The word from Bill Roggio's inbox

Power Line ^ | May 8, 2010 | Scott Johnson

[yoe]

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, (Steve Hayes and Tom Joscelyn document) the lengths to which President Obama and other public officials have gone to make fools of themselves commenting on the attempted terrorist attack by Faisal Shahzad in Times Square. They note, for example, that attempted bombing is properly referred to on the White House Web site as "the Times Square incident." (Is anyone in the White House familiar with The Ox-Bow Incident? You might want to change that to "the Times Square happening" or "the Times Square event.")

Hayes and Joscelyn have much more. Treating the Times Square happening as the third such terrorist attack in the Age of Obama, they show how the public relations foolishness fits into a recurring pattern: "The most striking thing about all three attacks is not what we heard, but what we haven't heard. There has been very little talk about the global war that the Obama administration sometimes acknowledges we are fighting and virtually nothing about what motivates our enemy: radical Islam." Is Shahzad a Muslim? I hadn't heard that.

Elsewhere in the new issue of the Standard, Bill Roggio -- proprietor of (The Long War Journal) -- examines the Times Square happening from the perspective of what he calls (The Taliban in his inbox) In the early morning hours of May 2, only eight hours after the bomb was discovered in Times Square, Roggio received an email message. The emailer's handle was Taliban News and the subject line read: "Qari Hussain Mehsud from Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan accepts the responsibility of recent Attack on Times Square Newyork USA."

"You're the first one to know" the cryptic email stated.

The email included a link to a 1:21-length video posted on a YouTube site called the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan News Channel. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan ("the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan") is an al Qaeda-linked group waging war against the Pakistani state and against NATO forces in Afghanistan.

"We Tehreek-e-Taliban with all the Pride and Bravery, TAKE full responsibility for the RECENT ATTACK IN THE USA," Qari Hussain states at the beginning of the tape, which was accompanied by English subtitles.

Mum's the word, but you'll want to read the whole thing.