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Sun. Oct 31, 2004

Not Quite Dead Yet

I guess we got our October Surprise, neatly slow pitched right into the Friday news cycle on the final weekend before the election, arriving a little over an hour before the East Coast evening newscasts. And it didn’t take a high priced political PR team to make it happen, just a new bin Laden videotape hand delivered in an envelope.

The Arabic television channel Al-Jazeera said Saturday that it received the latest videotaped message from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden at its offices in the Pakistani capital [...] The tape was dropped off at the gate of the station’s office in an envelope on Friday, just hours before it aired, said Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Pakistan [...] Zaidan said he immediately transmitted the tape to Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

A senior State Department official told NBC News that the Qatari government told the United States about the tape within the last day. The U.S. ambassador, Chase Untermeyer, unsuccessfully lobbied Qatari officials to persuade Al-Jazeera not to air it, the official said.

MSNBC: “Al-Jazeera: Bin Laden tape obtained in Pakistan”

The ambassador may not have persuaded Al-Jazeera to keep it off the air, but it appears they only aired 5 minutes of the 18 minute video. Why? Why is our government’s knee jerk reaction to try and keep the tape from airing? Why would Al-Jazeera only show less than a third of the first video from bin Laden in nearly three years? Not newsworthy enough?

I’m not trying to imply any conspiracy, I ask those questions genuinely. I’ve become spoiled in our wondrous Internet Age, and I see no reason we can’t have access to all the raw data. Does our government fear we can’t view it and judge it for what it is? Does Al-Jazeera fear that their audience might misjudge the full context of the video, and therefore edited it? I don’t know, and have no basis for suspicion … other than the fact this is perhaps the most newsworthy information we’ve had from the most wanted man on this planet in nearly three years, and some folks haven’t let us see it all.

Nor do I mean to place too much importance on it. It’s just that this data should be evaluated in full, not edited and spoon fed to us in small chunks by people with unknown motivations. I just want it without the spin, thank you very much. Then I can determine exactly where it fits in the Big Picture.

But its loose fit is already fairly apparent, as is the immediate spin both partisan camps have put on it. But I just have to say, if you’re an American voter who lets Osama’s words influence your vote, you are a fool, and somewhere in a dark place, Osama laughs at you.

However, you should “know your enemy.” We should all pay close attention to what he said, because it is only then that it becomes clear that it makes no difference to Osama or Al Qaeda who sits in the Oval Office. But for now, all we have is some translated excerpts, and not only that, we even have three slightly different translations (the one below from CNN, this one from Reuters, and one from Al-Jazeera).

I really would like to read the entire context. Just the same, there are some striking portions in these excerpts:

I wonder about you. Although we are ushering the fourth year after 9/11, Bush is still exercising confusion and misleading you and not telling you the true reason. Therefore, the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated.

Of course you wonder about us (the Reuters translation says “I am surprised by you,” and Al_Jazeera translates it as “I am amazed at you”). That will likely never change. Our actions befuddle you because you have never had a grasp on Americans, you’ve projected your isolated beliefs in the place of the reality you do not understand. You were certain that if you merely drew some blood from Americans, they might lob some more Tomahawk cruise missiles, but would revert to what you saw as our nature: tuck and run. We would never invade Afghanistan, and if we did, we could be defeated much easier than the iron-willed Soviets. You were confident of your position.

You were wrong. Oh so wrong.

So now you wonder about us. You’re surprised by us. Amazed. Why do we want to keep coming after you? Could it be that attacks on our embassies, on one of our warships, and eventually on our homeland were finally taken by us as the Acts of War you had intended them to be? You sound as though you might have gotten your cart before the horse; you attacked, repeatedly, and now you want to negotiate and tell us how this can all be brought to an end.

Getting a little dark and lonely in the wilderness?

Once attacked, Americans don’t negotiate. We find our own way to bring it to an end. That’s one of those “surprising” things you’re discovering about us. Here’s another: your attempt to peddle influence just prior to our election will be seen by Americans for exactly what it is. Not just an outsider, but an enemy of our country, trying to inject himself into our political process.

In turn, you reveal something somewhat surprising to us; not only a final admission that you planned the 9/11 attacks, but the background of your motivation. It is most revealing:

And I will talk to you about the reason for those events, and I will be honest with you about the moments the decision was made so that you can ponder.

