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New Bin Laden Tape Surfaces
An anonymous submitter writes "Osama bin Laden delivered a new videotaped message in which he told Americans their security does not depend on the president they elect, but on U.S. policy. 'Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda.'"
As illogical as it seems, this will scare USians into voting Bush/Cheney in this election. I think this is Karl Rove's October surprise and it will have a very distinct impact on the opinion polls across the nation. Unfortunately the impact will almost certainly benefit the Bushites.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Does he actually want to defeat Bush, or does he know that Bush's approval ratings go up whenever he(Bin Ladin) makes a threat, and so he actually wants Bush elected?
OR does he know we know he knows, and he actually want Kerry elected?
Or.. wait a second.. does he know we know he knows we know he knows, and he actually wants Bush elected? DIABOLICAL!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
From the CNN article:
The terrorists will not scare the United States as it did Spain, the Phillippines and other countries. I do not believe Kerry would be as effective at this as Bush, but I do believe he will pursue and destroy al Qaeda should he become our President. Anything else sets the precedence to begin the destruction of America.
I believe that all Americans should unite behind our President, whoever he is in January, to continue and win this war for our security and the security of free people everywhere.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Osama bin Laden has family members who are high members of Saudi society, and he had blood relatives in the US at the time of the attack, who were given protection and allowed to leave the country.
It is implausible to believe we don't have secretly collected hair samples and can know if a particular cave-giblet of flesh came from the bin Laden clan.
You doubt the authenticity of the tape and then turn around and use Prison Planet to justify a conspiracy theory? Pshaw.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Just read what the man said. He makes sense. I trust him more than Bush or Kerry. You may say that he murdered 3000 at WTC, but it strikes me that he was at war. Was his war more bogus than our own in Iraq. We have killed 15 THOUSAND innocent civilians in Iraq. Seems like we are the murderous sociopaths, not OBL.
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Here is a good transscipt of the tape:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The figure I heard was 21,800 Iraqi Civilians - that was on the McLaughlin Report a few weeks ago. That of course doesn't include the number of dead American soldiers and the number of dead Iraqi soldiers.
... at all - but I will say that Bush Jr. has murdered at least seven times as many Iraqi civilians as Osama murdered Americans. And while I am an American I will not be so arrogant as to pretend that American lives are somehow more valuable than Iraqi lives.
... but they are both terrible people.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that I trust Osama bin Laden
I feel it is perfectly fair to pin these as 'murderes at the hand of Bush Jr.' - just as fair as it is to say that Bin Laden killed people on Sept. 11th. Neither of them did the actual killing - both of them did the planning and made the call to have the people killed.
In this regard Bush Jr. has shown himself to be a larger risk to the safety of the people of this world than Osama has. There are of course other factors and I'm not sure I could decide which one I trust _less_
Funny how the above statement applies equally well to Bush and his troops, as it does to bin Laden and his followers.
Which, I think, was the parent's point.
-- mind over pixel
I don't think anyone outside of US/UK thought this guy was dead, and even with the US/UK that was just wishful thinking... you spend a pile of money to achieve something and surely you must have achieved it, right boys? Where are you getting your info?
Even using 15K as an accurate measurement of civilian casualties (and, to say the least, there is a large amount of contention over the exact number and how many 'combatants' were accidentally included), it still beats the number of people Saddam killed per time -- estimated at 300K over 23 years. 300K / 23 = 13K, 15K / 1.5 = 10K. From just a numbers point of view, I'd say things are better now than under Saddam. More importantly, the civilians that have been killed are collateral damage vs the terrorist philosophy of using them as targets with the goal of spreading fear among a wider population.
War is hell and innocent people die, its redeeming quality is that we end up with a better, more lasting peace, and advance the interests of our culture in having a safer world. If you (not the parent poster, the generic "you") can't see that that's worth more than a status quo world of dictators "contained", that it's something worth risking and taking lives for, then just do us all a favor and put away your megaphone, protest sign, and STFU so we can defend civilization.
Oh, and in response to OBL's reasoning behind the 9/11 attacks, I would support Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, any day over the dictatorships trying to push it into the sea.
I have never understood how readers of a technical blog, can have such a warped sense of logic.
OBL planned and ordered the direct attack of innocent civilians. Bush is waging a war to bring people who use such tactics to justice. At the same time we do everything we can to respect international treaties, and spare innocent lives. Young people today have no concept of what true war is like. 50 million people died fighting WWII. I'll take todays war over the wars of yesteryear any day. Peace is always better, but ignoring the rest of the world and doing nothing is unacceptable.
We could go back to the time where we just lob a few cruise missiles into aspirin factories, to protect civilians and american soldiers, everytime we get bombed. But it seems to me, that's what we used to do, and it led to September 11th.
Bush is waging a war to bring people who use such tactics to justice.
I find it pretty sad that people like you have convinced yourself that attacking Iraq was somehow related to bringing terrorists to justice.
of this topic. His request is simple, he's asking the US public to do some self-reflection; to allow a bit of humility, to examine ourselves. It's a fantastic ploy, and I'm sure BL is sincere.
However, I hardly think for a second that Joe-Six-Pack-Swing-Voter is going to even bother to humor that sort of thinking. This leaves both canidates to ignore the line of argumentation that he has put forth. More than that, no mainstream news paper will dare touch it, for fear of being bashed as "Liberal". This leaves the tabloids.
You see, when people want something reeeeaaalll bad that tends to screw their critical thinking on the subject. They read things out of events the way they see it so that everything fits into the picture of the world. Most people want bin Ladin dead; so as times goes by without any update on his status they will start to belive that he is dead. This isn't new. Throughout the history people have belived all kinds of wrong things because it gave them the comfort of not having to question the sources that fed them their reality.
(The "no DNA to compare it against" makes little sense as bin Ladins family is huge and their location known.)
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
One thing I have to agree with him upon: the demonization that he's fighting America because he dislikes freedom is absurd. The only spin on that argument that is remotely plausible is that he's fighting against secularization and disrespect for Islamic law, and in that case why wouldn't he just come out and say it rather than beat around the Bush with proclamations that they're supporting those bad guys who hurt some of our guys?
No, bin Laden truly believes that the US is meddling in affairs where it does not belong. The way he goes about acting upon his beliefs is somewhat less than proper, of course. But they are, at least in his twisted mind, well founded.
Few people seem to understand Osama bin Laden is an educated and well-spoken man. He's not just some fundie psychopath that "hates us for our freedom". In his opinion, international terrorism is the only means to get to the end of percieved US imperalism. While I strongly disagree with his methods, he does have a well articulated position.
... just because the position is held by terrorists, doesn't mean that the position is false.
I'm not a betting man, but I bet if we took an even handed approach to the Israel/Palestine problem as well as let the middle east be the middle east, we'd see a drastic decrease in worldwide terrorism.
Of course, the mainstream would denounce such a change in policy as "letting the terrorists win". Here's a newsflash, kids
Jill: "The terrorists say 2 + 2 = 4! What are they crazy?"
Bob: "I've consulted my calculator, and it says 2 + 2 = 4 as well."
Jill: "Quit siding with the terrorists, Bob. Why do you hate America?"
This conversation is similar to any conversation I try to have with someone who is sure that America is Always Right.
The most powerful part of this message is that it was sent on a video tape and not as Hijacked airplanes crashing into our buildings.
I have no doubt that if Bin Laden could attack us like he did on 9/11 that he would. The fact that he hasn't been able to do this for over three years is why I am voting for Bush
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
I don't know man. Bin Laden killed 3000 civilians, and what, 50 servicemen on the USS Cole? Bush has killed 100,000 civilians and 1000 servicemen. This is not to say that Bin Laden isn't a violent murderous psychopath. It's just to say that, even though I saw the towers fall with my own eyes, even though I hate bin Laden and everything he stands for with a firey, burning passion, even though if given the chance I would rip bin Laden's balls off and feed them to him before I rip off his head, shit down his neck, and feed him to the wolves... It's just that, put into perspective, he's less scary than Bush.
Does it really matter if OBL is dead or alive? The effects of being a rallying banner for terrorism are limited. With his financial assets mostly frozen, his means of communication greatly curtailed, and constantly on the run, I don't think OBL is as much a contributor to existing terrorist efforts as the (frankly) well thought-out, distributive nature of the Al-Qaeda organization structure and its well-known (and effective) doctrine of leveraging the media as a weapon.
