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Terror Networks & Islam
Osama bin Laden: It's the economy stupid!
2004-11-02
After initial concerns that the recent video message from bin Laden might contain "trigger" messages to "sleeper" cells within the USA , Al Jazeera released only an edited version last Friday after a U.S request.

Since then suggestions have circulated that the omitted footage contained specific threats against individual states of the U.S.A.To curtail this speculation the full transcript has now been released.

In the full transcript bin Laden makes it clear that the Al Qaeda strategy is to bankrupt the U.S.A.He claims that there are clear indications that he and Al Qaeda have been successful so far.

Full unedited transcript of the recent Osama bin Laden tape below.
Posted by:tipper

#5  No NSA spook, just a former English major (also History) who knows sh*tty prose when he sees it. This is not the work of an eloquent, confident, visionary warrior. It is a hack job by someone who'd trying to rip off anti-Bush memes from MTV, Mikey and the OpEd pages.

I mean, really, when did Osama start reading Krugman? He may be nutty but he's not stupid.
Posted by: lex   2004-11-02 5:52:05 PM  

#4  Lex/NSA spook. A lot of what you say makes sense. Alot of sense. But the CIA gave it a probably rating. Don't they do a voice print on the audio to confirm it isn't an imposter?
Posted by: Mrs. Davis   2004-11-02 5:42:50 PM  

#3  The video's bogus. Osama's famous for eloquent rhetoric and fluid, classical arab prose. This tape's jokey, adolescent, rambling, irrelevant. When exactly did these diehard warriors suddenly develop such a strong interest in economics? He's never said a word about any economic program or theory, let alone a strategy for economic warfare.

And then you have the script's syntax and banal, leaden style. It reads like your average editorial from Cincinatti or San Diego. That is, when it's not stealing lines from Mikey Boy, Rock the Vote, and The Beverly Hillbillies ("black gold" - ha!).

My money's on some lefty hack from Britain, perhaps an Arab who lived in the US for a few years. Regardless we can be 99% certain that this did not come from Osama's hand.

Posted by: lex   2004-11-02 5:30:29 PM  

#2  TW,

No need for an apology. All of your points are exactly right.

The only way we lose this fight is if we don't show up for it.
Posted by: Dreadnought   2004-11-02 4:39:11 PM  

#1  Bankrupt the U.S.???? The man is an ignorant fool. Not just because of the size of the economy in question, or that it is the most active in the world these days. But because of the freedom to create, which means that the people who proviously developed Ginsu knives and fantastic bagless vacuum cleaners have now turned their attention to inventing tiny tracers, chemical/biological detectors, anti-IED armor, and even more esoteric toys. And shortly, each one of those is going to be the seed of a new industry, as once the computer and the internet were.

I apologise to fellow pedants for the run-on sentence, but even I , in my abysmal ignorance of all things economic, know this much. If Bin Laden thinks to open a second front against the U.S. in this manner, he's already lost -- as badly as Hitler when he started toward the Russian border. And unlike the Russians, the Yanks will enjoy this particular battle.
Posted by: trailing wife   2004-11-02 9:48:06 AM  

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