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…or he might as well be. As Charles Johnson of “Little Green Footballs” points out, if Bin Laden were alive, he’d want to prove it with something more recent than the latest video, apparently dated 12/11/2001 or so. But if this is simply the best he can do, that’s an encouraging sign, too. This from MSNBC:

A Pakistani newspaper on Tuesday quoted a Taliban leader as saying that he had attended a funeral for bin Laden, who he said had died of a lung ailment in Tora Bora, where al-Qaida fighters made a last stand and where bin Laden was last said to have been sighted.

As for “Crusader hatred against Islam”: no, Osama, it’s garden variety — but well-armed — hatred against you and your nasty buddies, bub. You weren’t looking well: trouble sleeping? Where’s the old gang? That Kalashnikov doing you any good?

I’m just not in a “turn the other cheek” mood, and haven’t been for a long, long while; to tell the truth, I haven’t been since Lockerbie a long time ago. As if I needed reinforcing, we were in Union Station tonight, and saw an exhibit of World Trade Center rubble: twisted steel girders, concrete rubble, pictures of victims. To top it off, Maddie was along, and naturally she asked what happened. Never kid a kidder, and especially never kid a kid kidder: she knows this bothers us and that we haven’t told her everything. I told her a little more, and told her as usual when this comes up that the crash is over now and we are safe. So I lied, so sue me.

Destroy Al Qaeda, root and branch. Somalia, Philippines, wherever. It won’t make us safe, but it will make us safer, and that will just have to do.

Sorry for the abrupt change of mood from the prior post.

Guardian/Observer regulars Vulliamy and Burke claim Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting:

This weekend, as the debate the tape has provoked continued across the Islamic world, several intelligence sources have suggested to The Observer that the tape, although absolutely genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or Pakistani.

‘They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to get close to bin Laden and someone whom bin Laden would feel secure talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence at the perfect moment,’ said one security source. ‘It’s a masterstroke.’

The article goes on to i.d. the chief “interviewer” as “Ali Saeed al-Ghamdi, a former assistant professor of theology at a seminary in Mecca”; yesterday’s New York Times disagrees, fingering the same speaker as Khaled al-Harbi, a now-legless veteran of Bosnia and Chechnya. Whoever had access to the Handycam of Kandahar, the rumor might be as good as gold: if OBL starts to wonder about every contact of his, that would be, as Martha Stewart says, “a good thing.” The Guardian’s participation in the ruse would be somewhat ironic.

DoD News: U.S. Releases Videotape of Osama bin Laden: Text (Acrobat file), Video.

UBL: (…Inaudible…) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (…Inaudible…) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gasin the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.[...]

UBL: They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: be patient.

UBL: The difference between the first and the second plane hitting the towers was twenty minutes. And the difference between the first plane and the plane that hit the Pentagon

was one hour.

I never would have thought there’d be a tape like this; what a bunch of clowns, for all their murderousness. I wonder who the video was for? It seems so boring; maybe it was the “Shaykh’s” souvenir? (”Yup. I sat right next to him; we talked about the Trade Center and *everything*. What a guy. That’s me!”)

From the New York Times today, Tape Surfaces With Remarks by bin Laden:

Administration officials say they have read transcripts of the amateur videotape, which the White House is debating whether to make public, and that Mr. bin Laden seemed amused that many of the hijackers in the attacks apparently had not known they were on suicide missions.

“He suggests that they just thought they were involved in a conventional hijacking,” one administration official said today.

“There is a lot of laughter on the tape,” he added. “What’s new is the notion that some of the hijackers didn’t know they were going to die.”

Compare also another item in the same edition, Jihad’s Lost Battalions Mourned by Pakistani Kin:

(Syed Zaffar Saghir, disillusioned supporter of Sufi Muhammad, an Islamist Pakistani rabble-rouser now in jail): “So a lot of innocent people have died, and Sufi Muhammad and other religious leaders are responsible for this. They sent people who had no training whatsoever to war, and then they stayed back in Pakistan. They are still alive, while so many others have died.”

The second report says some 2,000 to 3,000 men from a single Pakistan valley north of Peshawar are still missing — of the at most 15,000 or so men who left for jihad in October.

Two articles confirming my impression of a latter day “children’s crusade” and its Pied Pipers. It will be as important as any “psyops” in the ground war to use news items like these to utterly discredit Islamicism in Pakistan and beyond. Maybe Israel should just leaflet the West Bank with the simple message, “They laugh every time one of you blow yourself up.”

Interesting speculation from the Telegraph (”Bin Laden will not surrender - we hope”):

The worst outcome for the West would be if bin Laden uses one of his televised appearances to tell the world that he wants to be tried by an international court. The Americans have already tried to make that option more difficult for him, by bombing his only outlet - the al-J_zeera television centre in Kabul - to smithereens. Let us hope that he stays in love with death, and never looks for a way to ensure that he receives a trial. For if he does, we might be forced to give him one.

