Posted on 11/13/2002 4:05:38 AM PST by Fighting Irish
U.S. officials said yesterday they strongly suspect a newly released tape by terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is authentic and provides the first hard proof in nearly a year that bin Laden is alive.
A preliminary U.S. government assessment indicates the voice is bin Laden's. "It sounds like his voice," said a U.S. official with access to intelligence reports, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
*****snip*****
If authentic, the tape would provide conclusive evidence that Saudi-born bin Laden had survived last year's U.S.-led strike against his base in Afghanistan and eluded an international effort to run him to ground.
****Here is the part that make my hair hurt****
Despite the strong resemblance to past bin Laden recordings, U.S. officials said for the record yesterday they were not ready to state definitively that the new tape was genuine.
"We've seen these reports, and we will analyze the recording," National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters at the White House. "We don't know if it is him or not."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, asked about the tape after a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said, "I'm sure it will be analyzed to determine its authenticity."
"The conclusion was that, that was his voice, but the timing of when the recording was made is not clear," the official said.
*****STOP THE PRESSES*****
But Ronald Noble, secretary-general of the international police agency Interpol, told a French newspaper last week he was convinced bin Laden remained "well and truly alive."
"Osama bin Laden is alive, and on the ground the hunt for him goes on as it did on the very first day," Mr. Noble told Le Figaro.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Nowhere in this story does it say that U.S. officials made a 100% voice match on the tape. As a matter of fact they (whoever they is) are not ready "to state definitively that the tape was genuine".
Then later in the piece the only bubblehead that is sure is a guy from Interpol. Last time I checked Interpol was a British agency.
A rather deceptive and sneaky headline, in my opinion. U.S officials have not given the green light to this latest tape. What a cheap way to sell a newspaper. I would expect a stunt like this from some cute little alternative rag like the Post but, not the Washington Times!
It's him.
This could be turned into a positive if true.
Perhaps while our boys are in the neighborhood they'll ice the chump.
There is no mention in the transcript of the muslim DC snipers. Laden's trying to rally the troops including the lone operators.
He did mention Chenians (but there aren't many details).
He didn't mention the political elections here or abroad or any American vote to pound Iraq.
Difficult to date such rhetoric without him providing concrete specifics. I'm sure that Al-Quaeda had a number of attacks planned and sleeper cells ready to operate.
Why the cover? Why not a video? Is someone going to recognize the room? Paint Saddam's bathroom walls black, that ought to disguise it...
In a cave.
In Tora Bora.
On the floora.
This guy runs INTERPOL ! I wouldn't expect any other answer from a guy with his responsibilities.
What...did his video camera break down?
This is nothing but an impersonator. But the good news is that if folks believe Osama is alive, we can use this as ammunition to exterminate the Islamic Infestation wherever it resides.
It's just an attempt by the Islamic Infestation to keep things rolling.
Let's Roll...
It may already be fundamentally impossible to definitively determine whether a given audio tape of middling fidelity is authentic. Once the state of the art advances to the point where the errors sink below the noise level, the information simply isn't there.
Video will become equally unreliable before long, but isn't quite there yet (the amount of information in a video image is a lot higher, so more processing and better technique is required to get the artifacts below the noise level).
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to hear the feds announce this conclusion whether it's true or not -- it puts the ball in the incest goblin's court (if he is indeed alive) to release a video (and risk giving away clues and/or showing his minions just how badly being on the lam has disagreed with him over the past year).
"Attention Muslim camel jockeys: We're coming for you. We will destroy your countries one by one. And once we occupy Saudi Arabia, I'm going to piss on that stupid black rock."
What concerns me is that I believe he specifically mentions all the Australians killed during the Bali attack.
He went to Interpol while Bill was still in office.
BONUS FREEPER TRIVIA QUESTION:
Who was his wife?
I give up. Who?
I think it was the Chechnya rebel's taking hostages, actually.
You're prolly right about the illness, though. Otherwise, he'd have made a video tape instead.
These are serious times, and the reflexive passifist/appeasement left is no longer worthy of being taken seriously.
That in itself is meaningless -- if Bali was a planned target (as it would be, being an intrusion of Decadent Western Culture[tm] into a Moslem country), even the most rudimentary homework makes that obvious.
Nope--Interpol is an international police agency. And Ron Noble is an ex-Clintonite. I "think" he was head of the BATF during Waco.
Oh, I'm sceptical, too.
It's just that I believe we'd be hearing strong comments of doubt already leaking from "our" officials if it weren't him.
Anyway, we should know by the end of the day.
Well bring it on! And then they will lose a couple of their big cities.
W A S H I N G T O N, Nov. 13 — The high school textbooks say the president of the United States runs the executive branch of government and rides herd on a vast bureaucracy assigned to carry out his directives.
