A leading French terrorism expert cautioned Thursday against taking the latest Osama bin Laden video at face value, saying it was largely an edited collection of old footage and sound tracks that have already been aired.
That’s what I thought.
Wednesday, the Al Jazeera Arabic television station broadcast a tape of bin Laden and his right hand man Ayman al-Zawahri, in which the al Qaeda leader urges supporters to bury Americans in "the graveyard of Iraq." But Roland Jacquard, head of the Paris-based International Observatory on Terrorism, told French radio that the tape was above all a show of defiance on the eve of the September 11 anniversary by al Qaeda number two al-Zawahri. "We have to be extremely prudent about this message," Jacquard told Europe 1 radio. "Given that Osama bin Laden has not appeared on a video cassette for many months it’s pretty incomprehensible that in the only video cassette where he appears beside Ayman al-Zawahri he doesn’t speak, he just allows the latter to speak.
Yup.
"The voice of bin Laden we hear in the background, thanking the World Trade Center plane hijackers, is exactly the same message that was broadcast in a video cassette by Al Jazeera on 26 December 2001," he said.
A oldie from the vault
Al-Zawahri’s message was also old and had been broadcast by Dubai’s Al Arabiya network on August 3, Jacquard said.
Another oldie
"Above all (this is) a message from the organization’s number two, al-Zawahri, who wants to remind the world and the United States on September 11 that he’s still around," he added.
"Hey, we’re still important!"
Jacquard said some of the bin Laden pictures may even date from before the December 2001 offensive in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, where U.S. warplanes and their Afghan allies tried to wipe out bin Laden and his associates. Nevertheless, the latest al-Zawahri soundtrack was recent, as he refers to recent events. But the pictures were old, the French expert said. Other analysts have said the film appeared to have been taken in April or May.
Of what year, 2000, 2001? I think that if this tape is the best that they can do, he’s long dead. |