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Frankly, I think what he wants to do is psych us out regardless of which candidate wins. He wants us to use this as a pretext for turning against each other. Whatever knocks Bush deserves for Osama’s ability to continue doing business, Osama should not be able to play us off one another. Nobody asked the politics of the victims of 9/11 before they killed them. The politics of those who avenge them should not matter.

This is probably not a good time to use your vote to make a point.

Amen.

Here’s the BBC story. He gets in a nasty jab at Bush (of course):

“It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the country (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone … because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important,” bin Laden said, referring to Bush’s visit to a school when the attack occurred.

Some more of the transcript:

“Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic candidate John) Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands,” bin Laden said.

“To the U.S. people, my talk is to you about the best way to avoid another disaster,” he said. “I tell you: security is an important element of human life and free people do not give up their security.”

“If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example. It is known that those who hate freedom do not have dignified souls, like those of the 19 blessed ones,” he said, referring to the 19 hijackers.

“We fought you because we are free .. and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours.”

In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period.

J. Anthony,

“The American people were not intimidated when he bombed our buildings and we should not be swayed by his words.”

I would agree that the American people were not intimidated by Bin Laden.

However the American people were scared shitless by their own government.
How many WASP grandmothers do you have to search?
How many businessmen in three thousand dollar suits do you have to pull out of line?
I don’t need to see anymore National Guardsmen with M-16s, and what’s up with the terror alert levels?

We get the point! You want us to go on with our lives? The best way to do that is to do your job and let us do ours. Leave the hysterics out of it.

Any Americans who don’t vote because of this, or change their choice because of it, should be ashamed of themselves. Bin Laden is a lying murdering pile of crap.

To their credit, the State Department asked Al Jazeera not to run the tape. Good for them.

-Cf

This video is certainly troublesome for Bush. Combined with the story, Bush mailings display images of burning World Trade Center, and given he has said, “I have no ambition whatsoever to use [the 9/11 attacks] as a political issue,” to then be forced to face a message from the man who perpetrated 911, and with a constant stream of bad news about Iraq, a country that wasn’t involved in 911, some folks might begin to seriously doubt that Bush is the man to keep us safe and fight the war on terrorism. This is obviously great campaign fodder for Kerry, though.

J. Anthony,
Here is my response to UBL and company, but like you and others posted on this thread have stated UBL should not make peole scared.

Dear UBL and Company,
Unless you are willing to surrender yourselve and the other leaders of Al Qaeda into the World Court of Justice there will be no peace in the Middle East. You, UBL had your opportunity to lead your people out of the land of oppression and proverty with the help of the American citizen. Yes, even after 9/11 Americans would of listened to your complaints if you would of turned yourself in. Now UBL, you and your people must unconditionally surrender or face total elimination which will put your people at the feet of our government.

Yes, I understand that our government has not dealt with an even hand around the world, but that fight is not yours to make. Just as Americans will not tolerate anyone from the extreme to control us, we will not allow your group to control jack. Your actions have left that question answered by the entire world. Absolutely NO Mercy will be shown on your people until you, UBL, surrender your life to a power greater than all of us.

Or should I show your people that your religion belief in God is as false as many other sagas. Verdi and Aryon may of gave us civilization, yet the power of the God of Nature rules ALL MANKIND not your false deity.

The Power of Our Government has and will always belong the “We the People” and UBL you can take that to the bank.

I really don’t see why this should be suppressed. What is there to be afraid of? Here is the MSNBC story on it with video.

Joseph, I was just thinking about how bin Laden’s intention was to affect the election. Suppressing the tape would prevent that affect.

You make a good point, however. It’s hard to say.

-Cf

Joseph,
Check Out OBL’s transcipt on Drudge’s web site: OBL Speaks

Just in case it don’t link:http://www.drudgereport.com/flash2.htm

We all know bin Laden wants to do us grievous harm and somehow he figures he can accomplish part of this goal with his tape. I can’t know what it is he wants and I might be fooled into doing it, so the best thing I can do to frustrate his purpose is not accept delivery of his pernicious message.

I expect the proper authorities to study it and I hope they can get some clues to his plans. As for me (and you) no good can come from watching him.

