Posted on 12/13/2001 7:11:51 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
The U. S. government released today a copy of a videotape of Osama bin Laden obtained by U.S. forces in Jalalabad, Afghanistan in late November.
The video was filmed by unknown persons.
"There was no doubt of bin Laden's responsibility for the September 11 attacks before the tape was discovered," said Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The release of the tape was made after balancing the concerns about any additional pain that could be caused by its release against the value of having the world fully appreciate what we are up against in the war against terrorism.
The tape was released with an English translation and English subtitling, prepared independently by George Michael, translator, Diplomatic Language Services; and Dr. Kassem M. Wahba, Arabic language program coordinator, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. They collaborated on their translation and compared it with translations done by the U.S. government for consistency. There were no inconsistencies in the translations.
The English translation is on the Web at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/d20011213ubl.pdf
I'll probably write a treatise arguing the earth is hollow and inhabited by mole people. Half the replies will try to reason with me, the other half will salute my genius.
But not today.
These guys are like on drugs or something,...
"Shaykh: Hundreds of people used to doubt you and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you. I remember a vision by Shaykh Salih Al-(( Shuaybi)). He said: "There will be a great hit and people will go out by hundreds to Afghanistan." I asked him (Salih): "To Afghanistan?" He replied, "Yes." According to him, the only ones who stay behind will be the mentally impotent and the liars (hypocrites). I remembered his saying that hundreds of people will go out to Afghanistan. He had this vision a year ago. This event discriminated between the different types of followers. "
Little did he know at the time that the hundreds would be United States Marines and Special Ops troups!
"UBL: Abdallah Azzam, Allah bless his soul, told me not to record anything (... inaudible...) so I thought that was a good omen, and Allah will bless us (... inaudible...). Abu-Al-Hasan Al-(( Masri)), who appeared on Al-Jazeera TV a couple of days ago and addressed the Americans saying: "If you are true men, come down here and face us."
We are here now ABU, come out come out where-ever you are! What? All talk and no Martyrs? Who are these jerks?
"(... inaudible...) He told me a year ago: "I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!" He said: "So I wondered if that was a soccer game or a pilot game? Our players were pilots." He (Abu-Al-Hasan) didn't know anything about the operation until he heard it on the radio. He said the game went on and we defeated them. That was a good omen for us. "
Yeah, but you forgot to note that the opponent team is all pilots too. And, these guys fly their own planes. Things like F-14s, F18s, B1s, B2s, B52s, C130s. Dumass. There are "dreams" and then there is the freakin game. In reality, we OWN the ball, and we OWN the field!!!
Send them to paradise!
But I'm really upset that these people are not coming after our fine armed services, like the Marines.
I've had too much BCS talk about the Buffs and the Ducks and well, this looks like game talk as well.
We're in the game BIG TIME
Hope you people at Free Republic can accept the apology.
Seems like sincere questions so I'll bite. I'm not technical enough to know how easy or concealable an alteration to a low pixel, low light, home video tape would be done. So let's look at this from a 'motivation' versus 'technical possibility' perspective.
The question I would ask are as follows:
1) Is the current adminstration trustworthy?
2) What benefits would be gained from doctoring & releasing a tape now that the Afghan campaign is nearing completion?
3) If they did intercept this tape from an Al Jazeera transmission from Kabul to their headquarters, as has been suggested, how would they assure that the original never surfaces to embaress them?
If someone answers #1 as a 'no' then no one can convince them. We see that in the Arab 'street' reaction. #2 and #3 are issues that someone would have to give me great arguments on for me to believe that there was a possible doctoring of the tapes.
To anwer your question about does the possibility of 'doctoring' trouble me? No, not me personally. I answer yes to #1 above, I trust this administration. They speak frankly and do what they say they will do. I think they were extremely thorough in the translation...having four independent people review it. Where they did not agree we see an **inaudible**. I can't find anything in the tape that looks fake to me. The body language and the translated text match and 'sound' real to me. I also believe that there are smart people who will uncover alterations if they occurred.
The most impugnable thing about the Muslims who were not directly in on this plot is that they will NOT vigorously denounce the promulgators of this wicked attack. That's because the religion forbids them to! Imagine that. To the majority of practitioners of this religion (at least the real world version, not Bush's idealized version) NOTHING done in the name of Islam and jihad is wicked enough to put a person outside of that pale.
