• Justice: Going Out the Front Door, which notes that al-Qaeda recruiter Fateh Kamel was let out of jail in January and is now back in Canada. 7 other Ressam associates have been sprung in the UK, as has Sheikh Abu Qatada, who prior to 9/11 was bin Laden's top representative in Europe. The British claim they're monitoring Qatada and the Ressam buddies, but I have my doubts given their failure to identify them as a threat and act on it prior to 9/11. Read alongside On The Loose.

• London bombers clearly linked to Pakistan - There is now solid evidence that 7/7 cell leader Mohammed Sidique Khan attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and that Shehzad Tanweer, another one of the bombers, also met with an al-Qaeda operative while in Pakistan.

• Outward Bound - Notes the possibility that the white water rafting trip that Khan and Tanweer took (with possible accomplices?) may well end up taking on for more sinister implications.

• Bomb Probe -Notes that 7/7 bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Germaine Lindsey came up on the British radar during the course of Operation Crevice but at least Khan was not regarded as important enough to merit an independent inquiry. This sounds like a particularly maddening replay of 3/11, where one of the masterminds, Jamal Zougam, had already been identified as a member of Imad Yarkas's al-Qaeda cell in Spanish court documents but simply wasn't monitored by the relevant Spanish authorities. My tolerance for this whole idea of "monitoring terror suspects to see who they meet with" that seems to have been in vogue for awhile in the UK is rapidly waning, in large part because all of this observation doesn't appear to have prevented those being observed from killing people. And what about the other 1,998 guys whose names were collected during Crevice? Are they being monitored?

In any case, the article notes that the 7/7 and the 7/21 cells were likely using the same batch of explosives but that the former had higher quality of detonators.

• The Times Online (not NBC or Newsweek, but okay) also reveals that the brother of failed 7/21 bomber Osman Hussain (alias Hamdi Isaac, does everyone from the Islamic world have to have at least one alias or nom de guerre?), Remzi Hussain, has been under surveillance since 9/11 for links to the al-Qaeda financial network. Couple that with the calls to Saudi Arabia, the trip there by one of the 7/21 bombers, and I'd say that there's a pretty good chance that they were getting direction from the al-Qaeda Gulf leadership, a point of view supported in this Washington Post article.

As Instapundit says, read the whole thing.

Couple all of this with other news coming out of Southeast Asia that bin Laden sent a personal courier to JI leader Azahari bin Husin to finance last year's attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta and I would submit that the open-source evidence to date is that there is still an organized terror network in place (as opposed to a "social movement") that is actively plotting against the West.

If the 7/7 and 7/21 strikes are indeed connected by a common mastermind as I suspect the evidence will more than bear out, I really have to hand it to them in that it was damned clever to use an African group to carry out the 7/21 attacks while relying on Pakistanis and a Jamaican for 7/7. Everybody, myself included, was looking for Lashkar-e-Taiba ties (among other things) after 7/7 and there was even some discussion as to whether or not this wasn't even al-Qaeda but rather Lashkar acting on its own without the direction of its parent network.

It's pretty clear now that that wasn't the case, but it still demonstrates the lethal adaptability of an enemy that may well have yet another cell waiting to be activated in the UK as I write this.