Osama Bin Laden has purportedly offered two audio messages this month, including one issued on the 25th that received little discussion. The more interesting of the two messages came on the 13th; it was directed to Americans. Basically, it's the Bin Laden Book Club recommendation list. He tells Americans to read three volumes, including Jimmy Carter's Peace, Not Apartheid (Bin Laden does not give the title, but the reference is clear) and Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (which Bin Laden calls "The Israel Lobby in the United States").
The third book remains enigmatic:
One of the best persons to explain to you the causes of the events of the 11th is one of your citizens, a former veteran CIA agent, whose conscience awoke in his eighth decade and decided to tell the truth despite the threats, and to explain to you the message of the 11th. So he carried out some activities for this purpose in particular, including his book Apology of a Hired Assassin.I know of no book fitting that description. Do you?
Juan Cole's readers have suggested that Bin Laden may have made a garbled reference to John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. However, Perkins is not in his 80s and he does not claim to have worked for the CIA -- although he has said that he was recruited by the NSA. In truth, though, the "NSA" reference always carried a funky odor. As the State Department pointed out in its rebuttal, the NSA's main tasks are codebreaking and electronic intelligence. The CIA is much more likely to have taken an interest in a man like Perkins. I suspect that he may have intentionally misidentified the Agency in order to speak freely and to bypass legal constraints.
In his September 13 message, Osama Bin Laden also warns that any American president who does not bow to "pressure groups" will end up like "former President Kennedy and his brother."
I must admit that Bin Laden is, in this communication, surprisingly cognizant of American culture -- so much so as to fuel speculation that the recording is a concoction. A lot of people think that Bin Laden died years ago. Perhaps he did. However, it seems to me that a forger would not have garbled the reference to the "Apology" book and its author.
Could these latest recordings be fake? I'm hardly qualified to opine on a technical level. But plenty of people are so qualified -- and that's where matters get tricky.
At least one previous Bin Laden tape (that of November 12, 2002) is widely considered to be a concoction -- at least, such was the conclusion of the respected Idiap Research Institute of Switzerland. But if all subsequent tapes have been shams, why would Idiap -- along with all of the world's intelligence services -- refuse to expose them? How could American fakers expect their work to go undetected by (say) the Russians or the Germans or the Chinese? The technology of simulation is quite good these days, or so I've read -- but I doubt that any aural counterfeiter is skilled enough to fool every expert on the planet. The technology of detection tends to keep up with the technology of deception. Any conspiracy to create bogus "Bin Laden" tapes would thus have to be a worldwide plot, an idea I find ridiculous.
Let us return to the question of whether Osama Bin Laden ever visited the United States. This piece in The New Yorker firmly establishes that he did come here in 1979. The sources are Khaled Batafi, a friend of the young Osama Bin Laden, and Najwah Ghanem, Bin Laden's first wife. (Thanks to Just Me for the link.)
I see nothing in the New Yorker article which precludes the possibility of a later trip to America. As we've seen previously, accused al Qaeda financier Yassin Kadi says that Bin Laden came to Chicago for business reasons in 1981. Kadi, who made Chicago his American base of operation, says that "he put Mr. bin Laden in touch with a group of engineers, several of whom were eventually hired." If this is true, I wonder why we've never heard from those American engineers, who surely would have an interesting story to tell.
This post from two days ago takes a close look at the claims of two questionable witnesses that Osama, using the name "Tim Osman," came to America on mujahadeen business in 1986, visiting Los Angeles, Nevada, several "military bases" and possibly Ronald Reagan's White House. A part of this story -- but not, alas, the truly pertinent part -- was confirmed by CIA officer Milt Bearden in a 2005 interview with French journalists.
The wildest story I've heard so far is that Osama Bin Laden posed for an ad for the Gap in the 1970s. Sorry; I just can't believe it. But part of me wishes it were true -- just as I'd love to learn that Stan Laurel really was the father of Clint Eastwood, as legend says.
5 comments:
IIRC Osama didn't become (publicly) anti-US until after the first Gulf War. Since he was helping the Reaganite cold warriors back in the 80's he would have been welcome here.
