Al-Qaida lieutenant warns of new attacks

[Jolie Rouge]

Al-Qaida lieutenant warns of new attacks
By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 27 minutes ago

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden's deputy warned that Persian Gulf countries and Israel would be al-Qaida's next targets, according to a new videotape aired by Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera on Monday, the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Ayman al-Zawahri accused the governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia of supporting Israel's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Addressing the West, the al-Qaida No. 2 said: "You should not waste your time in reinforcing your troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are doomed to defeat and are already all but defeated."

"Instead, you have to reinforce your troops in two regions. First is the Gulf, where you will be thrown out after you are defeated in Iraq, at which point your economic ruin will be achieved," he said. "The second is Israel, because the jihad reinforcements are getting closer to it."

He also condemned the U.N. peacekeeping force now deploying in Lebanon under terms set out in a cease-fire resolution. "What is so terrible in this resolution ... is that it approves the existence of the Jewish state and isolates our mujahedeen in Palestine from Muslims in Lebanon," he said in excerpts of the video aired on Al-Jazeera television.

"This is consecrated by the presence of international troops who are hostile to Islam," he said. "Anyone who accepts this resolution means that he accepts all these catastrophes."

In other portions of the tape aired by CNN earlier Monday, al-Zawahri urged Muslims to intensify their opposition to the United States and warned in general terms of new terror strikes. "We have repeatedly warned you and offered a truce with you," al-Zawahri said, addressing Americans. "Now we have all the legal and rational justification to continue to fight you until your power is destroyed or you give in and surrender."

The video was not on any of the militant Web sites that usually carry messages and videos from al-Zawahri and other al-Qaida figures. As-Sahab, the terror network's media arm, had posted notices late Sunday that the video would be available.

It was the latest in a flurry of al-Qaida videos released ahead of the anniversary. But unlike the others, it appeared to be new with references to Israel's bombardment of Lebanon this summer and the capture of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah and Palestinian militants in Gaza.

The video shows the Egyptian-born al-Zawahri dressed in white and seated in front of a wall of bookshelves as he is interviewed by an unseen person. The full video is an hour and 16 minutes, the stations said. "Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster," he said. "And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events, with Allah's permission and guidance."

Al-Zawahri criticized the West for supplying Israel with weapons, and he called on the Islamic world "to rush with everything at its disposal to the aid of its Muslim brothers in Lebanon and Gaza."

Late Sunday, another video posted on the Internet, purportedly by al-Qaida, showed previously unseen footage of a smiling bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp apparently planning the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

That tape's documentary-like retrospective of the five years since the attacks was unusually long — 91 minutes, split into two segments — and sophisticated in its production quality, compared with previous al-Qaida videos. The footage — with English subtitles — surfaced on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, on a Web site that frequently airs messages from bin Laden's terror network. "Planning for Sept. 11 did not take place behind computer monitors or radar screens, nor inside military command and control centers, but was surrounded with divine protection in an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness ... and love for sacrificing life," an unidentified narrator said.

The video released Sunday, stamped with the emblem of As-Sahab, al-Qaida's media branch, was titled "Knowledge is For Acting Upon: The Manhattan Raid."

It showed the al-Qaida leader meeting with colleagues in a mountain camp believed to be in Afghanistan, as well as video clips of Vice President Dick Cheney defending his old job at the oil company Halliburton, and President Bush at his inauguration. Other scenes show training at the camp, with masked militants doing martial arts kicks and practicing hiding and pulling out knives.

It included the last testament of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Wail al-Shehri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, and showed bin Laden strolling in the camp, greeting followers. "Among the devout group which responded to the order of Allah and order of his messenger were the heroes of Sept. 11, who wrote with the ink of their blood the greatest pages of modern history," the narrator said, referring to the hijackers who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Al-Shehri and al-Ghamdi were each shown speaking to the camera, their image superimposed over background pictures of the crumbling World Trade Center towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.

They both spoke of how Muslims must stand up to fight back against the West. "If we are content with being humiliated and inclined to comfort, the tooth of the enemy will stretch from Jerusalem to Mecca, and then everyone will regret on a day when regret is of no use," al-Ghamdi said.

The two videotaped final statements had never been seen before.

Al-Shehri was on American Flight 11, which was the first to hit the World Trade Center. Al-Ghamdi was on United Flight 175, which hit the second tower.

