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Colin
Powell launched a preemptive strike early Tuesday morning
against the latest evidence that the alleged Bin Laden-Al
Qaeda link is a lot of malarkey.
The first indication that anyone had of a new message
from Osama bin Laden was Powell's
statement to a Senate budget panel:
"Once again [Bin Laden] speaks to
the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and
how he is in partnership with Iraq. This nexus between
terrorists and states that are developing weapons of
mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and
ignored."
But
it turns out that what can't be ignored is the complete
agreement between Bin Laden and the Bushies on the subject
of Saddam Hussein's regime. As
MSNBC reported:
"At the same time, the message also
called on Iraqis to rise up and oust Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein, who is a secular leader."
Saddam,
OBL declares, must be overthrown, because Saddam is
a "socialist" and an apostate Muslim. "The hypocrites
of Iraq" are "infidels," says the Terror Master, and
the same goes for the governments of Yemen, Pakistan,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Nigeria, and any other
regional "stooges" of the U.S. Antiwar.com posted this
MSNBC story as soon as it appeared, but then something
strange happened….
We received the following email from
an alert reader, who noted:
"I've been keeping an eye on the
bin Laden tape story on MSNBC.com via the link on Antiwar.com,
and something interesting has happened. When the link
was first posted, the part about overthrowing Saddam
Hussein was not included in the MSNBC.com story. Later,
around 3:50 PM Eastern, the site contained this paragraph:
'At the same time, the message also called on Iraqis
to rise up and oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein,
who is a secular leader.' When I checked back with the
link on Antiwar.com around 4:35 PM Eastern, it said
that this had not become part of the MSNBC.com story,
so I clicked on the link again, and sure enough, it
had been removed. I'm glad I copied the story with the
'overthrow Saddam' part onto my PC. It appears this
part of the story, since it's inconvenient for the War
Party, is being buried."
Who
does MSNBC think they're kidding? I called those jerks
(425-703-6397). Why, I asked, had all references
to Bin Laden's denunciation of the Iraqi dictator been
edited out? Some drone at the "News Desk" actually expected
me to believe his line of bull about how they were "waiting
to get that confirmed" by a translator from Associated
Press – this while MSNBC's own translator was reading
the part about Bin Laden's call for overthrowing Saddam
over the air! When I informed him of this, he insisted
that everything had to be vetted by AP, even as MSNBC's
own analysts were trenchantly concurring that this was
"one battlefield, two wars." Both Bush and Bin Laden
had declared war on Saddam Hussein, and "the race is
on" for the doomed despot's domain.
Meanwhile, MSNBC revised their story
yet again:
"MSNBC.com initially cited an extemporaneous
translation that mistakenly quoted the speaker as calling
on Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein."
The
MSNBC website had no sooner revised history, than Reuters
posted a
more honest version:
"The statement did not express support
for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein – it said Muslims
should support the Iraqi people rather than the country's
government."
The Reuters story went on to cite the
Bin Laden message:
"'The fighting should be in the name
of God only, not in the name of national ideologies,
nor to seek victory for the ignorant governments that
rule all Arab states, including Iraq,' the statement
said."
Meanwhile,
the story went out over the wire as "Osama,
Iraq 'find common cause'," (the Australian version),
"Bin
Laden Condemns Iraq Plans" (the BBC), and "Bin
Laden Tape Urges Iraqi Suicide Bombs" (ABC News).
This last report, however, admitted that Bin Laden denounced
Iraq's ruling Ba'ath Socialist Party as "infidels,"
yet only chose to briefly cite the terrorist leader's
rationale objectively aligning himself with the hated
Saddamite infidels:
"'It does not harm in these circumstances
that the interests of Muslims and socialists crisscross
in fighting against the Crusaders,' he said. He urged
Iraqis to fight the Americans whether or not Saddam
remains in power."
What
this message fatally undermines is the administration's
whole rationale for a preemptive strike against Iraq:
that an alliance of convenience between Al Qaeda and
Saddam will supply the former and his operatives worldwide
with weapons of mass destruction. Bin Laden, the religious
fanatic and sectarian, doesn't ally himself with anyone:
only those who fight under the banner of militant Islam
deserve support. The rulers of the Arab states, in the
Ladenite view, are all apostates and puppets of the
U.S. and Israel, and the terrorists' fondest wish is
to see them all overthrown – a desire the Ladenites
share with our neoconservatve war-birds, who call for
the "liberation" and "democratization" of the region
at gunpoint.
In
his book, The
Terror Masters, a veritable manifesto of the
War Party (neocon wing), Michael
Ledeen calls for "creative destruction" in the Middle
East: that is precisely what Bin Laden and his fellow
fanatics are joyfully awaiting. With the last remnants
of Arab secularism in power – the Ba'athists and the
PLO – wiped out in the center of the region, what
Norman
Podhoretz calls "World
War IV" will commence, pitting the U.S. and Israel
(with compliant Turkey reluctantly but dutifully tagging
along) against the entire Muslim world, personified
by Bin Laden.
The
lesson of how this story unfolded and is being reported
is that truth is irrelevant to our captive news media
and putty in the hands of our government. The news is
not reported: it is shaped, spun, and molded to fit
the party line.
The
problem with the effort to shape the news is that the
truth eventually comes out, and this process has been
greatly accelerated by the advent of the internet. CNN
has "excerpts" from the Bin Laden missive,
which completely undercut the administration's claim
of a "link" between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi
regime:
"It
doesn't matter whether the socialist (Ba'ath) party
or Saddam disappear…. And it doesn't harm in these conditions
the interest of Muslims to agree with those of the socialists
in fighting against the crusaders, even though we believe
the socialists are infidels. For the socialists and
the rulers have lost their legitimacy a long time ago,
and the socialists are infidels regardless of where
they are, whether in Baghdad or in Aden. ..."
Having
succeeded in diverting Americans away from the war on
Al Qaeda, and instead focusing on the alleged danger
from Iraq, the War Party suddenly finds itself confronted
with a rude reminder – and Americans begin to remember
a name that our government would like to believe everyone
has forgotten: Osama bin Laden.
The
first supposedly "full text" translation of
Bin Laden’s message comes
from the BBC, and it seems to be at variance, in
many places, with CNN's. Whole paragraphs seem to have
been left out or unaccountably altered in the BBC version,
which hardly seems long enough to take up its alleged
length of some fifteen minutes. This story is spinning
so fast it threatens to unravel before our very eyes….
–
Justin Raimondo
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