Sunday, October 31, 2004

George Bin Laden and Usamah W. Bush: Recent Bin Laden Tape and Republican Dirty Tricks Part II: Those who have been reading me here know that I am particularly skeptical and cynical about political life. So cynical and skeptical I am, that--unlike people who are only mildly cynical and skeptical and who are drawn to conspiracy theories--I am also skeptical about conspiracy theories, unless there is a provable or convincing evidence. But the more I think and read about the recent Bin Laden tape, the more I smell a fishy conspiracy. First, I read today in the New York Times that the original tape of Bin Laden was only 5 minutes long, but just read in tomorrow's Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat that the original tape is 17 minutes long. The tape is dated last Sunday, but AlJazeera never rushes to air tapes. Another thing struck me about the tape: Bin Laden's tapes are all now produced by the Sahab Foundation (some audio-visual company linked to Al-Qa`idah), and they all are high quality in production and resolution. This was very low quality and resolution is grainy, although it was not retrieved from the internet (or "internets" as Bush calls it), but was hand delivered to AlJazeera's correspondent in Pakistan (Ahmad Zaydan) who seems close Al-Qa`idah people. And US officials are leaking to Arab and US media that they tried to pressure Qatari government to not air the tape. What! Did the US government try to pressure Fox News and ABC News to not air the constantly shown tape of a nobody terrorist (who has no leadership position anywhere and whose identity is even a mystery to the US government) and which is more horrific and gruesome than even the Bin Laden tape? And AlJazeera has only aired a few minutes of the tape (not one minute as NYTimes claims) but AlJazeera usually airs most or all of the tape in one special segment. Not this time. And the only segment airing is the one dealing with election and the Bush family and Floreeeeeeeeeeeeeeda. There is a whole section on Iraq, but AlJazeera has not aired it. And the Bin Laden's message is devoid of his typical violent and kooky religious preachment. And AlJazeera waits for weeks and months before airing tapes, and yet this time they aired it a few days before the election. Am I saying that AlJazeera (or more accurately the Qatari government) may be complicit here? You bet. Everybody noticed also that Bin Laden looked much healthier (and younger?) than the 2003 tape. Unless he has been in a bungalow in Hawaii for all this time, this is rather bizarre for somebody in hiding and constantly moving between Pakistan and Afghanistan with his dialysis machine, as the US government claims.