32 Comments

1. Joe Schmoe:

If he is alive, I hope Jaques Chirac will give us permission to go get him. Has Bush begun consulting with our allies?

Oct 29, 2004 - 4:09 pm 2. Sierra Sanity:

I saw Cat the other day, he ordered Soy, not skim, milk.

I can’t wait for 60 Minutes this Sunday. I’m sure the news will be how insensitive it is for W’s administration to refer to Islam as Cat. . . .

Oct 29, 2004 - 4:19 pm 3. John Swaine:

Well this might be something of a consolation. Taking footage from the new video I’ve uncovered startling evidence as to Osama’s true whereabouts:

http://www.whatcomestopass.com/images/oblsc.jpg

Compare and contrast – Bin Laden… Muppet… Bin Laden.. Muppet

Oct 29, 2004 - 4:28 pm 4. Terrye:

If they jerk the license of every NY cabbie that pisses somebody off a lot of people will be walking in that city.

I really thought OBL was dead. I am still wondering…three years is a long time. But I have to admit he sounded like he has been around lately and listening to the looney left. It is nice to know they are good for something even if it is comic relief for the likes of Osama Bin Laden.

How long did it take to catch Eric Rudolph and Unabomber? years..

Gale said we should just obliterate a large protion of the region and not waste any more time looking for the murdering sob. And people think Bush is harsh. Where are those nice British NGO people with the body counts when you need them? I am sure they could impress upon rednecks like my Gale the need to consider what we did to so inflame the likes of Osama.

Oct 29, 2004 - 4:38 pm 5. John©:

A new tape from Al Jazeera–what to believe? Al Jazeera, the radical network of jihad, John Dillinger, Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. I must admit to becoming a fan–mouth agape–of that demented outlet this past summer in Kabul, much to the chagrin and displeasure of Afghan friends who wished to commandeer the satellite remote in search of Italian porn, Bollywood or Arsenal football. This network’s production values are truly hypnotic, easily as good as anything by Leni Riefenstahl—fascinating fascism indeed. Al Jazeera’s topsy turvy moral sensibility is astonishing and appalling–serenely presenting daily images of the most ghastly evil as exemplified virtue. Anyone who’s viewed the network’s biography of American criminal John Dillinger–introduced with a title sequence featuring lush, romantic music and a swim of dissolving images of mass murderers Stalin, Mao and Hitler–knows first hand the consummate technical skills and rhetorical cunning of these militant Islamic propagandists.

Whither comes their tape of Bin Laden? And who is the author? The performer? The wizards in their editing suites? After all, the palaver’s so perfect, the timing of release so perfidious, one must by rights believe that this new, healthier ‘Jazeera Osama’ has been on comfortably on dry ice–with room service and premium blood transfusions–at a Dubai estate for the last three years, not chased through the hostile hot sands of Waziristan, trailed by a half mile caravan of dialysis tubing. Doesn’t this have a foul odor about it? I’m not just talking about a fetid corpse suddenly spring back to health; on that issue, I still remain convinced–along with most all Afghans, Roger L. Simon and Mark Steyn–that the real Osama is playing tonsil hockey with Hitler in Hades these past three years. The real stench, however, comes from the consummate, too convenient sense of timing that–surprise!–completely favors and endorses the Democrats. A tape emerges, late on Friday, the end of a weekly news cycle, just before the networks and daily news writers close down shop for the week. Isn’t this always the ideal moment to dump contaminated information on the public, knowing full well it will just sit there uncontested until election eve?

Cui bono? Well, the ’script’ sounds remarkably western, as if it was authored by Michael Moore, with a final polish by John LaCarre. The Democrats and its agents in the MSM have promised a fatal, last minute bombshell to derail Bush (like the decades old ‘revelation’ of DUI deployed on election eve in 2000) but the transparently inept CBS/NYT tale of missing Iraqi armaments didn’t even survive a day of cursory scrutiny.

