- On 9-9-01 - just two days before Osama Bin Laden's attack
on the US - the NY Times published a lengthy and chilling article about
Osama Bin Laden by reporter John Burns. Some time after 9-11, the Times
SCRUBBED this article, replacing it with a completely different article
that Burns wrote on 9-12. Both articles discuss a 2-hour videotape by Bin
Laden that intelligence agencies first saw in June 2001, but ignored until
September. Why was the 9-9 article scrubbed? Read it yourself - we've
UNSCRUBBED
it. We believe it demonstrates the GROSS NEGLIGENCE of the CIA, NSA,
Justice
Department, and the White House in the events leading to 9-11. These
agencies
had MANY warnings, but the people at the top IGNORED them, at a cost of
over 3,000 lives and billions of dollars. ALL OF THESE SCREWUPS REMAIN
IN THEIR JOBS!!! We demand a Blue Ribbon Commission on 9-11 and a thorough
housecleaning - not a Congressional Coverup!
-
- Unscrubbers Note: The article below was originally
published
here: http://w
ww.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/international/asia/09OSAM.html
-
- This article is no longer available on the NY Times site,
either directly or through a search of the archives. This scrub was not
accidental, however, since this URL was deliberately programmed to forward
here:
-
- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/international/12OSAM.html
-
- where you can read the post-911 "revision"
by the former "newspaper of record". George Orwell would
certainly
be impressed :(
-
-
- September 9, 2001 On Videotape, Bin Laden Charts
a Violent Future
By John F. Burns
-
- The image on the grainy videotape is mesmerizing: a tall,
slim, middle- aged Arab man, with the bushy beard, white robes and draped
white headcloth of a devout Muslim, standing before a gathering somewhere
in Afghanistan. He is reading an Arabic poem, apparently his own, on papers
that riffle in a breeze.
-
- The speaker's style is that of the fire-and-brimstone
preachers common at Friday Prayers across the Middle East. But he is no
imam, nor even, by calling, a poet. He is Osama bin Laden, the 46-year-old
Saudi-born fugitive millionaire who has declared a "holy war"
against the United States, directing suicide bombings that have made him
the F.B.I.'s most-wanted terrorist.
-
- In the verses, read at the wedding in Afghanistan of
his oldest son earlier this year, Mr. bin Laden declares his purpose -
killing Americans and Jews - more starkly than ever. Proudly, he salutes
the suicide bombing of the American destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of
Aden last October in which 17 American sailors died, and promises more
attacks.
-
- "The victory of Yemen will continue," he
says.
-
- Shots of the Cole listing in Aden harbor after the
attack,
and of the Americans being carried in flag-covered coffins - and a
simulation
of the bombing, complete with a blinding flash - are played in the tape's
opening and closing sequences.
-
- The shots are taken from American television coverage,
and accompanied by what seems like a gloating brutality. "Their limbs
were scattered everywhere," Mr. bin Laden says.
-
- The verses also celebrate what Mr. bin Laden describes
as the futility of American military might. "In Aden, our brothers
rose and destroyed the mighty destroyer, a ship so powerful it spreads
fear wherever it sails," Mr. bin Laden says, over images of the
Cole.
-
- "But as it moves through the water, toward the small
boat bobbing in the water, it is sailing to its own destruction, drawn
by the illusion of its own power."
-
- In the Cole attack, two Arab- speaking suicide bombers
blew a gaping hole in the destroyer at the waterline with an
explosives-laden
skiff, causing $250 million damage. While Mr. bin Laden, on the tape, stops
short of saying he ordered the strike, he effectively confirms what the
F.B.I. suspected from the outset: that it was a bin Laden operation.
-
- Mr. bin Laden uses the tape to spell out a continuing
nightmare for his principal enemies, the United States and Israel. He
promises
an intensified holy war that includes aid to Palestinians fighting Israel
- an important shift in emphasis, according to intelligence analysts. In
recent years, through a series of violent attacks, Mr. bin Laden's main
focus has been on driving American forces from the Arabian
peninsula.
-
- He also outlines plans for an expansion of his terrorist
training operations in Afghanistan, saying that the Taliban, the Islamic
militant movement that has sheltered him since 1996, have built an ideal,
purified Islamic state that provides the perfect base for a worldwide holy
war against "infidels."
-
- When the two-hour videotape surfaced last June, it
attracted
little attention, partly because much of it was spliced from previous bin
Laden interviews and tapes. But since then the tape has proliferated on
Islamic Web sites and in mosques and bazaars across the Muslim
world.