I can understand, Cf (and on preview, Jack), I just always see censorship as a sign of fear. It’s not that I care what other countries or ObL might think of this if they interpret such a reaction in the same way, but it doesn’t give me a very good impression of ourselves. Our case against ObL is solid, his assertions are completely bankrupt.

I did read this over at CrookedTimber.

About two hours after the Osama video hit the newswires, and the good old Iowa Electronic Markets have marked down the two DEM04 contracts from about 48% to 44%. Ouch.

Whatever may come of it, it’s done. I’m a firm believer that the strength of American democracy can easily handle something like this. I think our decision on who to vote for should be done in the face of reality. We now know ObL isn’t as debilitated as we might have thought, and the video may be a sign of imminent activity.

Editorial note

J. Anthony Matel = Jack. I was not trying to be tricky in answering my own post under another name. I just put in my ordinary name when I signed up for editorial posting and have been using the nickname for posts. In case anyone cares, now you know.

Jack-
Just call yourself Jack Matel. That way you are identifiable as Jack, and as J. Anthony Matel.

Seems clear to me what OBL’s intent was. He is attempting to act as a head of a landless state. He is attempting to dictate terms to the American people from what he perceives or wants us to believe is a position of strength.

Why would he believe he holds a position of strength? One only need look at all the fear and gutless reactions of the American people to see why he presumes a position of strength. He has inflicted fear upon Americans, he has used that fear to provoke a military response that was over the top in the eyes of the international community.

Since I was a kid, picked on and bullied by the bigger kids, I learned that bullies are only stopped when their bullying is exposed to reasonable people. No question OBL is a bully. But, what he may not have expected, but now intends to capitalize on, is the fact that President Bush is also a bully. Know what happens when two bullies go after each other, escalation which ends with one or the other dead, or one or the other condemned and rejected by the community, or both.

Bush has alienated the international community and defied reason in pursuit of our war on terrorism. This is what OBL intends to capitalize on. His video is directed to heighten American fear, inflame their anger, and embolden them to vote again for the President which OBL chooses. Bush is prone to overreaction which alienates America in the world. One could not ask for a better weakness in an opponent if one is hoping to diminsh America’s influence in the world. And that has always been one of OBL’s stated goals.

Personaly, I think some techies out there should do some good photoshopping of BinLaden in a dress or other equal silliness and redistribute the tape to male him out the fool that he is. I also hope we have begun to build operatives in Pakistan and it will only be a matter of time until Bin Laden is worm food.

This man is a mass murderer and enemy of the civilization.

The problem is, more and more Muslims see bin Laden as a pious and humble defender of Islam.

It’s fine to talk about how to kill him (we should) or the merits of putting him in a dress (chuckle), but that’s not going to stop the Muslim perception that their religion is under attack by the United States.

Greg and AP, here’s something I threw together really quickly. I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t have any pictures of fairies so I had to make the best of what I could find on Google. I don’t have any rotoscoping software so I can’t do anything to the video itself, but I do what I can. ;) Any ideas what I should use for a word balloon?

Osama Fairy

AP

Sometimes people are just wrong. The U.S. has shown astonishing respect for Islam; often more than the supposed proponents, who desecrate mosques by storing munitions and using them as bunkers. At some point, you just have to say enough. We are confronted by a narrow-minded bigot (Osama) who claims to support Islam. We can expect good Muslims to be as intolerant of someone like him as we would expect Christians to be of a “Christian Soldier” who advocated killing Muslims.

I met a man once who refused to shake my hand because I was an American. He said something like, “no offense, but I so oppose what your country is doing etc . .” I told him that I did indeed take offense, because what he was doing was racist. Imagine me doing the same on meeting an individual Iranian or N. Korean. Individuals are responsible for what they do, not what people like them might do.

Toleration only works when everyone agrees to the basic rules. We should be tolerant of others AND demand they are tolerant of us. This works in the real world. They call it respect. Imagine how far civil rights movements would have gotten if minority groups had simply tried to understand why others were intolerant of them. No – they demanded respect. We should do the same.

AP, I understand that I am responding to more than you said. I just wanted to make the point that it is possible to be too tolerant.

