On bin Laden Courier Cellphone Story..

The NY Times has an intriguing story today about ties between bin Laden's courier and the Pakistani ISI. As Thomas Joscelyn says, this itself should not be surprising--it's clear UBL had help living where he did. The surprise is the name that showed up in the courier's phone, Maulana Fazlur Rahman. Some have pegged the former Pakistani MP as a founder of the Afghan Taliban.

Rewind to Iraq--unlike the Palin email trove the Times never asked readers to help them go through the Project Harmony database of Iraqi government documents captured by Coalition forces after the regime fell. One of the documents mentions a suspected meeting between a Maulana Fazlur and a high ranking official in Saddam's government:

Part One of the Saddam Dossier appeared to chronicle Rahman's meeting with Taha Yassin Ramadan, the then-vice president of Iraq and Saddam's chief enforcer. Part Two describes a meeting with an unidentified Iraqi official referred to as “M.O.M.,” who possibly is Tahir Jalil Habbush al Tikriti, the director of the IIS. This translation refers to the previous meeting of Maulana Fazlur Rahman and Ramadan. It also mentions a future meeting between the Maulana and Saddam Hussein. A second document captured in Afghanistan seems to confirm that a relationship existed between Saddam and the Maulana. The document is posted under the identifying Harmony number AFGP-2002-601693 at the West Point Terrorism Center.

If the meetings actually occurred it's sorta like Fazlur having the number of Iraqi officials in his cellphone just as bin Laden's courier had Fazlur's number in his. Yes, a disparate dot as yet connected. Just sayin'.