Anyone notice how all the media are basically publishing the same words of the same text regarding this story? Isen't there any independant thinking journalists left?
Also: Does anyone have a link to an english version of a transcript of what Bin Laden said in the video? I'd like to make up my own mind about what this guy has to say VS getting just choice quotes.
> Who would argue that the American Civil war wasn't worth it?
The sad thing about that war is that England gave up slavery two generations sooner, and didn't have to fight a civil war to do it.
> Every major war in the world for the last 150 years has led to the advancement of rights, liberty, and economic improvement.
Only if you're selective about what you look at. For example, WWI gave us Fascism and Communism, and economic collapse in Germany.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is going to point out that according to the man himself, WE WERE ATTACKED BECAUSE OF OUR SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL? (and note that he cited direct military support for Israeli policy)
Or shall we just continue to pretend this doesn't matter?
Regardless of what you think may about Israel, you have to admit that this makes a helluvalot more sense than "they hate our freedom."
It may be more productive to address this one issue than to run around invading whomever we like and justifying it by calling them terrorists no matter how tenuous the relationship is between them and Al Qaeda.
And to think I used to be much like you. Manipulated by those in high places, by the corporations, by the war machine, by those who exploit the religious nuts, by a those driven to achieve and to create a lasting legacy. Whipped up into a righteous fury, ready to go out and die for nothing but a fatter wallet for some CEO, for some investor.
And how sad that humans should do this, when our time alive is so short. That we should allow ourselves to be manipulated like this. And not only do we allow ourselves to abdicate our powers of logic and take such rash actions, but we also forego a chance at a more logical and rational alternative world, a world where we all do not have to strive so hard, where we would not have to stress ourselves so much just to survive, a world where we devote all that wasted energy and wealth to more worthwhile pursuits, such as medical research to lenghten our own lives. Such a tragedy....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Fear in America is a little different. It doesn't elicit compliance, it elicits swift violence and a suspenstion of the normal rules.
My poorly socialized little yippy dog is exactly the same way. When he gets scared, he runs around and barks and snarls and snaps at any damned thing he can get away with. He never actually confronts the thing he's scared of (because he's scared of it, duh), but his little stuffed animals really get the shit kicked out of them.
I think it's pretty damned funny that we got so scared of Bin Laden, so as a country we decided to take our agression out on a country that we saw as no threat to us. Boy, do we look foolish, now that Iraq has refused to be our little stuffed animal to kick around.
Try to understand this: the previous Spanish governement took Spain to war against the will of a large majority of the people. Why can't you understand that this tends to upset people, and may cause them to vote for the guy how says he'll take them out of there?
Every major war in the world for the last 150 years has led to the advancement of rights, liberty, and economic improvement. Sure it's terrible when people die, but war is inevitible. And usually good always wins in the end, and the world is better off.
You might want to ask for a refund for your history degree.
The mafia is also very nice and friendly, as long as you pay them and don't go to the police or hinder their enforcers they will not put you at the bottom of the river in concrete overshoes. Nice guys ain't they?
Same thing really with organisations like this. As long as the world lets them be, allows their members into their countries to convert citizens, allows them to build a super powerfull base then they won't harm you, promise, honestly.
Every speech, every statement said by anyone must be tested against the agenda that person has. Goes for people like Bush where you constantly have to ask if what he is saying in election speeches compares to his personal and those of his backers agenda. Same for Kerry. Same for Bin Laden.
If you read the speech carefully you see that it blames everything on somebody else. What this means is easy. If only the world had done everything the way he wanted to then he wouldn't have to do the things he did. Sounds like the excuses of a wifebeater to me. If only she had dinner ready in time he wouldn't have had to beat her into hospital. Not his fault, clearly it is the wives fault.
To understand this tape you have to understand one single thing. The world is divided. Not just the west but the muslim world as well. There are even muslims who, shock and horror, think that the Israely conflict is kept in place by certain muslims because it is very handy distractor from internal affairs. Who dare to ask the question why exactly no arab nation has taking in the palestine refugees. And just why the occupied terrortories with all the hard Israely rule are actually one of the very few muslim democracies in the region. Dangerous thoughts. Especially to Al Quada and there backers.
