Replies to post #23162 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Qaeda group warns US of 'unbearable hell' after Bush re-election

Fri Nov 5, [2004] 11:43 AM ET World - AFP

DUBAI (AFP) - A group linked to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s Al-Qaeda network threatened the United States with reprisals after the re-election of President George W. Bush (news - web sites), warning of "unbearable hell," in a website statement.

"The coming days will show you that the one you preferred will lead you to an unbearable hell," said the group calling itself the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades after the Al-Qaeda military chief killed in Afghanistan (news - web sites) in October 2001.

In Washington, a US official said Friday that the message appeared to be authentic.

He noted that the Abu Hafs Brigades, which has also claimed responsibility for the deadly Madrid train bombings in March, had previously used the website where the latest message was posted.

The bombings killed 191 people in Spain's worst terror attack and injured another 1,900.

"So it appears to be them, given those credentials ... We are taking it seriously and watching it closely," said the official who asked not to be identified.

"Although the criminal Bush has spilt blood of Muslims during the last four years and despite the butcheries that he committed and continues to perpetrate in Afghanistan, in Palestine and in Iraq (news - web sites), we see that... the applause of his people is increasing," the new message said.

"This shows the nature of the American people who approved the war against Islam led by criminal America," it added.

The statement comes after a video message from Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden -- broadcast just days ahead of the US election -- warned the United States of new attacks similar to those of September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people and were claimed by the network.

In the first appearance of bin Laden for over a year, the Al-Qaeda leader accused Bush of "misleading" the American people and of being negligent during the attacks, saying that the "reasons to repeat what happened" still remained.

Bush beat his rival Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) to win a second term in office in Tuesday's vote after a campaign where national security proved a dominant issue.

The new message from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades said it was of no consequence which of the candidates won the election and appeared to threaten new attacks on the United States within the "next days".

"The re-election of the criminal Bush, who is no different from the other leaders of this country who have devoted their efforts to killing Muslims everywhere in the world, will not dissuade the mujahedeen from striking the head of the line of infidelity," it said.

"Bush and Kerry are two sides of the same coin. Both have a dark history that will never be erased. It is the American people who will take the consequences of the politics of its president over the next four years.

"The next days will show that your support of the criminal will not bring you security and will not prevent the muhajedeen from hurting you where you are. The next days will prove this."

In his first pre-election press conference Thursday after his resounding election victory, Bush vowed to "defeat the terrorists and to encourage freedom and democracy as alternatives to tyranny and terror."

Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1511&ncid=1511&e=8&u=/afp/20041105/w...

[ed_ferrari]

One word describes this "man" - insane.

[F6]

Bin Laden sought Bush victory

Nov. 7, 2004. 01:00 AM

Remember him, the guy in the picture on the right?

He has barely been mentioned since Tuesday when the U.S. media began framing the election results around "morality" — a genteel way of saying middle America hates homos — instead of the fear factor that drove most of the campaign.

Behold Osama bin Laden, star of the most effective ad all year for the Bush-Cheney ticket. It debuted two Fridays ago, on the eve of the vote, in time to mute talk of the missing explosives at Al Qaaqa and to wipe out coverage of the impending collapse of the necessary overhaul of American intelligence agencies. Its appearance could not have been better managed if George W's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, had planned it.

As Vanity Fair's James Wolcott lamented on his blog ( http://jameswolcott.com ) on the day after the election, "This was the outcome (bin Laden) wanted, a gift from us to him: an unapologetic Christian Crusader in the White House whose re-election gives lie to the notion that Abu Ghraib was an aberration and that the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians weigh upon America's conscience. This morning America could not look more like a grinning aggressor to the Arab world, an aggressor with fresh marching orders."

Or, if you prefer the picture worth a thousand words version, check one of my favourite Canadian sites at http://myblahg.blogspot.com [F6 note -- quite good]. There, blogger Robert McClelland has a Photoshopped screen grab of bin Laden superimposed on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln with that infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner behind him.

