I saw Mr. Mir's interview on Fox this morning. His information seems to conflict with the other reports of possession of the tape. But, he sounded pretty convinced of whatever he was trying to say.
Color me confused.
As best as I can tell at the moment, this is how I understand it:
1) this 6-year old tape was given to the British newspaper by al Qaeda via proven intermediaries with high level contacts with al Qaeda leadership
2) one of the links in this "chain of custody" was the Jazeera reporter mentioned by Mir (Peter Bergen on CNN vouched for this same reporter a couple hours later)
3) Mir seems to say that this al Jazeera reporter was given this exact same tape years ago by KSM, presumably before his arrest in 2003, and perhaps to prove al Qaeda's direct involvement in the planning of 9/11 when all this was still poorly understood in the year or so after 9/11. But the tape was not intended for public release at that time.
4) U.S. authorities themselves have had this tape for some time (maybe since the time of the KSM arrest in 2003) but did not release it.
5) Mir believes that the decision to release the tape right now, over 6 years since it was made, is significant. And the decision to release this comes directly from UBL himself
6) It was released after *6* years (remember UBL mentioning 9/11 six times in the last tape), and the release took place 2 days after a Zawahiri tape where he repeatedly mentions KSM *12* times - - who coincidentally, was the one who first gave the tape to this "widely respected reporter" possibly years ago. And in his last video in late 2004, UBL made the reference to the "wills and testaments" of the victims of 9/11 that "should be researched and studied" (even though the victims had no time to make such recordings . . . but their attackers did).
7) To my knowledge, Mir has never gone on TV after any of the dozens of UBL and Zawahiri tapes since 9/11 and said "this is a signal for an attack"