So another calamitous revelation is necessary…Osama has been resurrected! No matter that the corpse is seen only in an extreme long shot, single take (from what I’ve seen thus far) with OBL mumbling something through a full beard and mustache. No dated newspaper in the foreground, of course. Why not the Daily Mullah with a Red Sox series win headline? And who knows for sure what he’s saying? The distance of his face from the lens and the density of his whiskers allows the least talented jihad ventriloquist with a copy of Final Cut Pro to cut and paste any soundtrack that might effect the defeat of Bush. But the script doesn’t sound at all like the deranged OBL. This kinder, gentler Bin Laden sounds definitely more sane than the unhinged Dean. In fact, one of his key point’s: “we are a free people … and we want to regain the freedom of our nation,” appears cribbed from rhetoric of the anti-communist revolutionaries of 1980s Eastern Europe. In any event, it’s certainly less shrill or extreme than what we’ve come to expect from the increasingly psycho Gore. (One wonders, exactly what’s ‘our’ nation is Bin Laden describing? An telling anachronism? A faux pas by a western author of the speech? Certainly not Afghanistan…he was an arrogant and despised Arab meddler in that nation.)

Then what is this tape all about? One oddly authored OBL locution stands out: Bush tarried in Florida, reading to kids when he could have saved NYC. This sounds suspiciously like the meme hissed through McAuliffe’s fangs for the last few months on television: Bush read, New York bled. Am I to believe that Osama’s kicking back and taking notes from Crossfire? Does anyone really believe he’s bending the inflexible jihad to accommodate Kerry’s campaign? Or is something far more treacherous at work here?

Might this all backfire on Kerry? Teresa thought she co-opted this issue when she predicted a Bush election eve announcement of the long silent Osama’s death would prove a fatal cynical attempt to manipulate the electorate. But we have the opposite here–’proof’ of Osama alive. Does this mean if OBL turns up toast tomorrow that Bush succeeded or that Teresa’s right?

John©

Oct 29, 2004 - 4:59 pm 6. Fausta:

I’ve dedicated some of my worse limmericks to the defunct Osama.

As far as the video, any good f-x makeup artist could make a tall skinny guy with a long nose look like Osama (Halloween, anyone?). Until someone out there with credible credentials on biometrics does some some serious research on this video — as was done with the Afghan lady’s photos — my limmericks will continue saying

“There once was a guy named Osama”

Oct 29, 2004 - 5:23 pm 7. Peter G.:

Ho hum, another slow news day. Have there been any shark attacks lately? Anyone know what Gary Condit’s been up to? I just want to hear about something of interest. You know, to keep my mind occupied.

Oct 29, 2004 - 5:26 pm 8. Katherine:

All right, John. I definitively need to adjust my meds.

These sudden bursts of adrenaline are going to send me to a hospital with a stroke.

Oct 29, 2004 - 5:37 pm 9. DennisThePeasant:

Copyright John-

Personally I couldn’t think of anything more devastating to the Kerry campaign that the nearly simultaneous release of the ‘bin Laden’ and ‘ABC Adam’ tapes.

First, these tapes put the focus of the election squarely back into the sphere of the War On Terror (as opposed to Iraq), which is exactly the most glaring of Kerry’s multitude of weaknesses. Here we have bin Laden and an American al-Qaeda pledging death and destruction to all Americans. How does Kerry’s ‘global test’ and ‘let’s get the French to help’ schtick play against that backdrop? Is running to Kofi for permission going to satisfy the Security Moms?

Second, both constitute a transparent attempt to intimidate American voters into voting for Anyone But Bush. Do you really think that will play any better than The Guardian’s ridiculous attempt to get the voters of Clarke County in Ohio to vote Kerry? Bush will pickt up votes based on nothing more than people refusing to give Osama and Adam the satisfaction…Bush will get more than a few Clarke County votes for no other reason than some bad tempered Ohioans wish to tell The Guardian to fuck off in a very big way.

