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| Terror Networks |
| Al-Qaeda propaganda network still up and running |
| 2006-02-02 |
| More than a week after Osama Bin Laden's Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, resurfaced in an audiotape posted on the Internet, Al Jazeera aired a video of Zawahiri berating the United States for a bombing attack on a place where he had been suspected of being, and threatening further attacks on the United States. In another broadcast Monday evening, the Arabic-language network based in Doha, Qatar, broadcast a videotape of Jill Carroll, the American correspondent kidnapped in Baghdad in mid-January. Zawahiri, shown wearing white robes and a white turban, said the Jan. 13 airstrike in the northeastern Pakistan village of Damadola had killed only "innocents," and called President George W. Bush a "butcher" and a "failure" for the attack. He said the United States had lost its chance for a truce offered by bin Laden in an audio recording broadcast by the Arab satellite television station Al Jazeera on Jan. 19. "Butcher of Washington, you are not only defeated and a liar, but also a failure," he said, speaking of Bush. "You are a curse on your own nation and you have brought and will bring them only catastrophes and tragedies." A U.S. counterterrorism official said that the videotape "demonstrates that Al Qaeda's propaganda apparatus is still functioning." The official, who asked not to be identified because of the rules of his government office, called Zawahiri's message "an attempt to reassure the Al Qaeda rank and file that he's still alive" after the January missile strike in Pakistan. Thirteen villagers were killed in the strike, setting off widespread protests in Pakistan. U.S. officials say that several Qaeda figures were among those killed, but have not determined who they were. In the video, Zawahiri refers to the strike as aimed at "my humble self and four of my brothers." "The videotape proves that Ayman is closely following what is happening around him," said Mohammad Salah, Cairo bureau chief of the pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Hayat, an expert on Islamist groups. "He is talking about events that happened as recently as last week." Zawahiri issued seven public statements during 2005, becoming the public face of the terrorist network, the intelligence official said, and U.S. officials had expected him to speak out after the missile attack to silence any rumors that he might have been killed. The Al Jazeera broadcast of Carroll was the second videotape of the journalist and showed her dressed in a white Muslim head scarf and weeping as she spoke to the camera. Carroll's voice is almost inaudible on the tape, but the network said she had called for the U.S. and Iraqi governments to release all women held in the jails of the Iraqi Interior Ministry and the U.S. Army, and said doing so would help to win her release. The 30-second video clip bore a date stamp marked Jan. 28. In the upper left corner of the screen were the words "The Revenge Brigade," the same logo that appeared in an earlier videotape of Carroll broadcast on Jan. 17. In the new videotape, Carroll, who was abducted in western Baghdad on Jan. 7, looks directly at the camera, speaking quickly, her face contorted with anguish. Her voice, tremulous and breaking, can be heard at one point saying "hope for the families," but at other times it is obscured by the network voice-over. It was the first sign of Carroll since the first videotape, in which her captors threatened to kill her in 72 hours if the U.S. military did not release all Iraqi women from its jails. Carroll, a freelance journalist, wrote mostly for The Christian Science Monitor, an American daily published in Boston. A number of prominent Iraqi and Arab figures, including some with ties to insurgent groups, have issued public calls for her release. The U.S. military freed five Iraqi women from detention last week, but military officials said the decision had no relation to the kidnappers' demands. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 Of course Al-Qaeda's propanganda network[s] still up and running: CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC are still on the air, last I checked. |
| Posted by: The Angry Fliegerabwehrkanonen 2006-02-02 16:33 |