Osama bin Laden Respectfully Exhorts USraeli Aggressors to Overcome Their Own Vile, Depraved Natures--Or Else


by mallah
(
Saturday 30 October 2004, 2:05 Makka Time, 23:05 GMT


Bin Ladin accused Bush of being slow to react on September 11



Following are excerpts from a speech by al-Qaida leader Usama bin Ladin in a video, parts of which were aired by Aljazeera:


"O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.

"Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example.

"It is known that those who hate freedom do not possess proud souls like those of the 19, may God rest their souls. We fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security we squander yours.

"I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces... thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers"

"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed - when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US Sixth Fleet.

"In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.

"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.

"He [Bush] adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism.

"We had agreed with the (September 11) overall commander Muhammad Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces [Bush] would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing
her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This had given us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God.

"Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic presidential candidate John] Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe."


Aljazeera



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State Department Tried to Stop Airing of Bin Laden Tape

By Barry Schweid The Associated Press
Published: Oct 29, 2004






WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department on Friday urged the government of Qatar, which finances Al-Jazeera, not to broadcast a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden, a senior State Department official said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the State Department spoke to officials in Qatar before Al-Jazeera showed a portion of the tape. In it, the al-Qaida leader said the United States can avoid another attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims.

The request to the Persian Gulf government, which is considered an ally in the U.S. campaign to counter terror, was passed through the U.S. embassy in Doha, Qatar's capital.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Bush administration officials have appeared in Al-Jazeera interviews, although the State Department has occasionally denounced the network as biased against the United States. The reason for going on these programs is to convey the U.S. message to the Arab world, the official said.

AP-ES-10-29-04 1903EDT

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Bush and Kerry see election hijacked by their old enemy
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
30 October 2004


Finally, the October Surprise has come. But it is not the one Republicans had dreamed of - the capture or killing of America's mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden. Instead, with an aplomb verging on impertinence, the al-Qa'ida leader has delivered his own election message to the American people, just four days before they choose their next president.

US intelligence officials claimed last night they had been expecting such a move - or something like it - as the 2004 campaign moved towards its climax. Even they, however, must have been taken aback by the bravado of the performance.

Of late, Bin Laden's voice had been heard only in crackly audiotapes. Not for two years had he appeared in a video.

The new tape, showing the terrorist leader very much alive and in apparent good health, appears to have been made within the past seven weeks, and might have been recorded even more recently.

The political impact is as hard to gauge as Bin Laden's motives for making it. His warning that the best way of avoiding another disaster (like 11 September 2001) was to avoid provoking Arab anger, might be taken as an oblique endorsement of the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.

That raises the question of whether Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri want President George Bush to win or lose next week.

Republicans claim that the al-Qa'ida leaders are on the run, and would far prefer to have a "weak and indecisive" Democrat President in the White House.

Other analysts say that assumption may be mistaken. They believe that a second Bush term, and a continuation of this administration's unqualified support for Israel, will ensure that the United States will remain deeply unpopular in the Arab world, thus playing into Bin Laden's hands.

Mr Bush's hardline policies, according to this school of thought, have turned Iraq into a hotbed of terrorists.

It has thus become easier for al-Qa'ida and affiliated terrorist groups to recruit new members from an ever-widening pool of radicals, convinced that violence is the only means of securing change.

If this theory is correct, then Bin Laden would do nothing to indicate support for Mr Kerry. Nor, by the same token, is he likely to launch an attack to disrupt the election - for the simple reason that at this late stage, it would merely see Americans rallying around their President, as happened after the 11 September attacks.

In fact, Bin Laden's appeal to the American people was ambiguous. Their security was, he said, in the hands of neither Bush nor Kerry, nor even al-Qa'ida. It was up to them.

The question now is what will be the effect on the campaign. Some experts say it will play to the belief of Americans that Mr Bush is more likely to keep them safe - and tip a desperately close election his way.

But the opposite may happen. Voters may be reminded that the man who has for the first time explicitly admitted he was behind the 11 September terror attacks is still at large, strengthening the feeling that the war against Iraq was a mistake, a distraction from the real war against Bin Laden and international terrorism.
30 October 2004 07:02

news.independent.co.uk