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| Terror Networks |
| Binny sez he's alive... |
| 2002-11-12 |
| Intelligence analysts are studying a tape-recorded message to determine if it contains the voice of Osama bin Laden praising recent terrorist activities, government officials said today. Sould be fairly easy to authenticate — voice printing isn't new technology, and new technology's probably made it more accurate... If the voice is authenticated as that of Mr. bin Laden, the references to recent events, including the Oct. 12 Bali bombings, would be persuasive evidence that the terrorist leader of Al Qaeda survived American air strikes in Afghanistan last year. The voice purporting to be that of Mr. bin Laden was on an audiotape broadcast to the Arab world today by Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television channel. Experts who have heard Mr. bin Laden's voice said the taped message sounded very much like him. I used to be able to do Jimmy Stewart, but I'm not him... Intelligence officials in Washington were not ready this afternoon to declare that the voice was that of Mr. bin Laden. But the officials were taking seriously the possibility that the words are indeed those of the man widely believed to have been the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "Our people in Palestine are being killed, are being subjected to the worse kind of suffering for almost a century now," the speaker on the tape said in Arabic. "If we defend our people in Palestine, the world is disturbed and allied against Muslims under the banner of combating terrorism." Don't we hope so... The Associated Press reported from Cairo that in addition to referring to the Bali bombings, the voice on the tape mentioned last month's killing of an American marine in Kuwait, the bombing of a French oil tanker last month off Yemen and the bloody hostage-taking in Moscow by Chechen extremists. Those attacks were "undertaken by sons who are zealous in the defense of their religion," the voice declared. The speaker on the tape said those attacks and others were "only a reaction in response to what Bush, the pharaoh of the age, is doing by killing our sons in Iraq and what America's ally Israel is doing, bombarding houses with women and old people and children inside with American planes." Tough nails, ain't it, Binny? If you are Binny... As I commented a few months ago, lacking a corpse, and lacking verifiable activity, the likelihood of him being titzup can keep going up, but can't quite reach 100 percent — it would take only a single appearance to make the probability zero. It'll be interesting to see if this is really his voice; if not, we can peg the likelihood of decomposition at 99 percent. If it is, why no video? Was he maimed? So deathly sick-looking that he'd scare women and children? |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |