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... |