It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that Donald Rumsfeld gave him a birthday cake at a private White House dinner party.
Maybe some of the lack of response is due to lack of knowledge with which to converse?
Also, it's not as easy to look up things online these days. So many sources one was able to access quickly in the past are inaccessible these days.
Do you remember when School of America was renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (or WHISC...some kind of pun on clean sweep altho all they changed was the name)? There was a lot of chatter on how SOA trained bin Laden, and I just assumed (erroneously, I guess!) that he'd been trained right here in the U.S. in Georgia. After all, his family was here in the Boston area. At one point it was no big deal.
So, actually, I was kind of surprised to see that it was any kind of surprise that bin Laden had ever been here. He was one of our agents...who, according to the SOA, just happened to turn into one of those "few bad apples."
Here they indicate he was trained by a CIA arm in Pakistan (ironically, to fight communism. So much for the Commie Threat):
http://www.soaw.org/newswire_detail.php?id=414
I'm extremely interested. I just have nothing constructive to say. Keep up the good work.
Well here's a technical question for you. The conjecture from some sources is that the bin Laden audio tapes are done with the voice morphing technology that was profiled over 10 years ago in the WaPost, iirc. That article described a high ranking, possibly flag-rank military official presented with a 'tape' of 'him' calling for the forcible overthrow of the US government (done with this technology).
It is my understanding that with digital video technologies now, a video artifact inserted into a live feed is indistinguishable at any level from the live feed portion of the video. How would forged audio tapes using a voice morphing technology give themselves away? (Obviously, no clicks from splice artifacts would be present.)
And it isn't clear what big power games the powers play among themselves.
When Bush the Wiser was conning Saudi Arabia into allowing the US forces to activate the gigantic $200 billion dollar defense machine they'd built in-country, he did so by falsely claiming a large buildup of Saddam's armor divisions next to the Saudi border, making for an imminent threat of invasion. The St. Petersburg Times bought some commercially available satellite views of the area, which showed no such amassing. Are we to suppose the then-Soviet Union didn't have the access to this purchasable data, or its own national means to independently dispute the Bush claim in real time (to stop the activation of the center), or later, to provide embarrassment?
The same question can be asked about the secret Cambodian bombardment campaign. The Soviets couldn't find that out, and if they found it out, they didn't mention it?
I think countries may keep other countries' secrets for self-interested reasons, such as blackmail for better treatment in various areas.
And it must be said that the US populace has been somewhat immunized against Soviet/Russian 'revelations,' back to when they let out the word that the HIV virus was a US government creation.
Possible candidate for the third 'book' might be the deathbed 'confession' of E. Howard Hunt?
XI
Sorry about this late comment JC, but the Idiap Research Institute of Switzerland is mentioned here. Angelo M. Codevilla claims that Idiap "compared the voices on 15 undisputed recordings of Osama with the voices on 15 subsequent ones attributed to Osama" and found they did not match up. Unfortunately, I cannot find any such research listed at their web site or any link to the primary research leading me to conclude it possibly exists but has been subsequently pulled for political reasons.
I'm also not sold on the idea that one has to posit a "world wide plot" in order to dismiss doubts about the bin Ladin tapes. Various intelligence agencies may have political or practical reasons for silence. The Russians are hardly likely to object given their own false flag exercises blamed on Chechen rebels.
The UK may defer to what they believe may be superior US voice analysis technology or the intelligence firewalls that stop UK politicians ever finding out what goes on in their own intelligence agencies. Or they simply want to achieve broader political goals involving the US and are prepared to ignore their doubts.
On a tangential issue, recall that the FBI claimed that over 90% of Flight 93 was recovered at Shankesville and returned to United Airlines in three weeks, a highly doubtful and bizarre proposition on its face. Yet foreign governments have accepted this and many other disturbing oddities about 9/11 without question. When bin Laden started recommending to people that they should read William Blum I stopped listening. I think the case is still open on the bin Laden tapes.
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