Jack, a suprising number of mostly ultra-conservative Americans, including some WatchBloggers, genuinely perceive the war on terror and the Iraq War as components in a larger and morally just war between the United States and Islam in general. They fear (and I do mean “fear”) that our country will be overrun by Muslim armies and that our people will be forecably converted to Islam. It’s insane but true.

Clearly both sides have supporters who buy into the whole “all Muslims are against us” view of foreign policy. But only Bush actually has pundits and surrogates working night and day specifically encouraging this perception and trying to make sure these folks vote for him.

-Cf

CF

What I like to hear is, “these terrorists don’t represent Islam. What they believe is an evil caricature. They are not martyrs; they are simply murderers who commit suicide. According to the Koran, those who commit suicide go to Hell. If I hear anyone recruiting or espousing these ideas in the mosque, I will report it to the authorities.” I don’t hear enough of this. Maybe the news media is not reporting it. I don’t know. This is what leads to misunderstanding.

Jack, I hear that pretty often here in SE Asia. But the US hasn’t directly attacked a Muslim SE Asian country, yet.

I understand what you’re saying, and if you want to start a dialogue on promoting tolerance and respect between Americans and Muslims, I think that’s a great idea.

The reality is: Many Muslims (mainly Arabs, I think) believe bin Laden is a pious and humble defender of Islam. By uttering idiocies like, “they hate us for our freedoms,” we ignore that reality at our peril

What we should be focusing on, is how to alter their perceptions of America and bin Laden.

Let me amplify that a little bit: What we should be asking is, what is it that makes bin Laden and his message so appealing to Arab Muslims?

With the answer to that as a starting place, we can begin to solve the perception problem… if it is indeed possible to solve it.

AP

I agree that we should try to end run bin Laden and appeal directly to moderate Muslims. But we do have a technical problem doing that.

At the end of the Cold War, there were a lot of people who wanted to give up the ideological battle and go home. During the 1990s, we systematically destroyed our government’s ability to influence foreign audiences. We closed most of our overseas libraries and cut budgets and personnel. It saved money. The worst of these lean years were 1993-2000, when we lost about half of our total numbers of information/cultural officers to retirement and attrition. Incoming classes were very small and we actually transferred some of the incoming officers to other duties. It was not a Clinton policy to do this, but it was Clinton appointees who carried it out. If you read my posts, you may have perceived my dislike for Madeline Albright and Jamie Rubin. That is one reason why.

Things looked up under Bush, but not much until September 11. At that time, our influence network was called on to turn around Muslim opinion. That would be some task, even in the best of times, but in this case, it was a lot like asking a man who has been starving to fight Mike Tyson.

Under the Bush administration, we started a diplomatic readiness, that has more than doubled our numbers of incoming officers and increased training in languages, but things take time. It takes a couple of years to train a person up in some of the harder languages and it takes 5-7 years before he/she is really up to speed. We are paying a high price now for those seven lean years under President Clinton. I liked Clinton in many ways, but his treatment of the nuts and bolts of diplomacy was dreadful. I don’t know what Bush understands about foreign affairs, but under his watch infrastructure is being rebuilt.

You live in Singapore, so you are aware of the attitude of officials there toward Muslim radicalism and toward the U.S. efforts in this regard. The USG is working on programs of outreach in Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries in the region, but we are not ready yet. It is great when our president meets with regional leaders, but that only opens the door. Influence is a ground game. We have to get assets on the ground, as we successfully did in E. Europe. I hope and believe our efforts will bear fruit, but it is not something we can do overnight.

The U.S won the battle of ideas against world Communism, I believe we can dispatch these guys too.

Jack, one of the problems we have comunicating with moderate Muslims is the poor choice of words used by this administration in reference to the early stages of the war on terror.

Rocky

In modern English, we do not use the word Crusade in its medieval meaning. It has probably not been used in that sense in hundreds of years. Eisenhower fought a crusade in Europe. We can have a “crusade” against cancer or even a crusade against litter. Anyone familar with English knows that and so should anyone who translated into Arabic. That complaint was a set-up.

At the same time, we are asked to ignore the use of the word jihad, which evidently does retain much of its original meaning.

Respect and understanding is a two way street. Think of it like a negotation. If you surrender your postion too easily, you gain neither your goal or the respect of your adversary. We can appologize that those unfamilar with our language were confused, but we need not beat ourselfs about it.

