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--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], NY Transfer News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit
source - abcnews.com
Providing Fodder for His Enemies
Bin Laden Tape May Have Planned Evidence Against Him {?}
By Andrew Chang and Deb Amos
[ABCNEWS.com]
Dec. 13 -- If Osama bin Laden is such a calculating terrorist
mastermind, why would he create a piece of evidence that justifies
America's pursuit of him?
That's the question that follows the broadcast today of a videotape
in which bin Laden acknowledges direct responsibility for the Sept.
11 attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people.
Up until this point, the Saudi exile had praised the attack but
denied any involvement in its planning or execution.
But the video released by the Pentagon today shows bin Laden at a
dinner meeting with his top associates on Nov. 9, recounting his
involvement in and reaction to the attacks nearly two months earlier.
On the tape, bin Laden describes how he had calculated how many
civilians would die in the attacks, and how he was surprised that
both World Trade Center towers collapsed. He also says some of the
hijackers did not know they were going to die.
Some voices in the Muslim world, and among bin Laden's supporters,
have already expressed doubt about the tape.
The amateurish quality of the video, the many cuts, and that bin
Laden's voice is hard to hear, already have some arguing that it is a
U.S. fabrication.
Skeptics might also point out that the tape has emerged only two
months after a military action had already begun, and that "it didn't
surface through normal channels," Thomas J. Badey, a terrorism expert
at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.,said on Tuesday.
But there are also entirely feasible reasons for the tape's
existence, experts said -- even accounting for bin Laden's careful
planning.
An al Qaeda Production
Bin Laden's al Qaeda network has long been known to have a "media
wing" -- not only assembling propaganda, but also creating material
for internal use.
As opposition forces seize bases that once belonged to bin Laden's al
Qaeda network across Afghanistan, they have been discovering tapes
documenting executions, terrorist training exercises, and the
destruction of the ancient Buddahs in the Afghan city of Bamiyan.
Other al Qaeda tapes discovered by conquering opposition forces have
also shown everyday activities like building new hospitals and
handing out aid from Islamic aid agencies.
It is believed bin Laden's ultimate objective is a worldwide Islamic
revolution, and his supporters may have wanted a historical record of
such events.
The video, along with bin Laden's close associates, features a
visiting sheik.
In the course of the dinner, the sheik proclaims, "In these days, in
our times, that it will be the greatest jihad in the history of Islam
and the resistance of [sic] the wicked people."
"It could be devotees of Osama bin Laden preserving an important
moment for posterity, knowing that he could be a martyr," Roxanne
Euben, a political science professor at Wellesley College in
Massachusetts, said on Tuesday.
The tape might be used "to claim an incredible success at the very
moment that morale may be falling," Euben said -- but most experts
agreed it was unlikely the current tape was made for the global
media.
Previous releases to the media have been much more polished and have
been efficiently dispatched, they said. "If he wanted to state his
responsibility for it formally he would have done so with a big
bang," said Badey.
It was also unlikely that bin Laden was unaware that he was being
taped, they said.
Bin Laden would have been particularly attentive to video cameras,
says Badey -- especially after the assassination of famed Afghan
opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massood.
Two suicide bombers killed Massood days before the Sept. 11 attacks
by pretending to be journalists to get close to him and setting off a
bomb hidden in a video camera.
However, the fact that the the video was left behind might be an
accident, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said today.
No Worries
Ultimately though, experts said, bin Laden might not care very much
whether or not the West has evidence against him.
Whether or not he killed innocents still does not diminish bin
Laden's political appeal, Lou Cantori, a lecturer for the State
Department and professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County,
said on Tuesday.
Bin Laden's "criticism of the American foreign policy resonates in
the Arab and Muslim imagination even though they disagree with his
brutal and terrible methods and tactics," said Fawaz Gerges, a
professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
Bin Laden's sympathy for the Palestinians, his concern about
sanctions on Iraq that are blamed for killing hundreds of thousands
of children, and criticism of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia -- those
causes generate support for him in the Muslim world, regardless of
the videotape, Cantori said.
The United States is already pursuing bin Laden, and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has expressed his preference for
apprehending the exiled Saudi dissident -- dead.
"I think people now, the sense I get from speaking to a number of
people out of the Arab world, is that what difference will it make?"
said Ghida Fakhry, a former journalist for the Arab satellite
television network Al Jazeera.
"The military campaign in Afghanistan at least is at such an advanced
stage, what is the difference whether we see this evidence or not?"
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
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interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. For more information see:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ]
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