So this message can be seen in the following light. Trying to get the weaker westerners (those who would give into bullies/mafia/abusive spouses) to think that if only they give Al Quada everything it wants it will let them in peace. Won't work. Give a bully a finger and tommorow he will be back for the hand.
It is also trying to get those muslims who are in the doubt to switch sides. Or at least create conflict.
A united world is the greatest enemie of terrorists. What do you think Bin Ladens agenda really is. World peace? Harmony between muslims and the west? Religious tolerance?
Don't forget he and his followers/backers had decades in Afghanistan to shape that country to their vision. We also had refugees fleeing to the infidel west for the same amount of decades.
This is a political speech. Trust it like you trust any political speech.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because you thought he was dead, he managed to convince and some of the european nations to go after someone completely unrelated.
If Americans finished their job in Afghanistan, I might have thought although war is a bad thing, at least they managed to get something positive out of this (fall of taleban, extermination of Al Queda). Taleban is on the rise again and this guy is still alive, plotting. Nice one Dubya!
I can't imagine how Bush will use this news, probably he will try to scare USA citizens even more but it is completely his fault that the twin towers fell down, it was completely his fault that this guy is still alive.
To all his faults, Clinton at least tried to kill this bastard once in a while.
Doesn't explain the withdrawal from Iraq does it?
There's no need. 80% of Spain population was already against the war, and the government went in Iraq anyway. No surprise that it got booted out of office.
You should take bin Laden's statements with the greatest seriousness. In fact, the U.S. government has effectively declared war on Arabs and Muslims. Here is just one example: New York Governor Pataki's statements are equivalent to a declaration of war.
To get votes from Jews in the United States, U.S. politicians go into the Jewish community and declare their "support for Israel". That's code for support for Israeli violence. Many politicians don't care about the morality of their actions. They don't care whether U.S. government support for Israeli violence is actually good for Jews. They just want the vote.
Non-Jewish United States citizens never hear about this support for foreign wars. It isn't a secret; it's on Pataki's web site. But it is effectively a secret, because no one tells U.S. citizens that they are engaging in a war that will definitely cause them to be attacked.
There is a one-sentence record in ancient Jewish texts, that are now part of the Christian Bible, that a Pharoah of Egypt had some complaint against the Jews about 3,200 years ago. Since then, at least every 200 years, the Jews have annoyed the surrounding cultures enough that they have been the targets of extreme violence. Certainly this is regrettable. Certainly something should be done about this. However, there is no evidence that anyone presently in power in the U.S. government has a sophisticated understanding of the problems, or any sensible ideas about how a nation thousands of miles from Israel could be helpful. In fact, it seems that U.S. government support for Jewish violence is like pouring "gasoline on a fire", as one Jewish leader said.
The U.S. government, at present, fully supports the use of violence to achieve its goals. Under George W. Bush, the U.S. government believes that it is okay to kill people and destroy their property even when the U.S. is not directly or immediately threatened.
Most U.S. citizens do not make the connection that a policy of violence supported by the U.S. government means that they will inevitably be attacked.
Quoting from the CNN article, here are some of Osama bin Laden's words: "And as I was looking at those towers that were destroyed in Lebanon [with U.S. government help], it occurred to me that we have to punish the transgressor with the same" he says, "and that we had to destroy the towers in America, so that they taste what we tasted and they stop killing our women and children."
If you live in Kalispell, Montana, USA, to pick a place at random, it is unlikely that you will be directly attacked by Arab terrorists. However, attacks on the U.S. affect you profoundly because they lower your quality of life, just as the U.S. attacks on Iraq lowered the quality of life there.
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It's not just that Bush removed a strong and secular government from Iraq, one that hated Osama's Islamicism, leaving the vacuum needed by religious fundamentalists sympathetic to Al Quaeda who want to grab power. (Al Sader is polling at 50% nationally!)
It's also that Bush is the best Al Quaeda recruiter that anyone could imagine. Sure, we've destroyed a nominal number of terrorists and training camps, but all the intelligence agencies report that new recruits pour in far faster than we are able to kill them.
