Al Qaeda terrorist chief Osama bin Laden is “back” — resurfacing on the world scene via a new video.
Or IS the video new or that new? Some wonder…but also note that even if it’s not really new, it could be dangerous.
Bin Laden doesn’t look in the pink of health in the 40-minute video, but that’s not what’s worrisome to terrorism experts. Was there a “signal” in there?
Osama bin Laden stresses the importance of martyrdom for Muslim causes in a videotape that purportedly contains a 50-second message from the al Qaeda leader.
Note the “hedges” in this news report. MORE:
…..The 40-minute videotape, whose audio was being translated from Arabic by CNN, was intercepted before it was to appear on several Islamist Web sites known for carrying statements from al Qaeda and other radical groups.
The videotape, titled “A Special Surprise from As-Sahab. Heaven’s Breeze Part I,” was made in the last four weeks, but the clips appear to be old, said Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Arab affairs. There is no indication of where it was shot, and CNN cannot verify its authenticity.
“We’re aware of the tape,” a government official, who didn’t want to be identified, told CNN. The official agreed that the tape’s content is not necessarily new.
“There has not been, over time, a one-to-one correlation between release of a tape and any significant operation or attack afterward,” the official added.
….[Bin Laden]says that the Prophet Mohammed wanted to be a martyr, and that is a worthy goal for every Muslim.
“So be alert, be wise and think. What is this status that the best of mankind wished for himself? He wished to be a martyr. He himself said, ‘By him in whose hands my life is! I would love to attack and be martyred, then attack again and be martyred, then attack again and be martyred.’
The tape is being released at time where there is a growing controversy over President George Bush’s constant linkage of Al Qaeda to the Iraq war. This line of argument seemingly receded after criticism some months ago but would occasionally resurface. But now, Bush is consistently attributing insurgency outrages in Iraq to the handiwork of the people who attacked the U.S. on 911. That’s not true.
Re-read our post HERE on New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt who looks extensively at this issue (and offers some extensive reporting of his own, as well as criticism of his own newspaper for accepting officials’ statements).
Criticism is mounting over a) Bush’s blaming violence in Iraq on the same group of people who took down the World Trade Center and b) the continued focus on Iraq while bin Laden has reportedly reconstituted his group and is essentially living in remote areas of Pakistan — hidden and, in essence, protected. In this sense, the U.S. victory in Afghanistan now has emerged as more of a forced relocation than a decimation.
Does the specter of a live and plotting Osama bin Laden keep President George W. Bush awake nights? Probably not. Yet, it might reassure the country if it had a president who could accept the reality that Bush has become so adept at finessing.
It was bin Laden and al-Qaida, stupid.
This president seems to have been given a pass on the turbaned terrorist who collapsed the Twin Towers….
….initially, Bush swore revenge. It has been 2,130 days, however, since the president declared on Sept. 13, 2001, that “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our No. 1 priority and we will not rest until we find him.” Our well-rested president has not found bin Laden. U.S. intelligence officials informed us last week that the chief executive of a stronger- than-ever al-Qaida is plotting global attacks from his mountain redoubt in Pakistan.
This resurgence mocks U.S. efforts to smash the al-Qaida threat. Bush is as immune to mockery as Bill Clinton is to shame. It was the 43rd president, after all, who shortly after 9/11 deputized himself as U.S. marshal duty-bound to hunt down bin Laden.
And then he says something many critics have said — but he says it better:
Someone, the record will show, painted the face of Saddam Hussein on Bush’s wanted poster and threw the marshal off the trail. “I don’t know where bin Laden is,” he said a year after deputizing himself. “I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.” Even as bin Laden harassed him with videotaped taunts, Bush declared himself “truly not that concerned about him,” turning his beady eyes toward Baghdad.
And, indeed, all of this is viewable on video tapes: when bin Laden was seemingly elusive, Bush pooh-poohed his importance and said he wasn’t on his mind.
But now bin Laden is baaaaaaaack:
–in a video (new and old) that is widely reported.
–in news reports suggesting that after 6 years the administration has failed to do the job most Americans (and certainly his supporters who would talk about the great job on terrorism) assumed he had done.
–in Bush’s rhetoric which does not address the MANY criticisms that what he’s saying is not accurate (which further contributes to a credibility problem that now rivals or surpasses that of Richard Nixon).