This is the first evidence the US government has given us, suggesting that they didn't have any before this. And, yes, the hijackers could have financed this themselves--Ramsey Yusef mentioned that the cells operating in the US were financially independent--most middle class Saudis can afford flying lessons, box cutters and airplane tickets. And, yes, I have seen no evidence disputing that an attack on Afghanistan had already been planned.
I posted this first about 12 hours ago. Surely you've had time to compose a reply.
I thought I did reply yesterday.
While it may be true that some Saudi's could self-finance flight training, what makes you think these specific Saudi's could and how do you explain the money transfers? Why did they all come from the same source? Why has that source disappeared?
Where's your sense of humor, lib? Or is it that you really don't know what reverse phychology is?
You know ... its like spending millions of dollars (or is that billions) to teach the little kiddies not to smoke and smoking is WAY on the rise among the kiddies. That's ironic too ... but another subject for another day.
Apparently. And apparently there's nothing to corroborate that statement either. Why am I not surprised?
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time Thursday to keep Congress from seeing documents of prosecutors' decision-making in cases ranging from a decades-old Boston murder to the Clinton-era fund-raising probe.
I trust them too .... to protect clinton's questionable fund raising practices. Never know how much of that 'brown stuff' might've rubbed off on THIS administration. Not that many in congress wouldn't have done the same, for the same reasons. They just can't keep it secret from the public as well as exec. priv. can.
Hey, what's that brown haze over Washington? LOL
LOL. Just can't stand to see some of us functioning without our daily dose of Prozac? Misery loves company?
I'm not a tech expert either, but I believe the low res, low light stuff makes everything infinitely easier if someone _wanted_ to fake something.
Your point about motivation is a kind of double edged sword. The government has strong motivation for something like this tape to surface. It provides a very visible, easy to understand smoking gun in a case that seems to be built around difficult to illustrate and track relationships and past histories and convoluted financial transactions.
My point was more general, though. I don't like coming to important conclusions based on "trust." (Remember, during the first Bush administration, during the Gulf War, some "Kuwaiti nurse" testified before Congress about the horrors she "witnessed." Later, it turned out she was an actress...) If I'm told that the square root of 81 is 9, I can whip out a calculator and check it myself. If someone tells me yellow and blue mix to make green, I can buy paint and test it out myself. But more and more, it seems, Americans are being asked to trust "evidence" when there's really NO WAY for us to verify the evidence our own self.
Imagine some woman told you that she had just taken two tests for HIV. One test came back positive. One test came back negative. And she wanted to have sex... Would you do it? (Could easily be a false positive. Could easily be a real positive. Yikes.)
This is kind of how I feel about a lot of government issues. Like you, I'm inclined to trust a Republican administration. But Republicans have lied to us before, too.
When I'm confronted, now, with evidence that _could be_ true or just as easily _could be_ false, I kind of just shake my head, take a step back, and say I'm neither going to believe it nor dis-believe it. I'm just going to note it.
Mark W.
No, I don't think so. It's possible, but from what I remember of the thoughts and feelings after the attack (both what I heard on the news and what I heard from my friends), I don't think the Arabs would have looked at things that way because no one really minded losing any freedoms or rights immediately after the attacks. Everyone was so scared and angry that the general consensus seemed to be, "Whatever keeps this from happening again."
I think it's more likely that our (the media's) vocal concern about the location of government leaders might have been construed by those who don't understand how America works as fear of a coup. The Middle East is full of dictators whose government collapses as soon as they do. It would make sense if Arabs looked at the Pres. in that light and saw the repeated concerns in the media concerning Bush's safety as fears that the American government itself would topple.
Luckily, we have a constitution that is more powerful than one man's death.
That is not 'reverse psychology' either. You can not use that phrase for every situation where a campaign fails or their are unintended consequences. Are you a Libertarian? I've seen this style of arguement from self-described members in FR.
Don't know enough about this case to comment other than to say 'if you are for it I am probably against it.' I will go with the Bush Administrations judgement on this. They are not Clinton lovers by any stretch of the imagination.
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