Sounds like CIA smoke. Perhaps they got their new Mafia in Afghanistan to stage it for them?
All the CIA can do is be a couch potato and throw money at people to fix up its' house. ------------ ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 1:35 PM Subject: CIA may have set up Bin Laden video 'confession' | | | | From: Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | | Subject: CIA may have set up Bin Laden video 'confession' | | HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK | --------------------------- | | CIA may have set up Bin Laden video 'confession' | | http://www.guardian.co.uk/GWeekly/Story/0,3939,621036,00.html | | CIA may have set up Bin Laden video 'confession' | | Ed Vulliamy and Jason Burke | Thursday December 20, 2001 | Guardian Weekly | | In the cavernous front room, beneath flickering neon lights, they | gathered to watch. Outside, darkness had fallen, but though the Ramadan | fast was over the men who sat riveted to the screen of the single | television in Jalalabad's Afghan Hotel were not in the mood for the | usual celebration. | | On the screen flickered a blurred picture: a tall, grey-bearded man in a | white turban talking in Arabic to other similarly attired associates. | These fuzzy, broken images were the "smoking gun" - Osama bin Laden's | long-awaited, albeit apparently unwitting, personal confession. | | The men in the Afghan Hotel had a more pressing, local interest too. | According to the American authorities who solemnly released the tape | last week, it had been found nearby, in a ruined building once used by | Arab fighters from Bin Laden's al-Qaida organisation. It had been seized | when mojahedin fighters entered their city a few hours after al-Qaida's | Taliban protectors had left. | | That, the viewers knew, was certainly possible. By the morning after the | "liberation" of Jalalabad, fighters loyal to Commander Hazrat Ali had | seized safehouses and training complexes linked to al-Qaida. Cmdr Ali | has cooperated with the Americans and the story that he had passed the | tape on to the CIA was very plausible. | | But then doubts began to surface. Why had Bin Laden broken his tight | security to talk? Why had he not used one of his normally favoured media | outlets? Was the tape genuine? Was this indeed Bin Laden at all? | | The tape was certainly damning. It showed Bin Laden laughing and | boasting about the September 11 attacks as he talks to his interviewer, | a Saudi cleric who had travelled through war-racked Afghanistan to see | him. Bin Laden, flanked by two key aides, describes how the planes did | far more damage to the World Trade Centre than he ever imagined. "We | calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy . . . that | the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors," he says. "I | was the most optimistic of them all." | | Bin Laden also indicates that the men who carried out the plot knew that | they were on a "martyrdom operation" but did not have details of the | mission until the last minute. | | Last weekend, as the debate the tape provoked continued across the | Islamic world, several intelligence sources have suggested that the | tape, although genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation | run by the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or | Pakistani. "They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to | get close to Bin Laden and someone whom Bin Laden would feel secure | talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence at the | perfect moment," said one security source. "It's a masterstroke." | | The focus of suspicion is the Saudi dissident preacher who appears to | have taped the interview, conducted according to the timecode on the | video on November 9, in what appears to be a guesthouse in the Afghan | city of Kandahar. Though unidentified in the one-hour recording, | security sources have said that the interviewer, who appears to be | disabled from the waist down, is Ali Saeed al-Ghamdi, a former assistant | professor of theology at a seminary in Mecca. Saudis who watched the | tape said the interviewer's accent betrayed roots in the southwest of | their country, either the lower Hejaz or Asir province, where most of | the 15 Saudi hijackers were from. Bin Laden bows down to greet the | cleric, who has not stood up to greet him. Only someone who was | incapable of rising would not be on his feet in the presence of such a | famous and revered man, Islamic experts said. | | However, Western intelligence officials identified the dinner guest as | Khaled al-Harbi, a legless former fighter in Afghanistan, Bosnia and | Chechnya who was not regarded as a religious scholar. | | Unlike Mr al-Ghamdi, who had been banned from preaching by the | government in 1994, Mr Harbi has never been arrested by the Saudi | government nor included on any security watch list, the Saudi official | said. Senior Saudi government figures and religious scholars tend to | dismiss such men as insignificant. "They are not big-time and they don't | have the legitimacy and the religious scholarship that the big guys | have," said Nawaf Obeid, a Saudi security analyst. "They make a name for | themselves with how extreme they are. They aggrandise themselves by | claiming they are with Bin Laden." | | Security sources stress that, despite his Islamist credentials, Mr | al-Ghamdi would still be a potential point of contact for Pakistani, | Saudi or Egyptian intelligence. | | "He was known because he was suspected of being involved in the | gathering of international finance for al-Qaida. He is a peripheral | figure who wants to be something bigger and is frustrated. It's a | classic profile. They could have turned him," one security official for | a Gulf intelligence agency contacted in Peshawar said. Experts said that | the tape bears a marked resemblance to secretly filmed evidence used by | the FBI against major American Mafia figures in recent years. | | Whatever its provenance, the video has polarised opinion in the Arab | world. Abdul Wahab Badrakhan, the deputy editor of al-Hayat newspaper, | said: "Only those with a fanatical mindset would deny what they can now | see." | | One such man is Syed, 38, who fought alongside Bin Laden in Afghanistan | during the 1980s. "There is no way Osama would have done something like | this," he said. "He was a quiet man with great reverence for human life. | The Osama I see happily describing people dying is not the Osama I knew | and loved." | | General Hamid Gul, a hardline former head of Pakistan's ISI spy agency, | suggested that the figure in the video might be a lookalike. Others have | queried the translation of the poor-quality Arabic soundtrack and the | way that certain key elements - such as the location where the film was | made - are inaudible. | | _________________________________________________ | | KOMINFORM | P.O. 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