Finally, I do not see sinister American forces at play here. Both of these tapes are the product of people who do not fully understand American politics or the American character. Terry McAuliffe is dumber than a box of dead crabs, but even he understands that the last thing John Kerry needs right now is the nation being reminded, quite graphically, that there are people out there working quite hard to find ways of killing us. This does not play to the strengths of either John Kerry or the Democratic Party in general.

Andrew Sullivan’s argument that a Kerry election would ‘force’ the Democrats to take the WOT seriously sounds doubly moronic now. Watching those two tapes, what reasonable, rational person would feel now is the time to force the responsibility of protecting the USA on anyone?

Oct 29, 2004 - 5:54 pm 10. nopundit:

Here’s a suggestion. Let the Las Vegas face-recognition crowd do an analysis. See if they can match the face to OBL. Do I remember “Griffin Security” from the Travel Channel?

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:07 pm 11. Terrye:

Hell’s bells I was looking for the Kerry pin on that lovely tunic.

I thought he sounded like Susan Estrich. There was the pet goat thing and the references to greedy daddy and governor brother etc. I kept waiting for him to bring up the whole stolen election sctick.

The Democrats did not get AlQaida when they were just a bunch of guys hanging out in Afghanistan and instead kicked this down the road to Bush to deal with and now they are bitching and moaning about how he dealt with it.

No, I don’t think this works for Kerry. I could be wrong, but I just don’t think so.

From what I hear Dan Rather disagrees. Now I don’t think the Dems had anything to do with this, but I am not sure about CBS. Would not be the first time.

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:09 pm 12. heather:

I agree with both John Afghanistan AND Dennis the Peasant: the tape was dreamed up by some hotshot in Egypt, who has been following the US election speeches.

It’s like the Anthrax thing: the bad guy is told to ‘attack the American Media’, and sure enough, the first and biggest attack is on the business down in Florida with the name, “American Media”.

So, this character does a Bin Laden show, emphasizes Kerry’s points, and OF COURSE, the terrified Yankees will vote for Kerry.

Also, this must be a message to the home team too: Bin Laden is ALIVE and TELLING THE YANKS HOW TO VOTE!!!

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:10 pm 13. PeterArgus:

Copyright John with apologies to DTP:

I doubt there is collusion but damn this eerie:

Democratic talking point 1: Bush lies.

“Bush is still practicing distortion and misleading on you, and obscuring the main reasons and therefore the reasons are still existing to repeat what happened before.”

Democratic talking point 2: Bush family/Saudi connection.

“Both parties are arrogant and stubborn and the greediness and taking money without right and that similarity appeared during the visits of Bush to the region while people from our side were impressed by the US and hoped that these visits would influence our countries. Here he is being influenced by these regimes, Royal and military.”

Democratic talking point 3: Patriot law takes away our freedoms.

“So he transferred the oppression of freedom and tyranny to his son and they call it the Patriot Law to fight terrorism.”

Democratic talking point 4: Bush stole the 2000 election.

“He was bright in putting his sons as governors in states and he didn’t forget to transfer his experience from the rulers of our region to Florida to falsify elections to benefit from it in critical times.”

Democratic talking point 5: 9/11 and My pet goat story

“Before Bush and his administration would pay attention and we never thought that the high commander of the US armies would leave 50 thousand of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because it seemed to distract his attention from listening to the girl telling him about her goat butting was more important than paying attention to airplanes butting the towers which gave us three times the time to execute the operation thank god.”

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:18 pm 14. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

The American people have to see this video or hear about it for it to have an effect on the election. It will be interesting to see how the MSM spins it – how much they show, or in the newspapers, how they describe it.

Meanwhile, my question is: what sort of evil surprise does CBS plan to use on 60 minutes on Sunday.

The explosives story, btw, does not seem to have legs. It is complicated, and it isn’t clear why anyone gives a damn about it anyway. The theft of a bunch of plastique in a part of the world that is full of it isn’t that big a deal. And that assumes that it really did disappear.

Had it disappeared in the US, it would be another matter.

