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| Terror Networks |
| US Confirms Bin Laden Is Alive - No Kidding! |
| 2002-11-14 |
| Source: MSNBC U.S. intelligence officials say they feel confident that the voice on an audiotape broadcast on an Arabic television network is that of Osama bin Laden. The disclosure, during the runup to a possible U.S. military campaign in Iraq, highlighted one of the most significant loose ends from Afghanistan, the first stop in the war on terrorism and the last known location of bin Laden. And some security officials fear that the tape may be a signal to bin Ladenâs al-Qaida network to launch new attacks. President Bush said Wednesday that he would leave it to the experts to determine whether bin Laden recorded the threatening new audiotape, but âwhoever put the tape out has put the world on notice yet again that weâre at war.â President Bush bristled when asked if the leader of al-Qaida should have been captured sooner. âWeâre making great progress on the war on terrorism,â he said. âSlowly but surely, weâre dismantling the terrorist network.â Binny himself is just a cog in a greater machine, run by the Soddies with the money we pay them for their oil. But it would be nice to have his head on a pike... U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News said they believed the recording is probably authentic, and Bush said he was taking the tape âvery seriously.â NBCâs Jim Miklaszewski reported that while officials believe the voice is that of bin Laden, CIA analysts have been unable to determine this definitively from the recording aired by Al-Jazeera. According to the officials, it appears the taped message was recorded over a telephone, reducing the quality, making comparisons more difficult, and that the initial analysis is âinconclusive.â Nevertheless, the speech patterns, rhetorical style, choice of words all match Bin Laden, proving that he is in fact, alive, they said. If he phoned the message in to a recorder, he could actually be calling from anywhere. They said on the terriblevision yesterday that the tape had originated in Pakistan â my offhand guess would be from Karachi â but he could have been calling from anywhere. Ben (aka Aracona) sent me a Debka story about three weeks ago that said he was in Arabia. I didn't use it because the guy's had more sightings than Elvis by now. A week before that, there had been a story that an Israeli woman had seen him in the check-in line at the airport in Bali. With the voice quality being too bad for printing â something I actually doubt â I think I'd just drop the probability of him being dead to under fifty percent. And there's a reason there's no video, too, and it's not because they can't pass video over a phone line... |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #4 I posted earlier on another site - same subject my theory which is the inverse: he is alive in the CIA/DOD/POTUS mind only in order to keep the fire lit. You need a bulls-eye or as the poster above said - game over! I agree - the lefties and idiotarians would use his death as the end of it all and start beating the drums of distraction. |
| Posted by: Jack 2002-11-15 05:21:39 |
| #3 The (NPR) interview mentioned above was with Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian political scientist and expert on Islamic fundamentalists and can be heard here if interested: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20021113.atc.03.ram |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2002-11-14 12:53:47 |
| #2 I agree with the sentiment that he is still dead. I do think he is perhaps just as valuable alive to the anti-terror coalition as he is to al qaeda et al. I heard an interview last night with an Egyptian professor of Islamic Studies who had actually interviewed Bin Laden. He stated that he was very suspicious due to the choice of words. For instance, since when did Bush become the "pharaoh" of the century? Also, as the professor above points out regarding the reference to Rumsfeld as "Butcher of Vietnam", why would Bin Laden identify w. Vietnamese, as they are infidels in his eyes just as much as the US? Of course, these could be geographical code words to his followers, but despite what CIA analysts say, the rhetorical style does not match (at least after translation). |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2002-11-14 11:53:23 |
| #1 I for one would like to encourage him to talk as much as he can as often as he can. Everytime he opens his yap, we get more valuable information about where he is. We also get a nice reminder that the jobs not done yet. My biggest fear about OBL is that we will find his rotting maggot infested carcass and 20 seconds afterwards the 'hue and cry' of the lefties will be "the war is over, back to the domestic agenda!" Personally, I still think he's dead. This recording is of such low quality that they could not even tell how the sound was recorded, either over the phone or over the internet. It sounds like a paste up job to me. Notice how they dont have low quality video tape, but they always have low quality audio, guess which is easier to fake. |
| Posted by: Frank Martin 2002-11-14 11:34:43 |