In brief summary of my problems/contentions concerning the article:

• The sections on Saif al-Adel and al-Qaeda policy towards Shi'ites are a mess. Ignoring the issues of al-Adel's "detention" and status as a "former member" of bin Laden's inner circle (a view not supported by the very online document that Time quotes from - to read more excerpts from it you can go here and read Bill Roggio or my own treatment on it when it was first reported by al-Sharq al-Awsat back in June, which should give you an idea of how dated some of this stuff is), al-Qaeda has always stayed away from sectarian animosity against Shi'ites. I am extremely skeptical that bin Laden would have tried to order Zarqawi via Hassan Ghul to carry out attacks against Iraqi Shi'ites as a means of leverage against Iran (why not just attack the Iranians directly?) given that media reports as well as Michael Scheuer (still employed by the CIA during this period) have explicitly stated that bin Laden rejected Zarqawi's sectarian campaign in Iraq. The latter opinion is even upheld in the same Time Magazine article, which notes that the purported letter from al-Zawahiri to Zarqawi "reveals differences between the old al-Qaeda leaders and al-Zarqawi over tactics and ideology" - one of which is his decision to attack Shi'ites in Iraq!

• The "two dozen other terrorist groups in more than 30 countries in Europe, Africa and Asia" that Zarqawi has contacted "in an effort to raise funds for his network and coordinate international operations" are almost certainly the relevant members of bin Laden's terrorist coalition (basically everybody except the Southeast and Central Asian groups, which have their own problems to deal with at the moment) that have been working together at least as far back as the early 1990s in Sudan - take a look at p. 58 of the 9/11 commission report, for instance. All this means, if you can see past the hype, is that the old al-Qaeda infrastructure is still intact and being readily exploited by Zarqawi.

• The account of the 1999 meeting between Zarqawi and bin Laden is supported by Jean-Charles Brisard's account of the relationship between the two men in Zarqawi, which was quite unprofessionally trashed by Daniel Benjamin in his review of the book for the New York Times a few months back precisely because he disagreed with Benjamin on that point. I myself have long been of the opinion that bin Laden and Zarqawi were brothers in arms and it's nice to see that the press is finally catching on. Next step: will they be willing to admit that they were wrong to charge the administration with distorting the nature of the relationship between Zarqawi and bin Laden?

• My understanding is that the Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi in Iraq is a separate individual from the Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi in Afghanistan and that neither is the same as the other Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi (Abu Abdullah) who was an al-Qaeda camp commander in Afghanistan who was reportedly captured in Afghanistan.

• I suspect that there's a lot more that was left out of Abu Faraj al-Libi's statements concerning the al-Qaeda "management committee" than what was leaked to Time by the French since there are currently two such committees - one based out of Pakistan that is more or less the same as the ad-hoc council that I wrote about here and another based out of Iran.

• The chronology is screwed up (either by Time or their senior ISI source, you decide which) concerning the departure of the "several hundred" al-Qaeda jihadis who left Afghanistan for Iraq to fight the US - that occurred prior to the beginning of the Iraq war.

As former Indian intelligence official B. Raman noted back in March 2004:

Even before the invasion, terrorist elements of the IIF started moving to Iraq via Saudi Arabia and Iran for starting a jihad against the Americans. The first group to go was from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM). They went to Saudi Arabia as Haj pilgrims and from there crossed over to Iraq. Subsequently, Arab-speaking volunteers of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the LEJ also started going to Iraq in small numbers. Many of the Arabs of Chechen ancestry, originally belonging to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, who were in the South Waziristan area of the FATA, also joined them.

• I'm rather skeptical of the contention that bin Laden is being phased out in favor of Zarqawi, if than nothing else than because we simply don't get that lucky. If you read over the al-Zawahiri letter, the distinct impression that I get is that he would be a far more dangerous opponent for us to fight inside Iraq than Zarqawi is. The fact that bin Laden has been able successfully evade the most sophisticated dragnet for the last 5 years is testimony enough to how adept he is at both secrecy and security and I'm more worried about the claim that we don't know anything about him than I am the idea that Zarqawi's the new supervillain on the block. I also don't think that anything should be read into the absence of public appearance on his part - prior to October 2004, that was sort of Exhibit A for far too otherwise intelligent people assuming that he was dead. Somebody seems to be working mighty hard to bulwark Waziristan into an al-Qaeda stronghold, for instance, and you can take your own guesses as to who that might be.

In somewhat related news, I see that Abu Khabab, al-Qaeda's resident mad scientist, is finally getting some of the popular notice that a madman of his stature deserves. As with bin Laden, the fact that we know far too little about where this guy is now and what he's up to now (his last appearance on the radar was in February 2003 - anybody care to guess what he's been doing the last 2 years?). As with Saif al-Adel, I think that the danger posed by Khabab and his students is under-appreciated in favor of Zarqawi at this point and that after either man successfully pulls off a major terrorist attack in the West (though I think you can see traces of al-Adel's hand in the 3/11 bombings through Rabei Osman Sayyid Ahmed and Abu Faraj al-Libi's in 7/7) all of the usual suspects will be scratching their heads wondering how exactly we missed these guys.