Salon.com Wire Story: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday rejected as 'nonsense' the notion that recent terrorist attacks in London were retaliation for the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

'Some people seem confused about the motivations and intentions of terrorists and about our coalition's defense of the still young democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq,' Rumsfeld said in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

'They seem to cling to the discredited theory that the recent attacks in London and elsewhere, for example, are really in retaliation for the war in Iraq or for the so-called occupation of Afghanistan,' he added. 'That is nonsense.'"

...

And in another Wire story: al-Qaida's No. 2 Threatens London, U.S. — "Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, threatened more destruction in London, saying in a videotape broadcast Thursday that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be to blame.

Al-Zawahri also threatened the United States with tens of thousands of military dead if it does not withdraw its troops from Iraq immediately.

In Crawford, Texas, President Bush dismissed the threat, saying, 'We will stay on the offense against these people. They're terrorists and they're killers and they will kill innocent people ... so they can impose their dark vision on the world.'

The tape, aired on the pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, was delivered exactly one month after the July 7 bombings in London that killed 56 people, including four suicide attackers. In the excerpts aired by Al-Jazeera, al-Zawahri did not directly claim that al-Qaida carried out the July 7 or July 21 attacks.

But he brought the July 7 attacks under al-Qaida's wing and depicted the terror network as still capable of delivering strikes around the world despite arrests in Europe and blows against its leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He presented the attacks as a result of Blair's decision to deploy troops in Iraq.

'Blair has brought to you destruction in central London, and he will bring more of that, God willing,' al-Zawahri said in the broadcast excerpts."

Emphasis mine. Btw, I've spent enough on DNS domains in my life already, but I just noticed that http://www.rumsfeldisatool.com/ isn't taken. Anyone up?

(Via Salon.)