Proof Bin Laden Tape Is 5-Year-Old, Re-Released Footage

Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, writes:

"Why did IntelCenter, the middleman between "Al-Qaeda" and the media, a group that has government and Pentagon ties, re-release old footage and why did the media report it as new when it had already aired twice before?" Continue reading.

Related Articles:

• Talking Points Memo | Curious Timing

  "Hot on the heels of [Tuesday]'s release of the declassified NIE on Al Qaeda, the U.S. military in Baghdad announced today that it has captured a top leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq… [T]he capture took place two weeks ago but was not announced until [Wednesday]… And the detainee just happened to confess to a greater level of coordination between AQ in Iraq and Osama bin Laden's global AQ, right in line with the official White House line."

• The Unknown Candidate: "New" Osama Video NOT New

Technorati tags: Prison Planet, Osama bin Laden, Videotape, news media, news, US Government

"New" Osama Video NOT New

I cannot help but think (pure conjecture, no proof) that the Bushies managed to get this into the medias hands in order to further fan the Al Qaeda fear flames they have been nurturing lately.

Why? To divert attention away from the real issues, of course. Namely, the fact that the war in Iraq is lost, America is less safe than before the war began, Americans want out, Americans want universal health care, Gonzales is in deep doo doo (still and again), the Tillman cover-up continues, and corruption and incompetence have become the legacy of the Bush White House. The list goes on ....

�Hot Air has the story:

“New” Osama video released; Update: Mystery solved — new video matches video shot in 2001; Update: Zawahiri directed Red Mosque jihadis? Update: It’s a re-run

Video courtesy of LauraMansfield.com

Trouble viewing this video? Click Here.

Technorati tags: Osama Bin Laden, Video, Propaganda, news

When Lunatics No Longer Hold Sway

Trust and Betrayal
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all go so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” people should have realized that he was going to use the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis of evil” consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with 9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr. Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure,” he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

Photo Credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Paul Krugman, New York Times, Politics, Iraq, Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Fear Mongering, news, commentary, op ed

The Undersecretary's Dangerous Trip

Sidney Blumenthal (Salon.com) writes:

"Karen Hughes takes her "Innocents Abroad" tour to the Middle East -- and plays into the hands of Osama bin Laden...."

Where Is Osama bin Laden? Day 1,461 and Counting

By Michael Tomasky
The American Prospect

It's the fourth anniversary of September 11 - and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Thursday 08 September 2005

This September 11 will mark the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The media will focus on the ceremonies at the former World Trade Center site, the Pentagon, and other cities and towns around the country that will honor the dead. The Bush administration, meanwhile, will do its best to remind Americans that today's George W. Bush - except for the Watergate-era Richard Nixon, the most unpopular two-term president, at this point in his tenure, since scientific polling began in the 1940s - is the same man who led the country through tragedy.

In truth, the anniversary should be the occasion for a thoroughgoing discussion of how America has combated terrorism in the last four years. And on that front, even the disaster Bush has created in Iraq takes a back seat to one overwhelming fact: By the time night falls on September 11, Osama bin Laden will have been at large for 1,461 days.

America vanquished world fascism in less time: We obtained Germany's surrender in 1,243 days, Japan's in 1,365. Even the third Punic War, in which Carthage was burned to the ground and emptied of citizens who were taken en masse into Roman slavery, lasted around 1,100 days (and troops needed a little longer to get into position back in 149 B.C.).

Yes, yes: It can be harder to find one stateless man than to defeat an army whose troop movements can be tracked. And that would be a good excuse - if the Bush administration had bothered to make capturing bin Laden a priority.

John Kerry can't be accused, alas, of having offered a coherent foreign policy in last year's campaign, but he was dead right when he said the administration had "outsourced" the job of finding the man responsible for the most deadly attacks ever on American soil. As the journalist Peter Bergen wrote in The Atlantic last October, we were closing in on al-Qaeda leadership in December 2001. But the United States decided to leave the crucial two-week battle of Tora Bora chiefiy to local Afghan fighters. It was, Bergen wrote, "a blunder that allowed many members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden himself, to slip away."

And, of course, we know why that battle was left to locals - and why, relatedly, we never had more than about 10,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2001. (How's Afghanistan going today? We now have 18,000 troops there, and 2005 has been the deadliest year for U.S. forces since the fighting began.)

The Bush administration had already decided, at the very least, to find an excuse to invade Iraq. We know from Richard Clarke's testimony and other sources that administration officials, including Bush himself, started asking the counterterrorism chief to find an Iraqi link to 9-11 from the day following the attacks. On December 11, 2001 - right around the time bin Laden began his escape, possibly the very day - Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News, "If I were Saddam Hussein, I'd be thinking very carefully about the future, and I'd be looking very closely to see what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Whatever the apologists say, the truth is simple: The administration held back troops from Afghanistan so that it could send 150,000 to Iraq. That, and nothing else, is the reason bin Laden is still at large.

But listen closely to the silence: Outside of magazines like this one and a handful of liberal Web sites, the subject is rarely discussed.

Just imagine bin Laden having been at large this long in President Al Gore's administration. In fact, it's impossible to imagine, because President Gore, under such circumstances, wouldn't have lasted this long. You probably didn't know, until you read this column, the number of days bin Laden has been at large. But I assure you that if Gore had been president, you and every American would have known, because the right would have seen to it that you knew, asking every day, "Where's Osama?" If Gore hadn't been impeached, it's doubtful he'd have survived a re-election campaign, with Americans aghast at how weak and immoral a president had to be to permit those 2,700 deaths to go unavenged this long.

To be sure, the difference is partly a Democratic failure - they're afraid of the right-wing noise machine, pure and simple. That's a failure of nerve, and it's an appalling one.

But the moral failure belongs to Bush and his subordinates and their amen chorus of slatternly propagandists and so-called intellectuals, who made great political advantage of 9-11 but spit on the grieving families by pretending that there is no imperative in seeing justice done for their losses. They may be able to control the dialogue, but they can't control the facts - and the facts condemn them all.

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Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.