April
18, 2002 8:45 a.m. Osama’s
Greatest Hits
Keeping
him alive.
he
latest Osama bin Laden video, which ran yesterday on the Saudi-funded,
London-based MBC network, answers unequivocally the question whether bin
Laden was behind the September 11 (or as they call it, "blessed Tuesday")
attacks, that is in case anyone was still asking. Yes. He did it. He was
proud of it. He loved it. It was a dream come true.
Sulayman Abu-Ghayth,
spokesman for al Qaeda, states in the video that "we have done what
Almighty God ordered us to do. We did not invent anything. Nor did we
invent any words. However, we implemented what Almighty God ordered us
to do. Almighty God ordered us to perform jihad, and therefore we performed
jihad." Bin Laden's segment dealt mainly with the monetary costs
of the attack to the U.S. economy, and clearly dates the taping to sometime
last fall: "The capital in circulation in this market amounts to
$4 trillion. If we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion to find out the
losses that their shares suffered, we find that it is $640 billion. This
is their loss in shares, and credit goes to God Almighty. This number
is equivalent to the budget of Sudan, for instance, for 640 years."
The 16 percent bin Laden refers to is the drop in the stock market —
which of course was not a permanent loss, we recovered all the Sudan years
of that value by December. He goes into minutia like 170,000 airline and
20,000 hotel employees being laid off, pretty tame outcomes for jihad
when you think about it. "The repercussions are so great, enormous,
and are spreading out that no one can estimate them in cash, and they
are on the rise, praise be to God." He's really grasping at straws.
I'm reminded of his
earlier video boast about the increasing number of people in Holland
getting interested in Islam since 9/11 — not much to show for the
effort.
Then the viewer has
a chance to compare the temporary economic effects of the attack to the
permanent manpower costs to his organization. The video, produced by an
al Qaeda media establishment, shows scenes of the effects of U.S. air
strikes in Afghanistan. It identifies members of the terrorist organization
killed by the bombings, and reveals their nationalities — Egyptian,
Saudi, Yemeni, Qatari, Iraqi, and natives of other Arab and Islamic states.
If true, this is useful intelligence for our side, but you have to wonder
if they slipped in some names of people they would like us to think dead
who in fact aren't.
Yet there is nothing
in the compendium to indicate that bin Laden is still alive. In fact the
recent "basement tapes" compilations that have been coming out
— odds and ends thrown together in rough edits — argue that
bin Laden is long gone. It's like when a musician dies and you begin to
see CDs of demos, alternate takes, remixes, and so forth. There's no new
material coming out so it's the only way to keep people interested. Same
with Osama. Were he alive, he or someone in his organization would figure
out a way to communicate it unambiguously. This new tape in particular,
in which the al Qaeda leadership admits what it never admitted in public
before (i.e., that they did it), seems to have the quality of a memorial,
a tribute to the act that could never be revealed while bin Laden was
alive.
OK, so I'm speculating
— but if the Washington
Post can make national news on what Secretary Rumsfeld called
the "pinnacle of relatively modest knowledge" why not me? If
bin Laden is alive, someone isn't minding the store for him very well.
This video cinches the case. Those diehards in the Muslim world who were
holding desperately to the double-think that bin Laden was innocent and
they were glad he attacked the U.S. — or those people in France buying
that book
about the 9/11 "fraud" — or those denizens of the fever
swamps who blame the whole thing on Mossad — will just have to face
reality. Bin Laden did it. Just like we knew he did.
— James
S. Robbins is a national-security analyst & NRO contributor.
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he
latest Osama bin Laden video, which ran yesterday on the Saudi-funded,
London-based MBC network, answers unequivocally the question whether bin
Laden was behind the September 11 (or as they call it, "blessed Tuesday")
attacks, that is in case anyone was still asking. Yes. He did it. He was
proud of it. He loved it. It was a dream come true. 
