Al-Jazeera broadcasts bin Laden tape

Al-Jazeera broadcasts bin Laden tape
Neither Bush nor Kerry can protect U.S., he says

NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 7:11 p.m. ET Oct. 29, 2004


Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, in a videotape
broadcast Friday on Al-Jazeera television, claims full
responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the
United States and warns Americans that �?your security
is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your
security is in your own hands.�?

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said U.S.
intelligence analysts, who were reviewing the tape,
believed that the message was authentic and had been
produced recently.

U.S. officials told NBC News that there was no plan to
raise the terrorist threat level, currently at yellow,
or �?elevated,�? because bin Laden makes no specific
threat. He does, however, warn that the �?main reasons�?
for the Sept. 11 attacks �?are still existing to repeat
what happened before.�?

A senior official said the main message appeared to be
�?I'm still here; I�?m still standing.�?

Al-Jazeera, an Arabic-language broadcast by satellite
from Qatar, would not say how it obtained the
18-minute tape, about seven minutes of which it aired.


A senior State Department official told NBC News that
the Qatari government told the United States about the
tape within the last day. The U.S. ambassador, Chase
Untermeyer, unsuccessfully lobbied Qatari officials to
persuade Al-Jazeera not to air it, the official said.

�?We are a free people�?
In the tape, bin Laden �? wearing traditional white
robes, a turban and a tan cloak �? reads from papers at
a lectern against a plain brown background. Speaking
quietly in an even voice, he tells the American people
that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks because �?we are a
free people�? who wanted to �?regain the freedom�? of
their nation.

�?Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you
will secure yourself,�? he says, according to a
translation by NBC News.


U.S. officials told The Associated Press that one part
of their analysis would be to discern whether there
were hidden messages or clues about a possible future
attack. But they said it was too early to know that
yet.

Bush was informed of the tape aboard Air Force One
late Friday morning by national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice. �?Americans will not be intimidated
or influenced by an enemy of our country,�? he told
reporters at the airport in Toledo, Ohio. �?I�?m sure
Senator Kerry will agree with me.�?

�?I also want to say we are at war with these
terrorists,�? said Bush, who added that he was
�?confident we will prevail.�?

Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential
candidate, was informed by his senior foreign policy
adviser, Rand Beers, who was briefed by the
administration.

�?As Americans, we are absolutely united in our
determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden
and the terrorists," Kerry said as he boarded a
campaign plane in West Palm Beach, Fla. �?They�?re
barbarians, and I will stop at absolutely nothing to
hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever
they are, whatever it takes, period.�?


Change of rhetoric
NBC�?s Richard Engel reported that bin Laden spoke in a
modern style of Arabic, in contrast to the flowery
Quranic language he has used in previous messages. He
appeared to be speaking in a fashion he thought would
be better suited to this target audience, the American
people.

Although he mentions Kerry, most of bin Laden�?s
message is in regard to Bush, who faces Kerry in next
week�?s presidential election. He accuses President
Bush of �?misleading�? the American people for the three
years since the Sept. 11 attacks.


In no previous authenticated message �? audio or video
�? had bin Laden explicitly stated that he ordered the
2001 attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people.

But in the new tape, he claims full responsibility.
�?We decided to destroy towers in America so they may
taste what we have tasted,�? he says, clearly referring
to the World Trade Center.

In the course of his comments, bin Laden revealed just
how patiently he awaited his opportunity to strike the
West. He said he first vowed to destroy �?the buildings
of tyrants�? after the devastating Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982 �? 19 years before he directed
followers to fly four jetliners into the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon and an unknown third target.

�?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 inflexibility of the
American-Israeli alliance toward our people in
Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind,�? he says.


At one point, bin Laden ridicules Bush for reacting
slowly to the 2001 attacks.

�?We never thought that the high commander of the U.S.
armies would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both
towers to face the horrors by themselves when they
most needed him because it seemed to distract his
attention from listening to the girl telling him about
her goat butting,�? he says, referring to Bush�?s
decision to wait more than seven minutes after being
informed of the attacks before leaving an elementary
room classroom in Florida where a student was reading
a story called �?The Pet Goat.�?

�?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.�?


Bin Laden admits setbacks
U.S. officials told NBC News that in parts of the tape
not aired by Al-Jazeera, bin Laden acknowledges that
the recent Afghan elections were not a success for him
because �?they came off with minimal violence.�? And he
admits that �?aggressive Pakistani operations�? in South
Waziristan, where he is believed to be hiding, have
hurt his operations.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a Middle
East specialist and former military official at the
U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, said the tape was
surprising in that it appeared to demonstrate that bin
Laden was in good health. Bin Laden�?s condition has
been the subject of intense speculation since the
United States launched massive airstrikes in
Afghanistan in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The last authenticated contemporaneous video message
from bin Laden appeared in December 2001, when he
discussed a U.S. attack on a mosque. U.S. officials
told NBC News that all subsequent videos of bin Laden
were believed to have been recorded around the time of
the Sept. 11 attacks and broadcast much later.

The last audio message from bin Laden was on May 6,
when he offered rewards in gold for the assassination
of top U.S. and U.N. officials in Iraq. On Oct. 1, bin
Laden�?s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, issued an
audiotape calling on young Muslims to strike the
United States and its allies.