TALIBAN LEADER'S WASHINGTON THREAT IS CREDIBLE, ANALYSTS SAYMarch 31, 2009Fox News reports: “The United States has put a $5 million bounty on his head, and he says militants under his control are planning a terrorist attack in Washington that ‘will amaze everyone in the world.’And he isn't Usama bin Laden.Baitullah Mehsud, commander of the Taliban in Pakistan, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that his group was responsible for Monday's attack on a police academy in his country that killed seven police officers and injured more than 90 others.He also said, chillingly:‘Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.’Terrorism experts call Mehsud a ‘rising young star’ who is linked both to the December, 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the bombing last September that killed 54 people in the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. They say his threat to carry out an attack in Washington is credible.‘It should be taken seriously because [Mehsud] has ordered the deaths of many Pakistanis and Afghans and has a close alliance with Al Qaeda,’ said James Phillips, a terrorism expert and senior research fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.‘It's not too much of a stretch to think he might be involved in an attack on the U.S. if he's able to get his followers inside the United States. He's a militant extremist whose threats cannot be ignored.’Mehsud, 35, is the senior leader of Tehrik-e-Taliban, or the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, and is a key Al Qaeda facilitator in the tribal areas of South Waziristan in Pakistan, according to the U.S. State Department. A $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction was announced just last week.‘He has conducted cross-border attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and poses a clear threat to American persons and interests in the region,’ the State Department wrote in a March 25 release.Phillips said Mehsud is less of a direct threat to the U.S. than bin Laden in an ideological sense, but his influence in Pakistan could allow him to tap into existing networks within Al Qaeda or among Afghan Taliban militants to achieve his goals…”