[Mb-civic] New Bin-Laden Video Released

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New Bin-Laden Video Released

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-bin-laden-tape,0,1073184.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines


Bin Laden: Another Attack Can Be Avoided

By MAGGIE MICHAEL
Associated Press Writer

October 30, 2004, 2:32 AM EDT

CAIRO, Egypt -- Osama bin Laden, in a statement directed to the American 
people days before the presidential election, says the United States must 
stop threatening the security of Muslims if it wants to avoid another Sept. 
11-style attack.

In the video aired Friday, the al-Qaida leader acknowledges for the first 
time that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks and said he did so because of 
injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United 
States.

Bin Laden refrained from directly warning of new attacks in the video, his 
first in more than a year, although he said "there are still reasons to 
repeat what happened.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaida. Your 
security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, referring to the president 
and his Democratic opponent. "Any state that does not mess with our 
security has naturally guaranteed its own security."

In what appeared to be conciliatory language, bin Laden said he wanted to 
explain why he ordered the suicide airline hijackings that hit the World 
Trade Center and the Pentagon so Americans would know how to act to prevent 
another attack.

"To the American people, my talk to you is about the best way to avoid 
another Manhattan," he said. "I tell you: Security is an important element 
of human life and, free people do not give up their security."

After the video was aired, President Bush said that "Americans will not be 
intimidated" by bin Laden. Sen. John Kerry criticized Bush for failing to 
capture bin Laden earlier and said that "I can run a more effective war on 
terror."

The political impact of the tape could cut both ways. It bolsters Bush's 
argument that the world is a dangerous place and plays to his strength as 
commander in chief in fighting the war on terror, but it also underscores 
that his administration has failed to capture or kill America's No. 1 enemy 
more than three years after the terror attacks on New York and Washington.

Bin Laden is thought to be hiding in the mountains along the 
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The video, broadcast on Al-Jazeera television, 
showed him with a long, gray beard, wearing traditional white robes, a 
turban and a golden cloak, standing behind a table with papers and in front 
of a plain, brown curtain.

His hands were steady and he appeared healthy.

The Bush administration said it believes the videotape is authentic and was 
made recently, noting that bin Laden referred to 1,000 U.S. military deaths 
in Iraq -- which happened in early September.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration did not 
plan to raise the nation's threat level for now. The U.S. official said the 
18-minute tape -- which has English subtitles, though not in the portion 
shown on Al-Jazeera -- lacks an explicit threat and repeats well-worn themes.

Al-Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, broadcast about seven minutes of the 
tape. The station's spokesman, Jihad Ali Ballout, said Al-Jazeera aired 
what was "newsworthy and relevant" and refused to describe the unaired 
portions, including whether they included any threats. Ballout said the 
station received the tape Friday but would not say how.

Before the tape was aired, the State Department asked the government of 
Qatar to discourage Al-Jazeera from broadcasting it, a senior State 
Department official said.

In the video, bin Laden accused Bush of misleading Americans by saying the 
attack was carried out because al-Qaida members "hate freedom." The 
terrorist leader said his followers have left alone countries that do not 
threaten Muslims.

"We fought you because we are free ... and want to regain freedom for our 
nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours," bin Laden said.

He said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were 
destroyed in the siege of the capital.

"While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my 
mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should 
destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be 
deterred from killing our children and women," he said.

"God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but 
after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of 
the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, 
this came to my mind," he said.

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the Sept. 11 attacks, giving 
the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the 
president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed 
forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these 
horrors alone," he said, referring to the number of people who worked at 
the World Trade Center.

"It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its 
butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the 
skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the 
operations, thank God," he said.

Excluding the hijackers, the Sept. 11 attacks killed 2,749 people at the 
World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 in Pennsylvania.

In planning the attacks, bin Laden said he told Mohammed Atta, one of the 
hijackers, that the strikes had to be carried out "within 20 minutes before 
Bush and his administration noticed."

Bin Laden compared the Bush administration to repressive Arab regimes, 
"half of which are ruled by the military and the other half are ruled by 
the sons of kings and presidents."

He said the resemblance became clear when Bush's father was president and 
visited Arab countries.

"He wound up being impressed by the royal and military regimes and envied 
them for staying decades in their positions and embezzling the nation's 
money with no supervision," bin Laden said.

"He passed on tyranny and oppression to his son, and they called it the 
Patriot Act, under the pretext of fighting terror. Bush the father did well 
in placing his sons as governors and did not forget to pass on the 
expertise in fraud from the leaders of the (Mideast) region to Florida to 
use it in critical moments."

The image of bin Laden reading a statement was dramatically different from 
the few other videos of the al-Qaida leader that have emerged since the 
Sept. 11 attacks.

In the last videotape, issued Sept. 10, 2003, bin Laden is seen walking 
through rocky terrain with his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, both carrying 
automatic rifles. In a taped message issued at the same time, bin Laden 
praises the "great damage to the enemy" on Sept. 11 and mentions five 
hijackers by name.

In December 2001, the Pentagon released a videotape in which bin Laden is 
shown at a dinner with associates in Afghanistan on Nov. 9, 2001, saying 
the destruction of the Sept. 11 attacks exceeded even his "optimistic" 
calculations.

But in none of his previous messages, audio or video, did bin Laden 
directly state that he ordered the attacks.

U.S. authorities have long said they believe bin Laden is hiding in a 
rugged, mountainous tribal region of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan, but 
there has been no firm evidence of his whereabouts for three years.

The last audiotape purportedly from bin Laden came in April. The speaker on 
the tape, which CIA analysts said likely was the al-Qaida leader, offered a 
truce to European nations if they pull troops out of Muslim countries. The 
tape referred to the March 22 assassination by Israel of Hamas founder 
Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

Associated Press writer Katherine Pfleger Shrader in Washington contributed 
to this report.




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