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:22 pm 15. Hovig:

John(c):

Great analysis. I was telling a friend about the bin Laden tape just a moment ago, and when I got to the part about the “pet goat,” I felt like a complete fool. My friend gave me a funny look. Bin Laden citing Michael Moore? I don’t think so. It hardly passes the laugh test.

I’ll wait until we hear the Arabic-language voice track first. But another thing my friend said was, it just doesn’t sound like the same Quranic fire-and-brimstone bin Laden’s spouted in the past. I guess there really is only one bin Laden, and if our guess is right, this ain’t it.

(The third thing my friend said was that it smells like Iran is behind this, but there I have to disagree. Iran may be many things, but stupid is most certainly not one of them.)

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:25 pm 16. Hovig:

P.S. I should clarify that by saying “Iran’s not stupid,” above, I meant in this case crude and unsophisticated. I don’t think anyone in Iran would think releasing a grainy videotape of a puppet-like Bearded Robed One wagging his finger at the TV (”I did not have terroristic relations with that building”), issuing an executive summary of Fahrenheit 9/11 was going to accomplish much but derision or scorn.

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:31 pm 17. Paul:

The surefire sign that this tape helps Bush, regardless of it’s legitimacy, is that every Dem talking head on TV is saying that it will have no effect on the electorate and benefits neither candidate.

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:43 pm 18. Rick Ballard:

As long as we’re speculating – There is a distinct (in my mind anyway) possibility that the American doofus from yesterday was the scriptwriter for OBL’s facsimile. He probably watched ‘Leni’ Moore’s magnificent work and did a halfassed take off on a halfassed original. If Ameridoof did script it based on Moore’s crockumentary it would be nicely ironic.

BTW – did anyone else think that Ameridoof’s accented English had an affectation very similiar to Jihad Johnnie’s? Maybe they were in the same Goth club together in high school.

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:44 pm 19. docweasel:

You can see the entire video with subtitles here;

Osama/Kerry Video

Oct 29, 2004 - 6:56 pm 20. Fresh Air:

John Moore–

The official rumor is SeeB.S. will be running the “Bush sent soldiers to Iraq without body armor” story.

I know, I know. October Surprises aren’t what they used to be.

Oct 29, 2004 - 7:02 pm 21. RogerA:

OK–you folks are BAD–the OBL “tape” should be an issue of gravitas–you clearly did NOT get the memo. I think DTP said it best–whoever made this tape does not understand the American psyche. No one with the remotest understanding of Americans would have floated garbage like this and expected it to have an impact (except of course for talk show people). That’s it!!! damn–it is a creation of the cable news networks to keep ratings up.

Oct 29, 2004 - 7:18 pm 22. Terrye:

One thing is for sure, no Democrat is going to do the pet goat/stolen election/ thing again without having some Bushie say “You sound just like Osama”.

Very weird.

The Dems will say he is laughing at us because Bush took men from Afghanistan to go to Iraq and failed to get OBL in the process.

Next there will be a tape of OBL saying that if the US had not outsourced the job of getting him he would be awaiting trial at the Hague as we speak.

Oct 29, 2004 - 7:18 pm 23. Rick Ballard:

RogerA,

Last Friday night, if I had speculated that the last week of the election would feature an al Qaqaa Times/SeeBS mockudrama concerning the “possible disappearance” of .01% of Saddam’s conventional weaponry followed by ABC’s playing of a tape of Ass am the American terrorist’s threats against his birth country immediately followed by a good OBL imitator reading a script by Ass am based upon some of the more stupid parts of ‘Leni’ Moore’s crockumentary, I believe that people here would have looked with skepticism upon any further posts that I made.

I don’t think our host could peddle the previous to a studio. I don’t think that he would consider trying to peddle it.

I hope we get to a reality based reality sometime soon.

Oct 29, 2004 - 7:43 pm 24. Hovig:

October Surprise?

The real October Surprise will be an attack on Fallujah.

We’ve been reading about “preparations” for weeks. Something tells me we’re just about done with the “preparations” now.

