Bin Laden is Back Now, as Defender of Iraq:
“The prospect of a US war against Iraq is already stirring anti-Western resentment in the Middle East, analysts say, and bin Laden’s message appears an attempt to capitalize on that sentiment. Though the Al Qaeda leader has little sympathy for the determinedly secular Saddam Hussein, the enemy of his enemy is his friend.” Christian Science Monitor.
Robert Fisk: Bin Laden is alive. There can be no doubt about it.
“But the questions remain: where on earth is he, and why has he resurfaced now? …It took only a brief flurry of phone calls to the Middle East and south-west Asia for the most impeccable sources to confirm that Osama bin Laden is alive and that it was his gravelly voice that threatens the West in the short monologue first transmitted by the Arab Al-Jazeera television channel…. As usual, “US intelligence” – the heroes of 11 September who heard about Arabs learning to fly but didn’t quite manage to tell us in time – came up with rubbish for the American media. It may be him. It’s probably him. The gravelly voice may mean he’s been hurt. He is speaking fast because he could have been wounded by the Americans.
Untrue…” Independent UK
Experts Say a bin Laden Impostor Could Fool a Lot of People:
“The government’s assessment so far that it cannot be absolutely certain that the audiotape broadcast on Tuesday was recorded by Osama bin Laden does not surprise experts in the field of voice authentication. The science of using computers and linguists to identify individuals by their speech has improved dramatically in the last several years, but still involves considerable guess work and speculation, the experts say.” NY Times
“In past weeks Al Qaeda has relaunched itself,
a rebranding that presages a second phase in its war against the West. The clearest evidence for this shift is in three audiotapes that Al Qaeda has released since the beginning of October from its top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.
Most analysts both inside and outside the government believe those tapes to be authentic. On them, the two Qaeda leaders call for a wider war against not only the United States but the West in general, with a wider range of targets. Al Qaeda has chosen war against all “the Crusaders,” not just Americans. The front can be anywhere.
This shift was precipitated by Al Qaeda’s loss of its headquarters in Afghanistan. Deprived of a physical base, Al Qaeda has morphed into something at once less centralized, more widely spread and more virtual than its previous incarnation.” NY Times
Brendan O’Neill: “…how do we account for bin Laden’s boasts about Bali and other attacks?
It seems to me that bin Laden is playing on Western fears about his supposedly powerful position. Rather than coherently or centrally organising such attacks, bin Laden seems to be drawing them together in an attempt to convince us that he has a mission, and the means to carry it out. And where is he getting his ideas? From our obsessive belief that he is behind everything bad that happens around the world and our notion that he is as strong as ever.
It wasn’t bin Laden who first linked the Moscow theatre siege with the Bali nightclub bombing with the Yemen tanker attack with everything else – it was Western politicians and commentators. And it wasn’t bin Laden who first said an attack on Iraq would cause al-Qaeda to rise up and take vengeance (why would he, when al-Qaeda and Iraq hate the sight of each other?) – again it was Western commentators and politicians who floated that idea.
And now bin Laden seems to be weaving these things together in an attempt to frighten us in the West. Our belief that bin Laden is behind everything, combined with our overly panicky reaction to every attack or whisper of an attack, has ended up giving bin Laden the mission he has always lacked. After all, al-Qaeda was the organisation that destroyed the World Trade Centre without ever claiming responsibility for it or explaining why they did it, such was their nihilism and lack of clear war objectives.”
