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>>and for a couple of months he has said OBL was alive;

>>that he was living in Karachi

Not to rain on Ijaz's parade, but that is something he picked up on from Indian Intel. He made a trip to the area,including Indian Kashmir and was welcomed by Indian authorities last fall.

An Indian ex-intel chief author named Raman who writes for saag.org claimed in one of his articles that Osama had been in hiding at one time, in the sprawling Binori mosque in Karachi.

Looks like Ijaz has stopped stating that Osama is dead or not in Pakistan as he was stating last winter and spring.

If Ijaz is finally spooked at the extent of jihadism, it is a good sign because of his connections to Pakistan, it means that the Pakistani military/ISI establishment may have finally seen the error of their ways and Musharraf has forced them on a different road instead of the jihadi one they were on.

You are certainly right on that last point. I don't recall if it was Ijaz or someone else who said it---I think it was him---but the "rags" that pass for "street papers" even were UNUSUALLY silent about the nabbing of the Sheikh, and he thought this indicated that Musharref had gained near-total control over the fundamentalist kooks.

This, by the way, was exactly Ijaz's point in his NRO article "Brain Drain" (http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/comment-ijaz030403.asp)

Moreover, this was a key paragraph that I did not read until today, but it makes the point I have made here for three weeks: the delay was all about dealing with the anticipated retaliation, not with military staging or the UN:

KSM's arrest therefore represented an opportunity, if done right, to dismantle the Middle East retaliation infrastructure before launching the war to disarm Saddam. Pentagon planners have long fretted about the cauldrons of fire al Qaeda's Saddam-enabled retaliation cells could unleash on weak Middle East governments if and when the U.S. decided to move against Iraq.