“Pakistani security forces say they have captured and wounded Mansoor Dadullah, a prominent Taliban commander and five other militants after a shootout near the border with Afghanistan.”

A Paki military spokesman said the 6 were were caught entering Pakistan from Afghanistan at a paramilitary check post but local officials say otherwise, that they were hiding in a compound that was raided by Pakistani security forces. These continuing counter-stories illustrate the conflicts between all the various little power centers within Pakistan and their need to constantly keep from offending while still making progress against the terrorists.

Mansoor Dadullah is the brother of a former top military commander for the Taliban, Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in an Afghan and NATO military operation last May in southern Afghanistan. Hopefully that ends this particular bloodline of terrorists.

There has been growing pressure from Western nations on Pakistan to crack down on Islamic militants launching attacks inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and the arrest came just days after a senior U.S. official said that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar were operating from inside Pakistan. I posted earlier that we probably know right where Osama is and are just waiting for the right political moment to take him, dead or alive. No doubt this will happen when McCain needs it most.

In fact, this same senior U.S. official said Mullah Omar and other commanders were directing the insurgency in Afghanistan from Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan. If we know that, we must know where Osama is.

Of course, Pakistans Army spokesman General Abbas says Dadullah’s capture does not confirm that top Taliban leaders are inside Pakistan, as they’ve been denying all along. The purpose of this bald-faced lie is keep a distance between the Musharraf government and its campaign against the terrorists as well as Musharrafs cooperation with us.

Pakistan is under constant stress from internal forces because of religious differences and Musharraf is forced into a balancing act. Lately we’ve been stepping up the pressure for him to come across with better results and since his regime would collapse without us, he’s complying.

The U.S. government has announced murder and war crimes charges against six suspects in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. The U.S. military wants the six tried together and are seeking the death penalty for all six. A military judge will now review the evidence and recommend whether to move forward with a trial.

Khalid Mohammad, aka “Happy”

The suspects include the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They are being held at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and would be tried in the military tribunal system. This means no civil trial that they don’t deserve, in the courts of our nation. The ACLU must be grinding their teeth over this one.

That’s 6 at the top of this post and 6 more here for a dozen. Can we get a bakers dozen? You bet we can! “A CAPTURED diary and a letter written by leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq show the organization in “extraordinary crisis” after last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight” in the terror group.”

The claims come from one of al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leaders in Anbar province - once the group’s stronghold in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda camp near Samarra in just last November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday and a second also seized in November, that is almost as startling. The second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad.

“I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”

Damn right they’re hypocrites, liars and traitors. They’re muslims! Wake up and smell the rancid goat butter. They’re doing exactly what Islam teaches them to do.

The U.S. military insists these documents are authentic and they provide a rare insight into an organization thrown into turmoil by the rise of the Awakening movement. More than 80,000 Sunnis have joined the tribal groups of “concerned local citizens” (CLC) that have helped to eject al-Qaeda from swaths of western and northern Iraq, including much of Baghdad.

Al Qaeda is really just a small part of the overall Mid-East problem, but progress on any front is very welcome.

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