But of course.

Everything about that video indicated that the terrorist mastermind has also mastered the media. They lined up to broadcast his message as eagerly as any freeloading second-string critic generates blurbs for third-rate Hollywood movies.

Leaving aside the obvious — the not-in-a-cave sound and lighting, the fact that he was using a lectern instead of a boulder, not to mention that he is very much alive — Bin Laden used mental terrorism to ensure that Americans would vote to bring back the poster child for his jihadist recruiting drive. What's more, he showed us that, wherever he is, he is plugged in.

For example, in the complete translated transcript — which was available Monday, although it was not widely published in the States — Bush is repeatedly denigrated. He is called a liar "engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes" of 9/11, accused of having "shady" connections to oil concerns, and mocked as a failed commander-in-chief who ignored the warnings of impending attack and who listened to a children's story when he should have acted.

Bin Laden knew that making fun of Bush would goad the electorate into supporting him — especially in a climate where it's a virtue to be hated by the Europeans, the United Nations and others who are not American.

Alan Rutkowski of Edmonton, in a letter to the Globe and Mail published last Monday, said it best: "Clearly Osama bin Laden wants Americans to think that he thinks they will think he only wants them to think he is trying to get George Bush re-elected so they will think that by voting for Mr. Bush they will not have been taken in, but in reality, if they think that, they will have been."

Bin Laden follows the U.S. media closely enough to know that the Bushite spin machine would use his video against Democratic contender John Kerry. So it did, right on cue. Instead of focussing on how he was still not caught "dead or alive" and how Iraq was a deadly diversion from stopping Al Qaeda, many news outlets painted filmmaker Michael Moore as the bad guy. That's because it was clear that Bin Laden was aware that the pet goat scene from Fahrenheit 9/11 had resonance.

"I'm glad to know that Michael Moore is giving aid and comfort to the enemy," snapped Danielle Pletka of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute on CNN.

Then she went on, as did many of her ilk last weekend, to accuse Kerry of exploiting the video for his political gain — as if he hadn't long been emphasizing that Bin Laden was still out there threatening Americans.

"This shifts the topic from Iraq where the challenger was hitting the president hard for alleged mismanagement of the war," opined MSNBC's Chris Matthews, as if he had nothing to do with shifting the topic. "This creates a terrible situation for the challenger because it seems to me that Karl Rove has his finger on this. He knows that the American people have only one president at a time. And that's George W. Bush. We only have one protector at a time. We have to rally behind the president when we're threatened by an enemy. Osama bin Laden. And he's done it again."

Bin Laden's strategy is clear. It's all in the tape: Bankrupt the U.S. as it fights the "war on terror" — and strike the states that helped return Bush to power.

Why the media are not exploring all that is a mystery.

Maybe they wanted Bush to win. Or maybe they don't want to lose the Florida tourism ads lined up for Christmas.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&a...

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: New bin Laden videotape offers chilling reminder of terrorist's will

WASHINGTON, Nov 10, 2004 (Chicago Tribune - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- While President Bush has argued that the U.S. fights terrorists abroad to avoid fighting them at home, Osama bin Laden's re-emergence in a new videotape recently was a chilling reminder of how much bin Laden still wants to wage his international jihad on U.S. soil.

In its way, bin Laden's reappearance cuts against the president's slogan -- often repeated on the campaign trail but increasingly questioned by many observers, from terrorism experts to social commentators, even before the Al Qaeda leader's latest video.

"It's very much a reminder from [Al Qaeda] that despite all that's going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and everywhere else, they are still very much focused on executing an attack here," said Ben Venzke, chief executive officer of IntelCenter, which monitors terrorist groups and their activities.

Experts agreed that transnational and stateless terrorist groups, with their cells of operatives across the world, are quite capable of multitasking. "Believe it or not, Al Qaeda can actually do two or more things at once," said Venzke.

"It would be rather silly to think that just because the war began in Iraq that they packed up their entire infrastructure around the world, the support cells and execution cells," he said.

