How quickly the New York Times forgets. On September 12, 2001, Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote:
Regardless of whether the carnage is reliably traced to one of the jihad sects, it is true that the magnitude of the pain inflicted on America yesterday moves us into the very exclusive club of democracies for which terrorism is not peripheral, remote or episodic, but a horrible routine.
Mr. Keller was wrong; thanks to President George W. Bush, his administration, the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the United States military, terrorists attacks on our soil did not become our horrible routine since September 11, 2001.
While the Pile still smoldered at the World Trade Center and anthrax began arriving in peoples’ mailboxes, U.S. officials fanned out across the globe and worked with foreign nations to track down Islamic terrorists. In early October, senior U.S. officials demanded that Pakistan President Pervez Mursharraf fire then Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Mahmud Ahmad. It seems that Lt. Gen. Ahmad was real chummy with senior al Qaeda moneyman Ahmed Omar Sayeed Sheikh. Reliable sources (then and now) say Omar, using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, had funded 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta with $100,000. At the time, the U.S. also presented to President Mursharraf evidence that top ISI officials had previously facilitated meetings between WMD experts and al Qaeda.
With that in mind, look at what the New York Times has never reported about both former Guantanamo detainee Muhammad Saad Iqbal and the radical Islamic Defenders Front.