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----- Original Message -----
Sent: 1/1/02 2:08:45 AM
Subject: German media: bin Laden tape translation is innaccurate and manipulative
[NOTE: This is a forwarded article. Any article I write, as opposed to those I merely forward, will clearly say "by Robert Lederman" in the body of the message immediately after the title. Previously a number of forwarded articles on 9/11 have been mistakenly attributed to me that were from other authors or from mainstream newspapers. My articles on Bush, Giuliani, street artists, West Nile Virus, eugenics and the CIA/Nazi connection are to found at http://baltech.org/lederman/ and at http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html ]
To the article below I'd add a few thoughts. The bin Laden in the Bush administration's videotaped "confession" looks quite different than the bin Laden in the latest tape released by Al Gezera TV and in all earlier tapes as shown on U.S. television. Even if we suppose - for the sake of argument - that bin Laden is 100% guilty of the 9/11 attack, why does the Bush administration have to create, falsify or mistranslate "evidence" to prove it? Anyone who has ever owned a video camera knows that indoors the microphone picks up sound even better than you can hear it with your naked ears, so why is the soundtrack, recorded in a small room, so obscured? Why does the camera operator focus his attention mostly on the crippled man and not on their great leader, bin Laden, making it difficult to ever read "bin Laden's" lips when he's talking? If you were taping a conversation between say Bush and some minor underling, who would you have the camera on?
Note also that the Sunday 12/30/2001 NY Times had a very long article, "MISSED SIGNALS, Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action" showing that the Bush administration was preparing an attack on Afghanistan and bin Laden which was submitted to President Bush on 9/10, one day before the now infamous 9/11 attack and that CIA officials had repeatedly cancelled and stalled planned attacks on bin Laden throughout the Clinton administration and first 8 months of the Bush administration. You'll recall that during the Reagan-Bush administration the CIA sent billions to Afghanistan to arm bin Laden and his army of militants and that many authors consider bin Laden to still be a CIA operative today. Bin Laden is now thought to have "escaped" to Pakistan, an Islamic fundamentalist government and close US ally in the so-called "war against terrorism" that is about to launch a nuclear war. Our ally, Pakistan, provided much of the Taliban's resources and financed their religious schools where the most violent anti-Americanism was taught to prospective terrorists. Despite just about the entire U.S. military and all of our intelligence resources worldwide being intensely focused on apprehending him, bin Laden and most al queda leaders have miraculously escaped again.
Here's a short excerpt from the Times article:
"Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss terrorism in late spring when intercepts from Afghanistan warned that Al Qaeda was planning to attack an American target in late June or perhaps over the July 4 holiday. They did not meet even after intelligence analysts overheard conversations from a Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's agents might be plotting to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in late July....President Bush's national security advisers approved the plan [to attack Afghanistan and bin Laden] on Sept. 4, a senior administration official said, and it was to be presented to the president on Sept. 10. However, the leader of the Northern Alliance was assassinated by al Qaeda agents on Sept. 9. Mr. Bush was traveling on Sept. 10 and did not receive it. The next day his senior national security aides gathered shortly before 9 a.m. for a staff meeting. At roughly the same moment, a hijacked Boeing 767 was plowing into the north tower of the World Trade Center."
After which, a jovial President said, "Lucky me, I hit the trifecta". And the rest is history.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/opinion/07KRUG.html
December 7, 2001 New York Times Hitting the Trifecta
"Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush interrupted his inveighing against evildoers to crack a joke. Mr. Bush had repeatedly promised to run an overall budget surplus at least as large as the Social Security surplus, except in the event of recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he remarked to Mitch Daniels, his budget director. "I hit the trifecta."
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2001 11:48 PM
Subject: George Bush has called a "confession of guilt
George Bush has called a "confession of guilt".
Anyone recall the parable of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf? Since we know
our government lies to us all the time, when, then, can we believe anything
the government tells us?
Consider the following article on the US Government translation of the Bin
Laden tape.....
Mistranslated Osama bin Laden Video - the German Press Investigates
http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=16389&group=webcastA German TV show found that the White House's translation of the
"confession" video was not only inaccurate, but even "manipulative".