What's more, Al Qaeda has demonstrated that it is a patient organization with the ability to plan more than one attack at a time, he said.

"It has multiple operations planned and in place over a period of years," said Venzke, meaning that operations in the planning stages before the U.S. launched the Iraq war could still be on track.

Also, different Al Qaeda members have various capabilities, with some jihadists trained to conduct insurgency and guerrilla operations and others more skilled at launching terror attacks in cities, Venzke said.

Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corp., also doesn't believe that the slogan stands up to the test of evidence.

"The picture it conjures up is that somehow the terrorists have to make it through Iraq to get to here, it's a front line," Jenkins said, noting that administration officials "refer to it as a front line."

"In fact, that is not true geographically," he added. "It is also not supported by what we have seen since 9/11 and since the invasion of Iraq. What we have seen is not only a continuation of significant jihadist attacks worldwide, but in fact at an accelerated pace."

Jenkins ticked off terrorist attacks linked to Al Qaeda or affiliated groups since the Iraq war's start, including those in Jakarta, Karachi, Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Casablanca and most recently Egypt. The attacks have have occurred at the rate of one every three months, Jenkins said. True, he added, there has been no terrorist attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001. That could be because the increased vigilance of the Homeland Security Department and other officials has made the U.S. a more difficult environment for terrorists, Jenkins observed, acknowledging that experts can only speculate on the exact reasons for an absence of attacks.

In addition, terrorists are communicating more frequently since Sept. 11 and have continued to communicate since the invasion of Iraq, he said. And not only have they continued to recruit, they have intensified their recruiting.

"Their pace of activity is accelerating. That does not support a notion that they are being blocked by our actions in Iraq, or necessarily being diverted," Jenkins said.

Moreover, some experts found the argument that America is fighting terror abroad to avoid it at home simplistic.

"It sounds really great and it's appealing to a domestic audience," said Charles Pena, a defense analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Of course we would rather fight the terrorists abroad than have them here on the streets of Washington, New York, Chicago or anywhere else as they're blowing things up. It's sort of an obvious statement."

Pena agrees with Jenkins that the evidence doesn't support the slogan. "The slogan... displays a real, to be charitable, under-appreciation of what our problem really is," he said.

Pena said it falls short as policy "because the implication is we win this war by killing people... We're not dealing with a structure anymore, if we were ever... We are dealing with a radical Islamist ideology that is infusing itself inside the Muslim world. You don't win by just killing people."

The line about fighting enemies abroad to avoid having to fight them in American streets has been used before in American history, experts noted. For instance, during the Vietnam War, many of the war's supporters said if the U.S. didn't fight communists in Indochina, it would eventually have to fight them in Hawaii or on the beaches of California.

Bush, who employed the line extensively in the closing days of the campaign, has used it for more than a year. In a September 2003 interview with Fox News, the president said of the terrorists, "I would rather fight them there than here."

As Reed Dickens, a Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman, put it, "The president believes if you are hunting down the terrorists it makes it much more unlikely that they're going to pull off a major coordinated attack if they're having to run and hide in caves."

And it's not just Bush. Iterations of the statement by Iraq war supporters can be found on the Internet.

"To me it's an empty phrase," Pena said. "It's a statement of the obvious that doesn't tell me anything about what we're doing and do we really have some plan that allows us to get somewhere that might approximate victory, however elusive defining victory is."

Even comedians have weighed in on the assertion that fighting terrorists abroad has precluded the likelihood of facing them on the homefront.

On a recent episode of his HBO talk show "Real Time" that was broadcast before the election, comedian and cultural observer Bill Maher echoed those who are skeptical that the fight against terrorists can be kept offshore.

"To say we're going to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here makes it sound like they're some sort of an army that can get bogged down like Napoleon on the way to Moscow," Maher said. "But they're a virtual army. They can fight us there and here at the same time."

By Frank James

To see more of the Chicago Tribune, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.chicagotribune.com .

