most levels of the Al Qaeda organization,” said a senior official at a briefing for reporters. He added, ”We know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern.

Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports — apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence — referred to efforts ”to inflict catastrophic effects” before the election.

The article reports that the nature of the threat was “unspecific” leading me to believe that it never got much past the wishing stage. For some reason or another. Still, it’s incredible that there was no such chatter this year. Was there?

And we if we go back to right before the election we recall that Osama bin Laden made a rather specific threat.

The Islamist website Al-Qal’a explained what this sentence meant: “This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, ‘Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,’ it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn’t treat all American people as if they’re the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.” [3]

Apparently, unable to strike before the elections, Bin Laden attempted to bully the American electorate into voting for John Kerry. It likely didn’t have any effect. But still remember he made a threat and never carried it out.

Jonathan Spyer has more as to what has happened to Al Qaeda since 9/11.

Al-Qaida has combined sometimes nightmarishly effective tactical ability with a somewhat other-worldly, incoherent political and strategic program. Political Islam is transforming the politics of the Middle East, and represents a key strategic challenge to the west. But the particular version of it represented by the perpetrators of 9/11 is today more of a murderous side-show than the nerve center of the future Caliphate which it likes to imagine itself.

Al Qaeda, Spyer reports, has been effective in getting its message out to like minded organizations, but operationally it has suffered numerous setback over the past seven years.

Abe Greenwald summarizes some of these losses:

Every criticism of President Bush’s national security record begins rightly with the charge that Osama bin Laden has not been captured or confirmed dead. Any honest defense of Bush must reckon with this fact. The story goes that in 2003 U.S. forces abandoned the hunt for bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan and shifted their focus onto Iraq, giving the al Qaeda leader a free pass so that we could take up arms against a regime unconnected to the attacks of September 11. Let’s put aside the fact that this is a false choice. And let’s put aside questions about the claim’s legitimacy regarding timelines, intelligence agencies, roaming fighters, Iraq’s terrorist ties, and the dynamics of force deployment, and simply accept the accusation at its most damning. To wit: Bush lost bin Laden by going into Iraq. Okay: If I were offered the choice of taking out one al Qaeda mastermind who had recently been reduced to the status of cave-dwelling spoken-word artist or more than a thousand senior al Qaeda operatives and tens of thousands of armed Islamist soldiers, I would choose the latter a thousand out of a thousand times.

And the proof is in the pudding. Consider the decimated state of al Qaeda and related organizations since they’ve come up against overwhelming American force in Iraq. As CIA director Michael Hayden recently put it, we’ve seen “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally.” Would the hunt for one man in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan have yielded better results?

While Al Qaeda remains a force to be reckoned with, it cannot act as it did seven years ago. This means that whatever mistakes President Bush has made along the way, he has succeeded in the big picture. Will whoever succeeds him take the calm we have experienced over the past seven years for granted and relax his vigilance or will he remain committed to keeping the forces of the Islamists on the defensive. Osama hasn’t barked in seven years on American soil. What will it take to extend that record?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

While Mr. bin Laden’s evolution from opposing Saudi Arabia’s ruling dynasty to running an international terrorist organization has been detailed before, said Flagg Miller, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who spent five years translating the tapes, the recordings provide a more spontaneous look at Al Qaeda than what is available through the carefully choreographed messages it releases.

“These are back-room conversations of Al Qaeda’s key operatives as well as fresh or potential recruits who are trying to figure out what the heck is going on and what their role in it is,” Mr. Miller said.

The article is underwhelming, except perhaps, where it discusses how boring the life of jihadists was. And that recalls an observation of Reuel Marc Gerecht as to why the United States had so little good intelligence on bin Laden.

A former senior Near East Division operative says, “The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with s***** food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ’s sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don’t do that kind of thing.” A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: “Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.”

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.