On 20 December 2001, German TV channel "Das Erste" broadcast its analysis
of the White House's translation of the OBL video that George Bush has
called a "confession of guilt". On the show "Monitor", two independent
translators and an expert on oriental studies found the White House's
translation not only to be inaccurate, but "manipulative".
Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini, one of the translators, states, "I have
carefully examined the Pentagon's translation. This translation is very
problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the
guilt of Bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic."
Whereas the White House would have us believe that OBL admits that "We
calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy.", translator
Dr. Murad Alami finds that: "'In advance' is not said. The translation is
wrong. At least when we look at the original Arabic, and there are no
misunderstandings to allow us to read it into the original."
At another point, the White House translation reads: "We had notification
since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day." Dr.
Murad Alami: "'Previous' is never said. The subsequent statement that this
event would take place on that day cannot be heard in the original Arabic
version."
The White House's version also included the sentence "we asked each of them
to go to America", but Alami says the original formulation is in the
passive along the lines of "they were required to go". He also say that the
sentence afterwards - "they didn't know anything about the operation" -
cannot be understood.
Prof. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the
Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg sums it up: "The
American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them
apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that
cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it."
Meanwhile the US press has not picked up on this story at all, reporting
instead that a new translation has revealed that OBL even mentions the
names of some of those involved. But the item is all over the German press,
from Germany's Channel One ("Das Erste" - the ones who broke the story,
equivalent to NBC or the BBC) to ZDF (Channel Two) to Der Spiegel (the
equivalent of TIME or the Economist - visit
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,174025,00.htmlif you can read German). More surprisingly, as I write the following site
appears on Lycos in German:
http://www.netzeitung.de/servlets/page?section=1109&item=172422 - but
nothing under lycos.com in English.
Instead, we read in the Washington Post of Friday, December 21, 2001 (the
day after the German TV show was broadcast) that a new translation done in
the US "also indicates bin Laden had even more knowledge of the Sept. 11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than was apparent in the
original Defense Department translation.... Although the expanded version
does not change the substance of what was released, it provides added
details and color to what has been disclosed."
I'll say. Aren't there any reporters in the US who speak German (or Arabic,
for that matter)? An article in USA Today of 20 December 2001 sheds some
light on why the original translation might not be accurate: "the first
translation was rushed in 12 hours, in a room in the Pentagon". So why
didn't the new US translation find the same discrepancies as the German
translators did? Read the article in USA Today against the grain: "Michael,
who is originally Lebanese, translated the tape with Kassem Wahba, an
Egyptian. Both men had difficulties with the Saudi dialect bin Laden and
his guest use in the tape, Michael said." Why can a Saudi translator not be
found in a multicultural country like the US, especially with the close
business relations between the US and Saudi Arabia? Bush Sr. probably knows
any number of them himself.
Of course, if we ever hear about the German analysis in the US press, the
reactions will be that some will never believe that OBL is behind the
attacks no matter what you tell them. But actually, Americans are just as
stubborn in refusing to face facts. One moderator on Fox News complained to
his interviewee that the European media were focusing too much on civilian
casualties in Afghanistan. (I wondered which European languages this
moderator could speak; a few weeks later, he happened to say on his show
that he had had "three years of German". This, he claimed, would allow him
to "do the show in German.") His interviewee responded that, yes, the
Taliban were very savvy manipulators of the media. So there we have it:
Europeans get their information straight from the Taliban Ministry of
Propaganda.
Craig Morris is a translator living in Europe. He can be reached at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]. The original broadcast of the German show can be
viewed in German at:
Monitor - RealVideos
http://www.wdr.de/tv/monitor/real.phtml?id=379.
"If you will not fight for right when you can
easily win without bloodshed; if you will not
fight when your victory will be sure and not
too costly; you may come to the moment
when you will have to fight with all odds
against you and only a precarious chance
of survival. There may be even a worse
fate. You may have to fight when there is
no hope of victory; because it is better to
perish than to live as slaves."
- Winston Churchill
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