Al-Jazeera broadcast on Thursday an audiotape on which a voice identified as Osama bin Laden declares “Iraq is the perfect base to set up the jihad to liberate Palestine.”
The voice calls on “Muslims in neighboring countries” to “do their best in supporting their mujahedeen brothers in Iraq.”
“My speech to you is about the siege of Gaza and the way to liberate it,” he said.
“The Gaza siege is a direct result of Annapolis,” he adds, apparently referring to the site of November’s summit in Annapolis, Maryland, where Israeli and Palestinian leadership agreed to work toward a two-state plan.
He accused Arabs who supported the plan of having become “partners in this horrendous crime.”
And he predicted, “Palestine will be restored to us, with God’s permission, when we wake up from our slumber and adhere to our faith and sacrifice our souls and belongings for it.”
The speaker called for armed revolt in the Middle East.
— CNN, (3/20/08)

Instead of at least still hunkered down on steep mountain sides in Afghanistan, fairly-well run to the ground, Osama bin Laden has enlarged his tent and officially placed his thumb of approval on Iraq.
Even without the 2006 NIE concluding the war in Iraq has increased worldwide terrorism, not decreased it, al-Qaeda still wouldn’t be called al-Qaeda In Iraq if Decider George hadn’t ordered the country attacked, a blunder which opened floodgates on a pipeline of insurgent/religious-fighters.

However, intel is not coming the other way. On Feb. 23, 1998, Osama issued a fatwa stating “the individual duty of every Moslem” is to kill US peoples and anyone who sides with the US peoples anywhere they’re found.
This was nothing more than blowback from US involvement in the Middle East, especially with military bases in Arabia, and should have been expected, but wasn’t taken serious by all the countries of the world.
Gettin’ the skinny on Osama’s organization is near-next to impossible.

BARCELONA — A decade after al-Qaeda issued a global declaration of war against America, U.S. spy agencies have had little luck recruiting well-placed informants and are finding the upper reaches of the network tougher to penetrate than the Kremlin during the Cold War, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials.
Some counterterrorism officials say their agencies missed early opportunities to attack the network from within. Relying on Cold War tactics such as cash rewards for tips failed to take into account the religious motivations of Islamist radicals and produced few results.
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said, al-Qaeda has tightened its internal security at the top, placing an even greater emphasis on personal and tribal loyalties to determine who can gain access to its leaders.
— Washington Post, (3/20/08)

Although Decider George supposedly decided to send the US military into Aghanistan to get Osama in direct retaliation to 9/11, and reportedly Osama and his boys did finally get hemmed up in the Tora Bora Mountains, and the half-crazed Taliban was broken up (no one seems to like the Taliban, except Osama and maybe the Pakistani intelligence service), the real objective was getting Iraq and knocking the shit out of Saddam Hussein.
And Osama lived to fight another day.