-
- Intelligence officials who have analyzed the tape now
say it features the fullest exposition yet of Mr. bin Laden's views, as
well as his terrorist strategy, and thus provides a rough road map of where
his organization, Al-Qaeda, is headed.
-
- With his mockery of American power, Mr. bin Laden seems
to be almost taunting the United States. Although F.B.I. investigators
believe he was behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed
six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 in which 24
American
servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa
in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the Cole attack, the United
States has found no way, so far, of containing him.
-
- After nearly a year, American investigators have been
unable to trace the Cole plot beyond six men arrested in Aden for assisting
the bombers. The man thought to have directed the attack for Al-Qaeda,
Muhammad al-Harazi, is believed to have fled to Afghanistan. Last month,
the Indian police indicted Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Harazi for an abortive
plot in June to bomb the American Embassy in Delhi, and alleged that Mr.
Harazi visited New Delhi in February, using a pseudonym, when he was
already
named as a Cole suspect.
-
- Now, despite a $5 million American reward for his
capture,
multiple indictments in American courts, and a cruise missile strike on
his camps in Afghanistan in 1998 that he narrowly escaped, Mr. bin Laden
is threatening still more attacks. He tells followers that there is nothing
to fear from the United States and that their Islamic faith - and their
willingness to die - is enough to neutralize America's military
might.
-
- To those who have studied Mr. bin Laden, this confidence
is one of the tape's strongest features. "A year or two ago, after
the missile attacks on Afghanistan, there were people in Washington saying
bin Laden was in a box," said Peter Bergen, a Washington-based writer
who interviewed Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997 and who is now writing
a book on him, to be titled "Holy War Inc." "But if he's
in a box, he's a jack-in-a- box. He as much of a threat as he ever
was."
-
- Part of Mr. bin Laden's defiance seems to stem from his
increasingly close ties with Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. Eager for
American
diplomatic recognition and aid, the Islamic clerics who lead the Taliban
have suggested that they might expel Mr. bin Laden from Afghanistan, where
he fled after being forced from Sudan under American pressure. But American
officials suspect the Taliban's hints at estrangement from Mr. bin Laden
were a ploy, and the tape seems to confirm this.
-
- At one point, Mr. bin Laden declares the Taliban leader,
Mullah Muhammad Omar, the rightful spiritual leader of the Muslim world,
and says Afghanistan has become the equivalent of the purified Islamic
state established in Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest cities, by the
Prophet
Muhammad in the early seventh century. He urges Muslims everywhere to
migrate
to Afghanistan to support the Taliban and Al- Qaeda, saying it is their
duty to God.
-
- "There is now a Muslim state that enforces God's
laws, which destroys falsehoods, and which does not succomb to the American
infidels - and it is led by a true believer, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the
commander of the faithful," he says.
-
- Another sign of the freedoms Mr. bin Laden appears to
enjoy are the tape passages showing his followers engaging in combat
training,
including firing heavy weapons and storming buildings, at a location
identified
as the "al-Farooq camp." Some recruits appear little more than
11 or 12. In one scene, Mr. bin Laden himself is seen crouching to fire
a Kalashnikov rifle.
-
- Much of the tape focuses on the current upheaval in
Israel
and the Palestinian territories. What is not clear, say intelligence
experts,
is whether Mr. bin Laden plans to mount direct attacks on Israeli targets,
or whether he is firing followers' passions for attacks elsewhere.
"Our
brothers in Palestine are waiting for you anxiously, and expect you to
strike at America and Israel," Mr. bin Laden says. "God's earth
is wide and their interests are everywhere."
-
- Since the Jordanian police foiled a bin Laden operation
to mount bombing attacks on pilgrims during millennium celebrations 20
months ago, Israel has been on alert for fresh bin Laden terror plots.
Israeli intelligence officials say they have evidence that bin Laden agents
have already linked up with radical Islamic groups like Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah.
-
- Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorist
operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, who reviewed the tape,
said Mr. bin Laden's warnings of new attacks should be taken seriously.
"The intifada has clearly focused his attention on the Palestinian
problem, which he sees in holy war terms - the Palestinians being oppressed
by the Israelis, in ways that are only possible because of the support
they get from the United States," he said. "This has reinforced
his opinion about the United States and its policies in the whole of the
Middle East. It sharpens his instincts for attack."
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