(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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*** end of story *** (emphasis added)

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: Analysts see change in bin Laden's tone ( United Press International )

WASHINGTON, Dec 22, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Intelligence analysts say al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has shifted the tone of his messages away from anger, the New York Times reported.

The most striking example was his pre-election videotaped message in November was where he traded his battle fatigues, his AK-47 and mountainous backdrop for a sheik's garb, a desk and a script without a single threat of another attack against the United States.

Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, said: "The talk revealed bin Laden to be sort of a policy wonk, talking about supplemental emergency funding by Congress for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and how it was evidence that al-Qaida's bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was working."

Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official who tracked bin Laden for years, said the Saudi dissident was trying a new approach to getting his message across.

"We are being told by the president and others that al-Qaida attacked us because they despise who we are and what we think and how we live," Scheuer said. "But Osama's point is, it's not that at all. They don't like what we do."

Copyright 2004 by United Press International.

-0-

*** end of story *** (emphasis added)

[F6]

The Longest War

Rep. Alan Grayson
Congressman Alan Grayson represents Central Florida (FL-8).
Posted: June 6, 2010 10:28 AM

Today, the war in Afghanistan becomes America's longest war. Longer than the war in Vietnam. Longer than the Korean War.

It took America two years to end World War I, and bring peace to the world. World War II was a little harder; that took us 3½ years to finish off.

The war in Afghanistan is over eight years old. And we're sending in more troops. We're not getting out. We getting deeper in.

Would you like to know why? It's not hard to find the answers. Just read the transcript of Osama Bin Laden's 2004 speech - right here [ http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html (the post to which this is a reply; that's the original source link for that post)].

Bin Laden's strategy was -- and is -- painfully simple: to repeat his victory in Afghanistan against Russia, by driving us into bankruptcy. As he put it, he wanted to use his "experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat." In other words, he just wants to go two-for-two.

And, as Bin Laden noted, it is equally simple to get us into that trap. As he said, it is "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."

It turns out that Bin Laden has a keen grasp of the federal budget: "As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan . . . ."

But Bin Laden felt that he needed to share the credit for the success of his plan -- share it with the Bush White House. "Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations -- whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction -- has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results." Why did the Bush White House do so? Because Bin Laden saw the Bush Administration as his partner in the destruction of America's economy: "It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced."

The new "war front" to which Bin Laden referred in 2004 was, of course, Iraq. As he put it: "So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq . . . ."

And at all times, Bin Laden's essential strategy has remained the same. Not, as so many think, to launch more attacks on American soil, but rather to make us destroy ourselves: "we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy . . . ."

Listen to Bin Laden summing up his strategy: "the real loser is ... you. It is the American people and their economy . . . ."

How strange. It turns out that America's chief military strategist for the past decade is Osama Bin Laden himself. We've been doing exactly what he has wanted us to do: spend staggering sums on the military, until the American economy is bled dry.

But it doesn't have to be that we. We are a democracy. We can choose peace.

I have voted against Bin Laden's strategy to destroy America, and I will continue to do so. But I've done more than that. I have introduced a bill called The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353.

This bill requires that the war be funded by the Pentagon's base budget - "only" $549 billion. And it uses the resulting savings to eliminate federal income taxes on your first $35,000 of income - yours and every American's. It also reduces the deficit.

Bin Laden told us how he would destroy us. And we're following his instructions, to a "t." How absurd is that?

No more. We have to make our so-called "leaders" listen to us. If we are to survive.

That's what we're going to do, together. Sign our petition [ http://salsa.mydccc.org/o/30019/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=34 ], and show your support for HR 5353. Ask your friends to do the same. Let's stop the war, before it stops all of us.

"They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore." Isaiah 2:4

Copyright © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/the-longest-war_b_602108.html [with comments]


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10 NATO Soldiers [7 Americans] Die in Afghanistan
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/asia/08kabul.html

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Nato loses 10 troops in deadly Afghanistan day

7 June 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/south_asia/10260145.stm


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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=51011225 and preceding (and any future following)

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