So of course Bin Laden, and anyone sympathetic to Al Quaeda, wants Bush to stay in power. I can't imagine a US response to 9/11 which would have been better from the Al Quaeda point of view. Obviously, there would be an Afghanistan invasion. But such a tepid one, where we bribe local warlords to do our fighting, is something Osama could not have dreamed of. All he had to do is bribe them more, and he stays alive. Meanwhile, the recruiting is in full swing, not in concentrated training camps which are easy to hit, but all over the world, including the US and Europe. There is no hope of a systematic campaign against these new recruits, because this would certainly involve serious coordination between the US and other states, but Bush's America is so politically isolated now that this cooperation is impossible. So basically, Al Quaeda cells can drop their roots all over the world, and during their most vulnerable phase (the next four years) they have nothing to fear from the USA if Bush remains president.
The above is just so obvious that I can't imagine how it might escape someone, so I don't get how people might even consider the idea that Bin Laden would prefer that Kerry becomes president.
Before this tape appeared what conclusive evidence did you have that he was still alive?
This depends a bit on your timeline. Bin Laden released a tape in April mentioning the Madrid Bombings, so we know he was alive just a few months ago.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Well, statistically, your security is more in the hands of the idiots at the wheel around you on the road than it ever was in the hands of any terrorists.
Not to mention that what you put in your mouth and how much exercise probably has much more to do with how long you live.
Unless of course you are exceedingly unlucky.
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Bush is killing civilians. His stated goal has changed with the winds, so who besides Bush knows what his real goal is? Whatever his goal, the murder of 100,000 civilians and more non-civilians (who WERE civilians before we invaded their country) is a much worse crime than the murder of 3000 civilians. Bull about "collateral damage" is just a way of not facing the fact that Bush is directly responsible for just about every death since the invasion. It was HIS choice to invade, so it was HIS decision to kill innocent people.
The murder of 1000 military members is also his responsibility. Any time you order someone into war, you bear the responsibility for their death, even if you don't directly kill that someone.
The "insurgents" are simply protecting themselves from an occupying force. Calling them terrorists is like calling the minutemen of the revolutionary war terrorists (which is what the Empire would have called them, but we're on the other side of that particular coin, so they were heroes).
Bush is a terrorist, a mass murder, and a war criminal. There is no "equating". If anyone other than this man from this country had done what he's done in the past few years, he would be tried for crimes against humanity.
Public support?
Telling me that, because I think Bush sent the children of this country to die with absolutely no reason, I am somehow causing our troops to be hurt is pure drivel. Blindly accepting what the government does because we're "at war" is just about the least patriotic thing a person can do. It is, however a very nationalistic (as in NAZI) thing to do.
There were alternative viewpoints. They were suppressed. Look at the aluminum tubes fiasco- a lot of people tried to tell the CIA that those tubes were for rockets, not centrifuges, but their informed opinion was disregarded because it didn't fit the party line.
Shit, it's hardly surprising that everyone in the White House thought he had weapons. When you use that as your starting point and only gather evidence that supports your idea, never get critical outside viewpoints, and refuse to consider the alternative- that he had no WMD- well, of course that's the answer you get.
Sure, at the time it was hard to rule out the possibility that he had a bunch of nerve gas artillery shells buried in a hole somwhere, or whatnot. You know what? It wouldn't have made any difference if he had. He could have used chemical weapons on us in the Gulf, but he didn't. If he wanted to attack us, he had ten years after the first Gulf War to do so, and he didn't. Why not? Because America has a massive conventional and nuclear deterrent.
Saddam was a twisted motherfucker, sure. But he had a rational drive for self-preservation and a strong sense of paranoia, which kept him from seriously attacking the U.S. And the "lots of other people thought so too" defense just doesn't cut it for the president. For one, when you take charge you are supposed to take responsibility. For another, he should have access to better intelligence than anyone else on the planet. He has access to intelligence from the CIA, the NSA plus the ability to ask other countries like the UK for their intelligence. If Bush had been seriously interested in the truth he could have gotten it.
Many of the quotes you gave only refer to weapons programs, or in some other way show that the person being quoted only saw Iraq as a future threat.
Yeah, but Bush extradited them to Saudia Arabia right after the attacks, good luck getting any from them ;)
I don't think "extradited" is the right word, as much as "escorted under taxpayer-funded protection."