I’m sorry Jack I understand your point but Eisenhower wasn’t fighting Fundamentalist Muslums.

Here’s my point. We’re fighting a group of people who are, for the most part, uneducated. These people are not going to get the nuances of the English language, hell a good portion of the population here don’t get the nuances of the English language.

Rocky

There are two roads you can take: soft and hard power. Both have their place, but they are not interchangeable. We all like soft power better, but sometimes using soft power is like trying to nail jello to a wall. If you can’t convince your enemies to stop being your enemies, you have to render them impotent. Our arguments never convinced the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese. American airpower saved the people of Kosovo and U.S. power liberated the women of Afghanistan. Maybe the problem in Iraq is that we are trying to apply soft power too soon. I do believe that after the U.S. election, no matter who wins, Falujah will be pacified and Iraq will have elections on schedule because force will be applied. President Bush will have nothing to lose in either case. It is something we probably should have done earlier. If we give peace a chance before we have won the war, we will get only more war.

Consider how New York dealt with crime. The liberal elites said you had to address the “root causes” before you could reduce crime. Instead, Mayor Giuliani went for the zero tolerance of the “broken window” theory and crime dropped like a stone. It turns out crime itself was the root cause. Maybe the root cause of terrorism is terrorist violence. Soft power can be applied only after hard power has made a place for it.

Jack, we agree on several points. I wish that we would have gone into Iraq with enough manpower that all of these conversations would have been a moot point.

I hate it when I agree with people. This is happening too often. I will have to become more partisan.

Good post Jack, my biggest problem with gunboat diplomacy is that we go into a country and make only a half hearted effort. If we are going to be taken seriously, overwhelming force is nesscesary.

We need to stop screwing around.

It was not a Clinton policy to do this, but it was Clinton appointees who carried it out.

Just a quibble, it’s the Congress that controls the purse strings. The State Department budgets Clinton submitted to Congress routinely got eviscerated. On the other hand, Clinton put balancing the budget over fighting like a mad-dog for the State Dept., so there’s some truth in what you say.

On the other other hand, during the 90s, Clinton empowered the regional CINC’s to take over some of those programs from the State Department. The Defense Dept. was the only agency with the budget to do so, and it was in the CINC’s best interests to “shape” their regions and be ambassadores for peace. General Zinni writes about his experiences doing that kind of work in his excellent book, “Battle Ready”.

As for knowing what’s going on in SE Asia, I keep my eyes open because every move Bush makes has a direct impact on the safety of my family. I wish Bush would show more respect to moderate Muslim Democratic leaders like Malaysia’s PM Abdullah. You’re right that America’s credibility is shot in the Muslim world - mostly within the last four years. We’re going to have to depend on guys like Abdullah to fight the idiological war for us until we can rebuild some trust.

And you’re right that respect is a two-way street. But it won’t hurt for us to be a little magnanimous and start the process. Bush’s squeezing Abdullah in for half an hour between lunch and a race car photo-op isn’t very respectful. Bush should at least make a show of serious consultation with the guy - give Abdullah something he can take home to show Muslims that America respects and supports moderate Muslim democracies.

We may have reached consenus, except on one point. Clinton gave us Christopher, Albright and Joe Duffey (at USIA). He surely could have done better. I think he specifically chose ciphers and half wits because he didn’t give foreign affairs high priority. There were plenty of good Democrats available. Why Albright?

FYI - I voted for Clinton. I don’t have a problem with his broad sweeps. It is the details that fell apart. I am not saying that we could have beat Mike Tyson (my analogy above), but we never had a chance because of the cuts and mismanagement. We won’t be up to speed for another couple of years.

I actually liked Albright. She had the stones to call the Pentagon on their “5 divisions and $500 million” crap for any operation that didn’t involve Iraq or North Korea. Whenever they didn’t want to do something, they got all passive-aggressive, and she kicked Shelton’s ass for it. It didn’t help, of course. She wasn’t Shelton’s boss. :)

That’s why I actually liked Rumsfeld. Too bad he had such poor oversight from the White House. They really let him screw up on post-war planning and Abu Ghraib.

I think we’re pretty much in consensus, Jack. Except that I’m absolutely sure a second Bush term would be just as much a disaster as the first. :)