In the footage, bin Laden wore a dark robe and white headdress, and was shown sitting alongside his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike on Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody, and last week Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.

Bin Laden was shown expressing his appreciation for the Taliban, the Islamic regime that ran Afghanistan and gave refuge to al-Qaida until the U.S.-led invasion toppled them in late 2001.

The video showed events up to 10 years before the Sept. 11 attacks — U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War and bin Laden preaching to followers after the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Sudan. It also showed events afterward including a man in an orange jumpsuit at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was unclear when the tape was made, or how soon before the Sept. 11 attacks the footage of bin Laden was recorded.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060911/ap_on_re_mi_ea/sept11_video

[Jolie Rouge]

I share my friend and Hot Air colleague Bryan Preston's related thoughts on this:

Five years on, a psychosis has gripped millions who can’t and won’t fathom the true nature of the war we are in. For many of them, having been born and raised in an essentially post-Christian West, they can’t imagine that anyone might be motivated to kill and die because of something a warlord wrote down centuries ago.

They cannot imagine any religion other than the one they believe they have outgrown being violent or causing violence. They cannot imagine anyone fighting for a cause that offers no material gains and therefore cannot be negotiated away. In our essentially materialist West, millions lack the imagination to believe that bin Laden’s pining for the return of Andalusia to Muslim rule is in his mind a legitimate reason to wage war on America now. They can imagine their own countrymen being so motivated, though, and I think that’s key to understanding their state of mind. They can imagine the Rotary Club member down the street plotting mayhem because he goes to church and votes Republican, but they can’t imagine that the Muslim in Karachi is a real, live enemy who is actually plotting an attack.


This lack of imagination has bred the anti-war madness we have now. Rather than accept the reality of an enemy that cannot and therefore will not negotiate away what he believes to be the will of God, and rather than accept that this enemy will understand nothing outside total victory or total defeat, and rather than understand that this enemy’s goals include enslaving the entire world in a global caliphate, and rather than accept that this reality necessitates the use of all tools including military might to defend ourselves, millions have embraced an alternate reality. The reality of the enemy outside the West and its motivations being too terrifying and too far beyond their own control, millions now imagine that the enemy in this war is within.

The enemy, to them, isn’t the turbaned man behind the plot to hijack multiple airplanes and crash them into multiple buildings in America. The real enemy, to these millions, is the man in the Oval Office, and the man or men behind him.

Imagining the enemy as a Westerner who has a Western worldview and essentially Western motivations gives these millions the comfort of thinking that they can understand and defeat the enemy easily. They can expose him in the press or on their blog. They can spread the word through a bumper sticker or a sign in their yard. They can vote against him and encourage others to help vote him out. They can impeach him. They can shout and rail at anyone who supports him. They can destroy his political party and ruin his name. They can, in their own minds, win the war on their own terms without exposing themselves to danger. Because they have imagined their own enemy from before that day to be the enemy of civilization. And because it’s not really a war at all, just a made-up threat some evil neocons conjured up to scare everyone into giving them power. And that being the case, the deniers imagine that they can save civilizaton at the ballot box. They don’t have to find out what makes the enemy tick, they don’t have to fight him, and they don’t have to change their fundamental and now obviously flawed assumptions about humanity and the world.

If only it were that easy.

Five years on, the illness of replacing an implacable, indeed alien enemy with one from our own civilizational family has spread and metastasized through the majority of one of our two political parties, and may yet claim a majority of the country itself. History has a way of fading out as the day’s current noise rises in volume, and to them 9-11 is either history or a historic lie. The loudest voice, though not always or even often right, is often the one that gets the last word. And the 9-11 deniers and their allies across the left are nothing if not loud.

Five years on, it’s hard to take a positive look at the war because we are failing to comprehend it. The mass denial of reality is taking half our arsenal of unity and morale away from us. Those of us who see the threat for what it is still say that we will prevail because we are right and because we are America, but that’s just letting the others off the hook. If we’re going to prevail anyway, why should they snap out of their fog? And why should we demand that they do? The truth is, we need the denial to end and we need our countrymen to understand and help, but since we’re powerless to cure it with reason we shrug or laugh at it. But it’s eating away at our ability to defend ourselves.


hhhhmmmmmm

remind you of anyone around here ???