And these special events that directly and personally affected me go back to 1982 and what happened when America gave permission for Israel to invade Lebanon. And assistance was given by the American sixth fleet. [...] And as I was looking at those towers that were destroyed in Lebanon, it occurred to me that we have to punish the transgressor with the same—and that we had to destroy the towers in America so that they taste what we tasted, and they stop killing our women and children.

Though you speak obsessively of Bush, you reveal your motivation came at a time when Bush was (by his own admission) a drunken ne’er-do-well, and Reagan was President. You attacked both our embassies and the USS Cole, as well as began detailed planning for 9/11, while Clinton was President. Every attack you’ve made against America came before anyone could have known that Bush would even become President.

If Ralph Nader had been elected in 2000, 9/11 would have still happened. If he was to be elected next Tuesday, Al Qaeda and its franchisees would still seek to attack us. The person who sits in the Oval Office is irrelevant, except as a focus of nutball rhetoric. Like this:

The resemblance started when [former President George H.W.] Bush, the father, visited the area, when some of our own were impressed by America and were hoping that the visits would affect and influence our countries.

Then, what happened was that he was impressed by the monarchies and the military regimes, and he was jealous of them staying in power for tens of years, embezzling the public money without any accountability. And he moved the tyranny and suppression of freedom to his own country, and they called it the Patriot Act, under the disguise of fighting terrorism. And Bush, the father, found it good to install his children as governors and leaders.

This comes across as the equivalent of schoolyard taunting; “your Mother wears Army boots.” Have no doubt that if Al Gore had been elected in 2000, bin Laden would today be talking of “the Clinton puppet,” and how he’d been installed in power by the Zionists just as Clinton was.

Here in America, I think we all know just how Clinton and Bush became President, and who elected the Bush brothers as governors of Texas and Florida. And bin Laden himself makes the point clear:

Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

In that respect, it really doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office. Neither individual will persuade our enemy. They will have to pass bin Laden’s personal test of purity, likely be found lacking as every President in the past two decades has been, and find themselves facing threats and attacks from Al Qaeda. The threats and attacks are not on one man in the Oval Office, they are on all Americans. They always have been.

And he is right, our security is in our own hands. As it has always been. On September 11, Bush didn’t declare war against Al Qaeda. Congress didn’t declare war against Al Qaeda. The American People did. The person in office was merely our vessel, and this will be true in the future as well.

Bin Laden was robed in white and unarmed, whereas he used to appear in fatigues with an AK-47. He used to give us heated rhetoric about the rain of horrors that would befall us, and the evil that America embodied. But this time he made a clear effort to speak more calmly to the American people (at least, as much as Al-Jazeera was willing to show of it), and wants us to believe this can all end well, if we will just change our ways to his satisfaction. “Don’t attack us and we won’t attack you.” Yet this is an offer made by someone “on the run,” literally unseen by the world for nearly three years, and unable to muster even one pitiful symbolic attack on our homeland during that time.

The only fitting response is “crawl back in your hole.”

And my honest gut feeling is that’s where the effect of this tape ends. However, there is the unknown percentage chance that this long overdue appearance by bin Laden is a “trigger message,” a go ahead for some planned attack. While it has happened that way in the past, I can also point you to a dozen or so times where one member or another of Al Qaeda has threatened blood and mayhem on most every holiday weekend since 9/11. Over time, their threats have grown rather empty. And from the excerpts we’ve been allowed to see, bin Laden issued no direct threat in this new tape, other than “the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated.”

His appearance and tone were so markedly different from previous messages, I cannot believe it was a trigger message. But could he issue such an appeal, and then do something like follow up with a sucker punch attack on Election Day? Certainly. To me, it has always only made sense that Al Qaeda would attack the process, not the men within the process, and that’s what an Election Day attack would be. But they’ve already missed or passed up a host of scary opportunities to really screw up this election this year. I think this video may be the only fuss they can kick up.

I think bin Laden is a man who had grand ambitions and philosophies, who finds them lying shattered in a three year trail behind him. There’s been a lot of big talk, and a near complete failure to execute. He wants to let us know he’s still out there, as that’s a small victory for him in itself, but otherwise, he’s now trying to adjust to his new environment. Alter his approach to fit the circumstances in which he finds himself. Send a new message.

Again, the only fitting response is “crawl back in your hole.” Until we kill you in it.