[Post Toasties]

Yigal Carmon, president of the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute and counter-terrorism adviser to three prime ministers, said the Abu Hafs statement does not represent Al Qaida.

"The text of this statement includes linguistic usages and concepts that are incompatible with or alien to authentic Al Qaida writings by Osama Bin Laden, Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri, and others," Carmon wrote in an analysis.

Possibly, but if this is the strongest argument for believing that there are no ties between Al Qaeda and the Madrid bombings, it sounds weak because isn't Al Qaeda supposed to be largely decentralized?

[daviddennis]

A nice point, and I was thinking along the same lines.

That being said, I think the analyst's point is that the offer for a "cease-fire" only applies to their specific group, not Al Quaida as a whole. This makes it effectively meaningless.

The group as a whole is unlikely to heed a message unless it's shown to come from one of the well-known AQ bigwigs, such as Osama. The issues they raise are relevent because they indicate that this group's ideology is different from AQ, and therefore other AQ cells are unlikely to respond.

D