Thanks, Tom, that's very interesting indeed. I'm sure people will be discussing it for months, not the least of the reasons being the translations. Aside from the suspicions of the paranoid, I'm already finding a lot that's ambiguous and just plain hard to decipher. This passage has been quoted a lot around the Net already:

Osama Ben Ladin emerged as a star similar to the fortress of Saddam and advanced to face the American enemy along with the Saudi regime. The people in that area responded favorably to his stated objectives and expressed their admiration with some comments and reservations.

Was the Saudi regime Osama's ally or America's? Either interpretation has some basis in reality.

That phrase "fortress of Saddam" produces mostly circular references back to the document; the one exception is a caption below a picture in an Army newsletter showing a bombed building it describes as "The Unconquerable Fortress of Saddam, as it appears today, after a visit from the US Air Force." Figure of speech, or the actual name of the place? I can't say. Some people will try to seize on it as evidence of a link to al Qaeda, but that's a stretch without more info. Isn't the name "Saddam" taken from a historical Islamic warrior? There might be a place referring to that Saddam and not the modern Hussein.

I found something that creeped me out a bit later in the document, when it started talking about an Internet strategy. It even recommended one Web site by address as a file storage service, and though the company seems legit, I can imagine those guys are feeling kinda bad about that. Not to mention the damage from guilt-by-association. Stuff like that can reach through the Net to anybody.

More news as it happens....