New York Times columnist Frank Rich has a column today that says Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff apparently had it right when he said hit ‘gut” feeling was that Al Qaeda could attack — and that was the voice of truth. But since the firestorm over his comments, Chertoff has had to partially back away.
Rich contends Bush, the Congress and the Beltway in particular are locked in a power struggle over Iraq and resolutions on Iraq and have lost sight of the bigger threat:
So give Mr. Chertoff credit for keeping his eye on the enemy while everyone else in the capital is debating never-to-be-realized benchmarks for an Iraqi government that exists in name only. Just as President Bush ignored that August 2001 brief “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” so Washington, some of its press corps included, is poised to shrug off the August 2007 update “Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West.” The capital has been sucker-punched by the administration’s latest P.R. offensive to prop up the fiasco in Iraq.
The White House’s game is to create a new fictional story line to keep the war going until President Bush can dump it on his successor. Bizarrely, some of the new scenario echoes the bogus narrative used to sell the war in 2002: an imaginary connection between Iraq and the attacks of 9/11. You’d think the Bush administration might think twice before recycling old lies, but things have gotten so bad in the bunker that even Karl Rove is repeating himself.
Later, he writes:
Not only did Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia not exist before we invaded Iraq in 2003, but it isn’t even the chief organizer of the war’s mayhem today. ABC News reported this month that this group may be responsible for no more than 15 percent of the attacks in Iraq. Bob Woodward wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday that Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, told Mr. Bush last November that Al Qaeda was only the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, after the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality and general anarchy.
This fits the motif of this President: he is not putting all of his cards on the table when he speaks in public. Citizens who really want to know what’s going on need to do Google searches — or hire lawyers to parse each word of his to look for the nuances and carefully dropped legal loopholes. More Rich:
So what if the Qaeda that’s operating with impunity out of Pakistan, North Africa and other non-Iraq havens actually is the most pressing threat to America? This president is never one to let facts get in the way of a political agenda. That agenda is to avoid taking responsibility for losing a war, no matter how many more Americans are tossed into its carnage. From here on in, you can be sure that whomever we’re fighting in Iraq on any given day will be no more than one degree of separation from bin Laden.
Rich ends with this:
That leaves Mr. Chertoff, whose department has vacancies in a quarter of its top leadership positions, as the de facto general in charge of defending us from the enemy he had that “gut feeling” about, the Qaeda not in Iraq. Last week we learned from a sting operation conducted by Congressional investigators that this enemy needs only a Mail Boxes Etc. account, a phone and a fax machine to buy radioactive material from American suppliers and build a dirty bomb.
For all Washington’s hyperventilating about the Iraqi Parliament’s vacation plans, it’s our own government’s vacation from reality this summer that should make us very afraid.
So is bin Laden REALLY back?
He is back –on a video. Which could be old.
He is back – being lumped together with Iraq in Presidential pronouncements that fail to mention what the President was told by experts.
And he is back — in spirit,even if he is actually dead, in Pakistan where various reports say his group has set up shop and has a new security force to protect it (Pakistanis whose government gets big bucks from the U.S. for helping us in the War On Terror).
But Afghanistan has been liberated, right?
Afghanistan is in danger, according to The Guardian:
Britain’s most senior generals have issued a blunt warning to Downing Street that the military campaign in Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic failure, a development that could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in neighbouring Pakistan.
Amid fears that London and Washington are taking their eye off Afghanistan as they grapple with Iraq, the generals have told Number 10 that the collapse of the government in Afghanistan, headed by Hamid Karzai, would present a grave threat to the security of Britain.
….Lord Inge, the former chief of the defence staff, highlighted their fears in public last week when he warned of a ‘strategic failure’ in Afghanistan. The Observer understands that Inge was speaking with the direct authority of the general staff when he made an intervention in a House of Lords debate.
‘The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,’ Inge told peers. ‘We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato… We need to recognise that the situation – in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan – is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.’
Inge’s remarks reflect the fears of serving generals that the government is so overwhelmed by Iraq that it is in danger of losing sight of the threat of failure in Afghanistan. One source, who is familiar with the fears of the senior officers, told The Observer: ‘If you talk privately to the generals they are very very worried. You heard it in Inge’s speech. Inge said we are failing and remember Inge speaks for the generals.’
So, unless the situation in Afghanistan improves, in the end the question in 2008 may not only be “who lost Iraq” but “who lost Afghanistan?”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.