From the Wall Street Journal:

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan publicly acknowledged for the first time Thursday that last year’s attack on Mumbai was largely planned on its soil and that it had arrested most of the key plotters.

Detailing a strong Pakistani link to the three-day rampage in Mumbai, Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik said his investigators had tracked down safe houses and hideouts used by the conspirators and traced the boats that carried the attackers from a seaside Pakistani town to Mumbai using engines boat in the Arabian sea port of Karachi. [Read More]

An excerpt from an interview conducted yesterday with Politico:

“I think there are some who probably actually believe that if we just go talk nice to these folks, everything’s going to be okay,” “I think they’re optimistic. All new administrations are optimistic. We were,” he said.

“They may be able, in some cases, to make progress diplomatically that we weren’t,” Cheney said. “But, on the other hand, I think they’re likely to find — just as we did — that lots of times the diplomacy doesn’t work. Or diplomacy doesn’t work without there being an implied threat of something more serious if it fails.

And,

“If you release the hard-core Al Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think they go back into the business of trying to kill more Americans and mount further mass-casualty attacks,” he said. “If you turn ’em loose and they go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?” [Read More]

By Fouad Ajami, in the Wall Street Journal:

…

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so. [Read More]

From the New York Times:

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official. [Read More]

From The Sun:

…

The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside.

The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East.

It trains Muslim fighters to kill British and US troops.

Now al-Qaeda chiefs fear the plague has been passed to other terror cells — or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. [Read More]

By Oliver North, at Human Events:

With all the preparations for the biggest, most expensive and most restrictive inaugural celebration in history, this is probably not the time to remind our President-elect of things he said and wrote, promises made or commitments pledged. Perhaps one of his new aides will clip and save this for his perusal later next week.

Candidate Obama repeatedly described Afghanistan as “the central front in the war on terror.” Sometimes, he included neighboring Pakistan, which he occasionally threatened to attack. After a brief visit to Afghanistan in July 2008, he said that “one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made strategically” was “failing to finish the job.” He used a sports metaphor, “We took our eye off the ball,” to accuse his predecessor of being “distracted by Iraq.” Then he pledged that if elected, “I will once and for all dismantle al Qaeda and the Taliban.” That is what we were told by once Senator, now President-elect, soon to be Commander in Chief, Barack Obama. But that’s not what he is saying today.  [Read More]

From Sara A. Carter at The Washington Times:

U.S. strikes against terrorist suspects in Pakistan’s tribal region have become more accurate in the past few months, leading to the confirmed deaths of eight senior al Qaeda leaders and a decrease in civilian casualties that have roiled U.S.-Pakistani relations, The Washington Times has learned.

Among those killed was the mastermind of a 2006 plot to detonate liquid explosives aboard planes flying across the Atlantic and the man thought to have planned the Sept. 20 bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, that killed 53 people, including two members of the U.S. military.

“The strikes have become increasingly accurate,” a senior Pakistani official told The Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject. The official, who has worked closely with U.S. authorities, also said fighting was escalating between the foreign militants and members of native Pakistani tribes in the area along the Afghan border. As a result, he said, Arab al Qaeda members “are increasingly isolated.” [Read More]

From the Weekly Standard:

The postmortems on the presidency of George W. Bush are all wrong. The liberal line is that Bush dangerously weakened America’s position in the world and rushed to the aid of the rich and powerful as income inequality worsened. That is twaddle. Conservatives–okay, not all of them–have only been a little bit kinder. They give Bush credit for the surge that saved Iraq, but not for much else.

He deserves better. His presidency was far more successful than not. And there’s an aspect of his decision-making that merits special recognition: his courage. Time and time again, Bush did what other presidents, even Ronald Reagan, would not have done and for which he was vilified and abused. That–defiantly doing the right thing–is what distinguished his presidency. [Read More]

From The Wall Street Journal:

Article by Zahid Hussain in Islamabad and Matthew Rosenberg in New Delhi.

Tensions between India and Pakistan rose again Friday as Pakistan said it was redeploying an unspecified number of troops from the fight against Islamic militants in the northwest.

Pakistani officials wouldn’t say where the troops were headed nor provide estimates of how many soldiers were on the move. The officials also said Pakistan had sharply curtailed leave for all troops amid the heightened tensions with India.

A Pakistani military spokesman suggested they will be redeployed to face Indian forces on the country’s eastern border, calling the troop movements and the restriction of leave “defensive and precautionary steps” prompted by souring relations with India after last month’s Mumbai terrorist attacks that left 171 people dead.

Another Pakistani security official said some of the country’s soldiers were being moved from northwestern areas where there were no militants to fight, or where both sides were snowed in.

Both officials insisted the redeployment was modest and won’t affect the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda, which control wide swaths of territory along Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan. [Read More]

From the Washington Post, via TruthCaucus:

You might be shocked by the headline, but that’s the latest report in the Washington Post, saying:

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.

Oh, and they’re happy about the U.S. financial crisis.

Al Qaeda finally caught on to Obama’s message, John McCain = Greorge Bush; and now joins Hamas in campaigning for Barack Hussein Obama.