Well, that's not quite the way it works, say Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who describe the travails of President Clinton in trying, often unsuccessfully, to get the Pentagon and the FBI to pursue Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
The two authors, both Clinton-era National Security Council experts on terrorism, share their thoughts in a new book, "The Age of Sacred Terror."
They say Clinton wanted to do something about al-Qaida operations in Afghanistan late in his second term, his cruise missile attacks on the group's facilities in August 1998 having achieved little. [Oh, I don't know, he did take out a camel and a $2 tent]
He approached Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said, according to the book, "It would scare the (expletive) out of al-Qaida if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters in to the middle of their camp. It would get us an enormous deterrence and show those guys we're not afraid."
The Pentagon feared a debacle similar to April 1980 when President Carter dispatched helicopters to Iran in hopes of rescuing 52 American hostages. The result was the incineration of two helicopters and the deaths of eight servicemen.
The authors suspect that Pentagon reservations about the Clinton plan ran deeper. The Pentagon, they point out, had an uneasy relationship with Clinton virtually from Day 1, when the White House began pushing to end discrimination against homosexuals by the military. They quoted a senior political appointee at the Pentagon as saying that Defense was "particularly unwilling to go out on a limb for Clinton."
Also, the authors say, Thomas Pickering, No. 3 at the State Department under Clinton, worried that someone at Defense would put out the story that the Clinton plan would "hazard the lives of young Americans in a wild goose chase. The Pentagon has a great capacity to let things leak to keep from doing them."
Clinton's "black ninja" plan never got off the ground.
Go to ABC News for full story.
......he is DEAD, in which case we have already got him.
And I think the point is well made: why the AUDIO tapes instead of a VIDEO tape? I think he's dead, and will until he rears his head to show us he's still alive.
He's hurtin', for certain ! :O)
Washington, Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- An audiotape of Osama bin Laden praising recent acts of terrorism is authentic, a U.S. official said, providing evidence the leader of al-Qaeda survived the U.S. aerial bombardment of Afghanistan.
Preliminary indications are that the voice on the tape is bin Laden's, a senior U.S. official said yesterday, requesting anonymity. Unidentified U.S. officials cited by the New York Times discounted the possibility the tape was the result of tampering.
The speaker on the tape praised terrorist incidents last month in Moscow and the Indonesian island of Bali and threatened to retaliate in the event the U.S. attacks Iraq, Cable News Network said. The tape was broadcast yesterday by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network.
Al-Qaeda has regrouped since its training camps were destroyed in Afghanistan in December, the United Nations said. The group is receiving funds and is ``fit and well and poised to strike at its leisure,'' a UN report said in August. Bin Laden's fate is unknown. He is said to have escaped into Pakistan with al- Qaeda leaders and those of the ousted Taliban regime.
The last indication bin Laden was alive came in December, when U.S. authorities intercepted a radio transmission in Afghanistan in which they believe they heard him give orders to al- Qaeda fighters, the Times reported.
`No Evidence' He's Dead
Dale Watson, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's executive assistant director for counter-terrorism, said in July he thought bin Laden was dead. Watson also said he had ``no evidence to support that.''
The speaker in the audiotape referred to U.S. President George W. Bush as ``the pharaoh of the century,'' CNN said. Attacks in Moscow, Bali, Kuwait and Yemen were in retaliation for Bush's actions ``killing our children in Iraq,'' the speaker said.
The U.K., France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia were criticized for ``allying themselves with America in attacking us in Afghanistan,'' CNN cited the speaker as saying.
Al-Qaeda said last week it carried out the Oct. 12 attack on a nightclub in Bali that killed at least 190 people, CNN reported citing a statement on the group's Web site. Most of the people killed in the incident were tourists, many of them from Australia.
Warning to Australia
The Al-Jazeera broadcast said Australia was warned against participating in Afghanistan. ``They ignored our warning and they woke up to the sound of explosions in Bali,'' CNN cited the speaker as saying.
Inflammatory statements, such as the audiotape, strengthen the resolve to fight terrorism, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said.
``We will stand by our friends and our allies and our neighbors in our determination to crush international terrorism,'' Downer said. ``This sort of language only reinforces our determination in our campaign against terrorism.''
Al-Qaeda is recruiting in Europe and increasing its activities, August Hanning, the head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, told a security conference last week in Berlin. Western intelligence agencies observed an increase in worldwide communications among members of the al-Qaeda network, the Associated Press cited Hanning as saying.
Well.....he either alive - in which case we WILL get him or.........he is DEAD, in which case we have already got him.
No bulls#it there; it just furthers our cause to take him and ALL of his Islamikazis out, once and for all.
OBL being alive is the worst scenario for these morons.
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