Bush can't be happy about this. Especially since bin Laden has been notably absent from White House rhetoric for the last year...
Osama's vow
Respect Muslim security or expect another 9-11
By Douglas Jehl and David Johnston
Friday, October 29, 2004 - WASHINGTON -- In a new videotape broadcast Friday, Osama bin Laden made a direct, formal address to the American people, saying the best way for Americans to avoid a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was to stop threatening Muslims' security.
The videotape of the al-Qaida leader was the first to surface in more than a year, and it was more formal and less confrontational than the few previous messages attributed to bin Laden that have emerged in the past three years.
Bin Laden did not explicitly threaten any new attacks in an excerpt of the videotape, first broadcast on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite station. But the appearance of the tape four days before Election Day injected the presence of al-Qaida and bin Laden into a presidential campaign in which the threat posed by terrorism has weighed heavily.
In his statement, bin Laden referred to both President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry by name, but he said the prospect of a future terrorist attack would depend not on the outcome of the election, but on concrete actions taken by the United States.
"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida; your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said. He added: "Any state that does not mess with our security has naturally guaranteed its own security."
At times gesturing emphatically with his hands, the al-Qaida leader wore a long gray beard, traditional white robes, a golden cloak and a turban. He gazed directly into the camera as he delivered the address, which he appeared to be reading from a text behind a lectern in front of a plain brown backdrop.
"Oh, American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results," he said. He added: "Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you, and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened."
The appeal to Americans to reconsider U.S. policy toward Muslims echoed the theme of bin Laden's last public message, an audiotape in April that offered a truce to European nations if they pulled troops out of Islamic countries.
In contrast to his haggard appearance in his previous videotaped message, broadcast Sept. 10, 2003, bin Laden appeared vigorous and healthy, more than three years after the United States launched the intense manhunt that he has so far evaded.
U.S. intelligence officials, who indicated that they had obtained access to the entire videotape, said it appeared to have been made recently, possibly as recently as Sunday, the date that appeared in Arabic in script superimposed on part of the tape. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials said an analysis by the CIA had indicated with "a high degree of confidence" that the tape was authentic. They otherwise offered no immediate assessment of the videotape.
A senior State Department official said the United States had sought unsuccessfully to persuade Al-Jazeera not to broadcast the videotape, consistent with past efforts to deny a podium to terrorist threats. The channel rebuffed that appeal, the official said, but a spokesman for Al-Jazeera said it had broadcast just one minute of a five-minute videotape.
U.S. officials said they would try to determine whether the address contained any hidden messages or clues about a possible future attack against the United States, but they said it was too early to know that yet.
A spokesman for Al-Jazeera would not comment on what the portions of the videotape not broadcast by the network had contained. U.S. intelligence officials said they saw nothing even in the unaired contents as conveying an explicit threat.
It was unclear exactly when and where the videotape was made, but it referred to recent events such as the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. officials have long believed that bin Laden has been hiding out in a remote region along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The broadcast came after five months of warnings by law enforcement and domestic security officials that al-Qaida hoped to launch a catastrophic strike in the United States timed to disrupt the presidential election season. In recent days counterterrorism officials have said they have seen no concrete evidence of an election-related plot, and it was unclear how the new tape would affect those assessments. The White House said there would be no increase, for now, in the current threat warning.
Bin Laden said Bush reacted slowly to the Sept. 11 attacks as they were occurring, giving the hijackers more time than they had expected to carry out the plot. At the time of the attacks, the president was visiting a group of second-graders at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., holding a book called "The Pet Goat."
"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," bin Laden said, referring to estimates of the number of people who might have been at the World Trade Center.
Referring to the president, bin Laden said, "It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."
The timing of Bush's actions on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, has been reported on numerous occasions. He was notified about 8:55 a.m. by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, that a plane had struck one of the two towers of the World Trade Center. He was told about 9:05 a.m. by Andrew Card, his chief of staff, that a second plane had hit the south tower. Bush left the classroom several minutes afterward.
The last time bin Laden appeared in a videotape was Sept. 10, 2003, when he and Ayman al-Zawahri, his chief lieutenant, appeared in a video walking down a rocky mountain path. In an eight-minute soundtrack that accompanied the video, bin Laden praised the hijackers who had caused "great damage to the enemy," identifying five of them by name.
In that videotape, bin Laden appeared gaunt and somewhat halting as he picked his way along a trail with a walking stick.
In the latest broadcast, bin Laden spoke more directly about the September 2001 attacks than he has in previous messages, saying he had told Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the plot, that the attacks should be carried out "within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration noticed." Bin Laden said the idea of attacking buildings in the United States occurred to him when he watched Israeli aircraft bombing towers in Lebanon in 1982.
"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way -- to destroy towers in America so that it can taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women," he said.
He claimed direct responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We decided to destroy towers in America," he said, apparently referring to the World Trade Center. "God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and the inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind," bin Laden said. The last time a message from bin Laden referred to the attacks was in a rambling videotaped conversation with a Saudi sheik that was broadcast Dec. 15, 2001.
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