Let’s see what effect a Sixty Minutes story will have while video of helicopter gunships blazes on all the other channels.

Oct 29, 2004 - 7:59 pm 25. Catherine:

Well, I have to say that the whole Bin Laden thing strikes me as bizarre.

I’m too tired to wade through the transcript, but from what I’ve read so far he is channeling Michael Moore.

Goats?

Voting fraud in Florida?

Hello?

This sounds nothing like Bin Laden, nothing like Salafi Islam, nothing like anything I’ve come to know about radical Islam in the past three years, and I don’t think I’m hallucinating.

I mentioned that I met last night an expert on sharia law. It turns out he is also an expert on radical Islam. He studies it “undercover,” and I mean seriously undercover. Horrifying.

I mentioned also that he violently opposed & opposes the War in Iraq.

I bring him up again because of UBL’s harping on freedom.

Undercover-guy spent quite awhile explaining to me that freedom is not an important value for Muslims. Freedom is an actively bad value, as a matter of fact, because freedom means the freedom not to be Muslim. “Freedom means your daughter is free to have sex with lots of men,” he said.

My husband asked whether he meant that within Muslim culture freedom is the same thing as license, and he said yes.

Freedom also, originally, simply meant “not enslaved.” Slavery in Islamic culture doesn’t have the same meaning it does in Western culture, where philosophers argued that to be enslaved meant to have one’s self crushed. I’ve semi-forgotten this part now, but, roughly, we have a philosophical tradition of arguing that a slave has been stripped of humanity, personhood, selfhood, etc.

That is not the case within Islamic culture, where slavery wasn’t considered a horrific thing, and where anyone who got conquered in battle then became a slave. It was a normal status, I gather. The guy said that back when slavery was a norm it was considered better not to be a slave, but not vastly better. Saying someone was free or enslaved was descriptive, not so different from saying someone was tall or short.

The ultimate value within Muslim culture, he said, is justice, not freedom. I believe that, partly because we have a similar dichotomy in the West, with a tension between freedom and equality. Republicans favor freedom over equality; Democrats favor equality over freedom.

Justice means leading an Islamic life in accordance with Islamic law.

I bring all this up because I believe him: you never, ever, ever read or hear Islamists yammering on about freedom.

We are the folks who yammer on about freedom.

They are the folks who yammer on about surrendering to the will of Allah.

Let’s try and keep the players straight.

Nothing about this tape adds up, unless Bin Laden has actually lost his mind due to Unremitting Stress, which was the first thing that occurred to me when I skimmed the transcript.

OTOH, the second thing that occured to me also has to do with last night.

The undercover-guy, whose first language is Arabic & who grew up in the ME but is an American citizen, sounded exactly like every other liberal Bush-hating professor at the table, which was everyone at the table except for me and the two French guests.

So they were all going on and on about the lying Democrats and the horrors of Wolfowitz and the low IQ of the president (I must say that my husband ditched the low-IQ business awhile back) with me interjecting the occasional, “Oh, come on!”

Everyone was in full agreement that “imposing” freedom on the ME is the worst possible thing a country could undertake to do; imposing freedom & democracy is just wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong the whole concept is practically a crime against humanity.

So in the middle of all this, with everyone nodding and agreeing and furthermoring, suddenly undercover-guy says, “Americans don’t have the will. We don’t have what it takes to bring democracy to Iraq. We need to lose 100,000 soldiers, and kill 1,000,000 Iraqis. That’s what it would take. Then we could do it; then I’d support the war.”

For the liberal professors, that was a conversation-stopper.

Not me. I’d just spent three years fighting with my husband over the strong horse/weak horse business; this wasn’t the first time it had crossed my mind you might need to dispatch a million Iraqis to settle things down over there.

I said, “If we lost 100,000 soldiers and killed 1,000,000 Iraqis and installed democracy, then democracy would be a good thing?”

“Of course!” he said impatiently, as if the rest of us just didn’t get it.