(Via Jeff Jarvis, who I also thank for some nice comments.)

(updated to avoid frequent search hits for Al J.. on 03/24/2003)

In his report from Kabul (see prior entry), Junger also speculates that Bin Laden may try to head to Pakistan, which might make a lot of sense from Osama “Bert” Laden’s point of view: no scary bombs falling on you, fair to middling support in the population, direct US pursuit … well, at least not as certain as it is right now. But

• he has to get there.
• his support may not be quite as enthusiastic as in their youth so many days ago: many of the “best and brightest” are dead along some Afghan roadside now, and many of the rest may not think the whole thing is quite as glamorous as it once seemed.
• if Musharraf doesn’t go after him hammer and tongs, the U.S. just might, whether he’s in Pakistan or not.

One possibility I dread, and which may “therefore” happen, is that Bin Laden turns himself in to Musharraf, and Musharraf turns him over to Kofi Annan or some other UN moron. The idea of some kind of “trial of the millennium” with chanting crowds from Peshawar to Kuala Lumpur makes me ill. Personally, I don’t want Bin Laden brought to justice, I want him and his lieutenants dead — but first whisked out of Afghanistan and put on sodium pentothal until they give up the rest of their organization. Once that’s accomplished, I suggest giving them the choice of death by flamethrower or by jumping out of a plane at 1000 feet, which would be roughly equivalent to the last choice many of their victims had.

But that would be cruel, so on second thought, just go ahead and blow up them up in their LandRovers on the road out of Kandahar.

I wrote earlier I saw no “I’m ready to die” quote in the Dawn interview. According to the Observer, Bin Laden taunts the West: ‘I’m ready to die’; this happened off-interview, or whatever the term is:

Mir said: ‘He told me, “I am ready to die. I know that they can bomb this place also. They are not aware that I am present here. But they are dropping bombs blindly everywhere. So I may get killed even with you”.’

I’m not sure if this qualifies as “taunting,” except in the minds of Observer headline editors. But what I’m wondering is, will John Ashcroft look the other way for this “assisted suicide”? Also, am I alone in remembering a certain scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”: the crowd parts to reveal a black-robed assassin, grinning ominously and twirling his swords impressively…

Again, via Jeff Jarvis: Dawn (Pakistani newspaper) editor Hamid Mir interview with Osama Bin Laden, night of November 7:

HM: In your statement of Oct 7, you expressed satisfaction over the Sept 11 attacks, although a large number of innocent people perished in them, hundreds among them were Muslims. Can you justify the killing of innocent men in the light of Islamic teachings ?

OBL: This is a major point in jurisprudence. In my view, if an enemy occupies a Muslim territory and uses common people as human shield, then it is permitted to attack that enemy. For instance, if bandits barge into a home and hold a child hostage, then the child’s father can attack the bandits and in that attack even the child may get hurt.

This seems to telegraph future tactics better than it applies to the Trade Center atrocities (the Trade Center was not exactly full of human shields on Muslim territory); Bin Laden may be threatening that refugee camps under U.S./Allied control in Afghanistan are legitimate targets for anything, regardless of the number of refugee dead the attack might cause.

The piece either seems to have been edited since Jarvis noted it, or it was in a different “Dawn” item: I see no “I am ready to die” quote by Bin Laden there.

The Sunday Times: “Wealthy, privileged, workshy, a rebellious public school boy - Giles Coren says he knows the type” - Osama Bin Laden, the original Trustafarian:

When we do find him, though, it is no good threatening him with death or prosecution.

That would be playing into his hands. We must respond in the only language he understands, with the only punishment he truly fears: we must offer him a job.

The Ordinariness of American Feelings

Another “usually” reliable progressive speaks up for truth, justice, and the notion that the American “way” might not be all bad all the time. I mentioned Ms. Roy’s reprehensible column in the Guardian earlier this month. Thanks to Matt Welch for noticing Mr. Gitlin’s article. Welch highlights many of his favorite passages; here are two of mine:

The terrorist logic of Osama bin Laden is transpolitical – that is to say, nihilistic. Issues are fodder for his apocalyptic imagination. He wants power and calls it God. Were Palestinians to win all their demands, he would move on, in his next video, to his next issue. …

From the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who has admirably criticised her country’s nuclear weapons and development policies, there is a tender concern that “American people ought to know that it is not them but their government’s policies that are so hated.” One reason why Americans are not exactly clear about the difference is that the murderers of 11 September did not trouble themselves to make such a nice distinction. (Just what were some 300 firefighters’ views of American bases in Saudi Arabia?).

“He wants power and calls it God.” That might be a pretty good message to stick with in that propaganda war we seem to be losing.