Terror tape lists Canada as target
Early analysis suggests voice threatening retribution against U.S. allies is bin Laden's
Stewart Bell
National Post
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
An audiotaped statement said to have been recorded by Osama bin Laden and aired yesterday on the Arabic-language channel Al-Jazeera explicitly threatens Canada for the first time over its role in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
According to reports last night, U.S. officials say the voice giving a rambling speech that also praises recent terrorist attacks in Bali, Yemen and Moscow is indeed that of bin Laden. The tape admonishes six Western countries including Canada for joining the campaign to dismantle bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
"Why did your governments ally themselves with America to attack us in Afghanistan, and I cite in particular Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia," threatens the statement attributed to the Saudi terror mastermind.
"As you assassinate, so will you be [assassinated] ... Do your governments not know that the clique in the White House is made up of the greatest murderers of the century?
He said Westerners who don't like seeing their people dead should remember the dead children of Iraq.
U.S. officials say a preliminary analysis by intelligence experts has concluded that the voice is bin Laden's, U.S. television networks reported. "It's him," two senior officials from different agencies told NBC News as the Central Intelligence Agency continued to analyze the recording.
"It is probably him, but we don't know [for certain]," a U.S. official told Reuters.
Bin Laden has not been since since last year. If it is his voice, that would show that the world's most hunted man, who has a US$25-million price on his head, was alive as of a few weeks ago -- because the tape refers to events such as last month's Chechen hostage siege in Moscow and the Bali bombings in which two Canadians were among the more than 190 people killed.
The mere denunciation of Canada on Al-Jazeera, which is watched by millions in the Muslim world, will be enough to convince some Islamic extremists that Canadians are acceptable targets, a former intelligence agent said.
"We have entered their frame of consciousness and therefore will become more and more suitable targets," said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer. "We have become proper targets."
There has been an ongoing debate in Ottawa about whether Canada could be targeted for attacks by Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaeda. When bin Laden declared a Muslim holy war in 1998, he called for attacks against Americans, Jews and their allies.
Some have argued that Canada is at risk by virtue of being an ally of both the United States and Israel. The government, however, has promoted the notion that Canadians are not targets and are in danger only if they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But last week, Ward Elcock, the CSIS director, warned in a speech in Vancouver that "our close friendship and support of the United States, including out participation in Afghanistan, could see Canada or Canadians targeted for attack."
Canadians are not "insulated from terrorism" and must remain vigilant, Mr. Elcock said. He also warned that al-Qaeda has not been destroyed by the war on terrorism and remains a dangerous international force that is "willing and able to strike."
In Ottawa, a Foreign Affairs spokesman said the taped message does not change anything.
"From the beginning -- from Sept. 11, 2001, and even before that -- it's been seen as a global threat and only a global response can deal with it," Rodney Moore said. "No country has felt isolated from this."
Canada has not previously been singled out in any of the numerous statements, audiotapes or videos purported to have been made by bin Laden and his band of al-Qaeda leaders.
The country's inclusion in the latest threat suggests Islamic militants have woken up to Canada's role in the military campaign in Afghanistan and the ongoing Canadian police and intelligence investigations aimed at disrupting al-Qaeda and rooting out its cells in the West.
"I'm not surprised," Mr. Juneau-Katsuya, now a private-sector security consultant at the Northgate Group, said of the broadcast.
The recent wave of terrorist attacks, including the Oct. 6 bombing of a French tanker in Yemen, the shooting of U.S. troops in Kuwait and the Oct. 12 bombing of an Indonesian nightclub crowded with foreign tourists, shows that all Westerners are now targets, he said.
"That is, in my point of view, evidence of a new chapter in this fight against terrorism that we have embarked on, which is that basically it's literally globalized itself because the targets are not just Americans or allies like Israel, but Canada can be one of them."
On the tape played on Al-Jazeera, the speaker called the recent terror attacks "only a reaction in response to what [President George W.] Bush, the pharaoh of the age, is doing by killing our sons in Iraq and what America's ally Israel is doing, bombarding houses with women and old people and children inside with American planes."
The use of the word pharaoh is a heavily freighted term drawn from Koranic texts, where the lesson of the fall of the pharaoh is deemed an example of the fate of arrogant leaders who think their own power equals God's.
In cadence and tone, the tape sounded like previous messages from bin Laden, the extremist son of a Saudi construction dynasty. The staff at Al-Jazeera said the tape arrived yesterday evening and that journalists at the station were convinced it was bin Laden. "It is absolutely positive that it is Osama bin Laden's voice because we have many people in the office who have met him and they said this is his voice," said Dana Sayyagh, an Al-Jazeera journalist.
The White House said the CIA was analyzing the tape. "We've seen the reports, we're looking into it, but at this point we're not making any judgments as to whose voice is on the tape," said Sean McCormack, the White House national security spokesman.
Last December, in intercepted radio transmissions from the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, U.S. officials believe they heard him giving orders to al-Qaeda fighters. His fate has been debated since then.
If bin Laden is alive, he is thought to be hiding in Afghanistan or the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.
Al-Jazeera, a satellite channel based in Qatar, did not say how it obtained the tape.
In September, Al-Jazeera aired voice recordings of bin Laden and top al-Qaeda operatives. The CIA authenticated bin Laden's voice then, but officials said the recordings probably were not recent.
Those statements came out around the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
U.S. officials have noticed evidence over the last few weeks that al-Qaeda appears to be regrouping in order to launch another round of attacks against Western targets.
The sudden re-emergence of bin Laden at a time when the United States is threatening a war on Iraq also complicates U.S. policy in the region.
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