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Fake Osama #2 releases October Surprise '04
BREAKING NEWS
MSNBC and NBC News
Updated: 3:21 p.m. ET Oct. 29, 2004
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, in a videotape broadcast Friday on Al-Jazeera television, claimed full responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and warns Americans that “your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands.”
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U.S. officials, who said the government had obtained the tape independently, told NBC News that the message authentic. They said, however, that there was no plan to raise the terrorist threat level, currently at yellow, or “elevated,” because bin Laden makes no specific threat.
Neither the Qatar-based channel nor U.S. officials would say how it had received the tape.
In the tape, bin Laden — wearing traditional white robes, a turban and a tan cloak — reads from papers at a lectern against a plain brown background. Speaking quietly in an even voice, he tells the American people that “Bush cannot protect you.”
Bin Laden says “we decided to destroy towers in America” because “we are a free people” who wanted to “regain the freedom” of their nation. He accuses President Bush of “misleading” the American people for the three years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of bin Laden’s message is in regard to Bush, who faces Democrat John Kerry in next week’s presidential election.
He ridicules Bush for reacting slowly to the Sept. 11 attacks, saying: “I never thought that the supreme leader would leave 50,000 of his people in the two towers to face the terrifying events alone at the time they were in need for him.”
The last authenticated contemporaneous video message from bin Laden appeared in December 2001, when he discussed a U.S. attack on a mosque. U.S. officials said all subsequent videos of bin Laden were believed to have been recorded earlier and broadcast much later.
The last audio message from bin Laden was on April 15, when he offered a truce to European nations if they removed their troops from the Middle East within 90 days. On Oct. 1, bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, issued an audiotape calling on young Muslims to strike the United States and its allies.
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