Then he told a story about Syria suppressing an uprising by slaughtering every single human being inside a city of 30,000 people. “That was the end of it,” he said. “No more problem. That’s what you have to do.”

So today my husband and I were trying to figure out if the guy had radically contradicted himself, or if there’s some angle of vision from which freedom-is-bad and democracy-in-Iraq-would-be-good-if-you-killed-1,000,000-people-first are consistent positions.

Maybe there is, but it did strike me that we’d witnessed a simple case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The guy had been humming along in his liberal-college-professor mode and we hit some invisible trip wire and his born-and-raised-in-Lebanon doppelganger just popped out. (Which is good, because now I don’t have to worry he’s gonna get beheaded in his chosen line of work.)

Maybe it’s the same thing with Bin Laden. UBL was educated in the West; at a minimum he’s familiar with our tropes. Maybe he has a Western Michael Moore self coexisting with his Muslim UBL self.

I have trouble imagining how this plays out.

If UBL’s whole shtick is: I’m a left liberal Democrat, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore, how scary is that?

Not very.

Oct 29, 2004 - 8:00 pm 26. Catherine:

Rick B

I hope we get to a reality based reality sometime soon.

LOL!

Another keeper.

Another factoid.

The speaker last night (have to look up his name) said that French authorities believe that 10% of France’s Muslim population (5 million altogether? I think?) are potentially recruitable to radical Islam. Some are going to Iraq.

Oct 29, 2004 - 8:04 pm 27. Rick Ballard:

Hovig,

I believe that W will insist that the attack not begin until after the polls close Tuesday. It would a be a nice gesture of respect to our Marines who deserve a battle free of political taint. Maybe it will give time for some of those French Arabs that Catherine mentions to get inside Fallujah. I hope that if they do they are carrying good ID so that their families can be notified.

Catherine,

Your acquaintance was referring to Hama where Daddy Assad made an example of the Muslim Brotherhood. King Hussein of Jordan also had a great number of Palestinians killed in September of 1970 while driving the PLO from Jordan.

It’s one of those quaint Arab customs that we will see enacted again in Iraq once the elections are held. Whatever remains of Fallujah after the Marines are done is going to be smashed even flatter by the Iraqis later. You can sort of count on a massacre of the al Tikriti tribe too. Again, it’s just one of those customs that we must all embrace if we are to truly celebrate cultural diversity.

Oct 29, 2004 - 8:50 pm 28. Ed Poinsett:

JFK: “I’ll hunt down and kill OBL”

OBL: “Kerry for President”

That evil Karl Rove has managed to get two AQ videotapes released within a week of the election saying “We want Kerry, he’ll be more sensitive in the fight against terror”

All the world’s leading terrorists now support Kerry, what a testimonial!

Oct 29, 2004 - 11:05 pm 29. Robert Schwartz:

John©:

What really kills me is that the rhetoric is all wrong. Every thing else I have ever heard from OBL, has been in a very sterotyped rhetorical pattern.

I hope that somebody can riddle who put this scam together and why. I am thinking some Euroleftists, but I made that up.

Bob.

Oct 29, 2004 - 11:10 pm 30. Gary Rosen:

Of course it’s Bin Laden. How many Muslims with beards are there, after all?

Oct 29, 2004 - 11:36 pm 31. ayahuasca:

John©: about the “nation” thing: OBL said “ummatinaa”, “our umma”, the word for nation which means the greater Islamic caliphate. Things get lost in translation. I speak Arabic and am convinced it’s authentic.

Oct 30, 2004 - 8:25 am 32. ayahuasca:

About the low quality: remember that it’s only a low quality web video, the Al Jazeera satellite broadcast was tv-quality. No one who’s seen it on Al Jazeera has mentioned that it’s low quality, have they? Let’s not confuse the artifacts of the low compression quality they’re using for web video content with the actual video they aired.

Oct 30, 2004 - 8:31 am

Write a Comment

Name:	(required, displayed)
Email:	(required, not publicized)
URL:	(optional, displayed)
Comments: