I check the major paper’s sites most mornings, but just like the real paper – if it is not on the headline page I may miss an important story. So it was today when an important WaPo article was not headlined which pointed to where Al Qaeda Leadership may be hiding out! Wouldn’t that be front page news? Not to some it seems. So now we find out that documentation from Zarqawi’s hide out has the Al Qaeda leadership supposedly in Waziristan Province in Pakistan:

Six months before the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June, a senior al-Qaeda figure warned him in a letter that he risked removal as al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq if he continued to alienate Sunni tribal and religious leaders and rival insurgent groups.

The author of the Dec. 11 letter, who said he was writing from al-Qaeda headquarters in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, was a member of Osama bin Laden’s high command who signed himself “Atiyah.” The military’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which last week released a 15-page English translation of the Arabic document made public in Iraq, said his real identity was “unknown.”

…

“I am with them,” Atiyah writes Zarqawi of the high command, “and they have some comments about some of your circumstances.”

…

Atiyah bemoans the difficulty of direct communications between Waziristan and Iraq and suggests that it is easier for Zarqawi to send a trusted representative to Pakistan than the other way around. The “brothers,” he writes, “wish that they had a way to talk to you and advise you, and to guide and instruct you; however, they too are occupied with vicious enemies here.

I must admit I am scratching my head over the publication of this information. One would assume the US would not want to tip its hand as to where we think Al Qaeda is so as to not tip them off and drive them underground. Or is this a signal to get them to move from cover and confirm the specific locations we have on our candidate list? The fact this is coming out may mean we are near to the day when we capture Bin Laden.

And then the Democrats are going to have to explain why we should not subject Bin Laden to aggressive interrogations and try and disprupt all of Al Qaeda’s operations and cells. That would be an interesting turn of events.