Al Qaeda's number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri, is calling for Palestinians to boycott PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's proposed referendum on Palestinian statehood because it would implicitly recognize Israel.

While the statement from al-Zawahri is nothing out of the ordinary, you have to wonder how much weight it actually has in the Palestinian territories. Prior to disengagement, the tight Israeli control of border crossings and internal security kept most international terrorists out of Gaza. However, in March, Abbas and the Israeli Defense Ministry agreed that Al Qaeda had infiltrated Gaza. Three months since their announcement, there isn't much word as to the strength of Al Qaeda cells there, but they could be a destabilizing factor for any new policy proposals.

The good folks over at the National Security Archive - they uncovered the reclassification of declassified documents by the CIA earlier this year - file a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests with the US government. So imagine their surprise when, after filing a request with the FBI in 2005 for documents relating to al Qaeda, they received a letter stating that "no records responsive to your FOIA request regarding AL QAEDA ... were located...". Slate has a copy of the letter up and, as Timothy Noah points out, the Bureau noticeably does not say we have documents, but you can't have them. They say no documents can be located. It must be seen to be believed.

Joe Biden is one of the more thoughtful members of the U.S. Senate. Often I’ll disagree with him, as I do about his new Iraq proposal, but his ideas are always worth listening to. As for his verbosity, I tend to agree with David Brooks that it is born out of intellectual curiosity not pomposity.

All of which, makes his comments on Hardball, flagged by the Hotline blog, about the Zacarias Moussaoui verdict all the more disappointing: "I think that boy is about to have, as we Catholics say, an epiphany. I think he's about to find how that he may not have gotten the better end of the deal." Matthews then asks, “Do you think he'll survive for long in prison, Senator?" To which, Biden responds “I don't want to answer that because I'll get 6,000 letters saying I'm encouraging something bad happening to him. I think it's not going to be an easy road for him.” Biden should leave this kind of crass populism to lesser men. Joseph Biden is better than this.

United 93 isn’t the movie I expected it to be. Having read John Podhorertz and Rich Lowry’s pieces, I thought the film’s key message would be that even on 9/11 itself Americans fought back against the terrorists. Well, it’s not.

The legend of this flight played a key part in the nation’s recovery after 9/11. The fact that ordinary citizens took the fight to the enemy that day and saved the Capitol from destruction meant that the United States was not some helpless victim ravished by a cunning enemy but rather a nation that fought back and once again demonstrated those virtues of courage, ingenuity, and self-reliance that have so defined its history. These brave passengers were reassuring evidence that this generation was up to the challenge that history had presented it with. I think this is why George W. Bush took to ending his speeches in the fall of 2001 with the line, “But we have our marching orders:  My fellow Americans, let's roll.”

The movie does depict bravery in the fight to retake the plane. But it also reminds us of something that it is easy to forget: The passengers wanted to land the plane. At the end of the film one feels deflated that all the passengers have died rather than elated that the Capitol has been saved. The movie also avoids patriotic bombast. There is no scene in which passengers declare that they must act to save Washington and the American system of government. Instead, they realize that the bombers are on a suicide mission and that they have to get control of the plane to have any hope of survival. (Although, it does seem like a cheap shot to have the voice of in-flight appeasement speak with a European accent.) 

Scare tactics, hysteria, and experts’ insights are easy to come by whenever a new tape of Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri surfaces. Harder to find is a clear, objective source of material for the messages that terrorists send—at least, those messages that don’t come in the form of bombings or hostage videos. So, the people over at RAND have developed a Voices of Jihad Database, which offers a “a compilation of speeches, interviews, statements, and publications of jihadist leaders, foot soldiers, and sympathizers.”

The resource is far from comprehensive. (A search for “bin Laden” yields just 27 sources.) And the clustered results are a bit of a mixed bag of categories. It helps to search for broader terms, like “attack” (66 results) or “jihad” (162). 

The larger question, though, is whether this collection of information, and others like it, will provide clues as to when, where, and how the next terrorist attack might occur.